this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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The Prime Directive is immoral.
Ehhh not really, it's a good policy to have for most cases, but it IS way too restrictive and there absolutely should be more flexibility.
For example, if a pre-warp civilization about to go extinct because of a giant ass asteroid. Not a whole lot of good protecting their culture is going to do when they're extinct.
But just giving a random pre-warp civilization replicator tech for funsies would be devastating. Just think, what would happen if aliens came and gave replicator tech to our current governments? They'd fucking replicator weapons or some shit.
But what if that alien species you saved from the asteroid becomes the next Space Hitler?
That's on them.
Does the asteroid even count as interference? If the civilization is sufficiently primitive, you can save them from an asteroid without them noticing.
This thought experiment is pretty easy:
if you could alleviate a large amout of suffering and death for a sentient species at little to no cost to yourself, would you?
If you can do that so trivially that it has no negative impact on you, and you do not do it, are you acting ethically?
The answers will be yes and no for most people. To me that makes it clear that neither the Prime Directive nor any kind of all-powerful deity can be moral, at least not humanly moral.
That’s a false premise.
How is this hypothetical a false premise?
ENT s1e13 "Dear Doctor" does a great job exploring the arguments that would result in its formation.
It's been a long ... time .. since I saw ENT, and I couldn't recall that episode, so I went and read a plot summary and still had a hard time recalling it.
The plot summary makes it seem, to me at least, like a very specific and constructed scenario to try to justify it ex-post-facto in canon.
My major issue with the directive is how general and unnuanced it is. Of course there are cases where you would not want to intervene because of some unique issue. To avoid helping for fear of potential futures is cowardly and unjustified, however.
It's not just contrived it's unethical in the episode that's supposed to be justifying it. They're withholding a cure based on "well, fate wants you all to die." And yes, I'm going with fate and not evolution because that's not how evolution works dammit.
Amoral, maybe. I know it's dealt with in the lore, but I'd like to think someone at Starfleet read Roadside Picnic and thought, "well, we don't want that."
Interesting. So District 9, but more bleak.
Was colonialism moral? One of the way european empires justified it was that they were uplifting Africa.
When someone lies about helping, that's not what I am talking about.
This is a thought experiment based on a hyper advanced society capable of easily solving many problems. We don't have that and never have on this planet.
🤷♂️
The problem is that the people doing harm often don't know the difference. I had the "pleasure" of meeting with several people involved in the Portuguese colonial administration in 1960s and 1970s and most of them seem to genuinely believe they were working to better the colonized people's lives.
Missionaries are committing a form of genocide that they believe is for the greater good.
That's the reason that we have prime directive-like protocols regarding uncontacted peoples in most of the places where they still exist.
If we struggle to make ethical first contact with "less advanced" societies from our own species, what chance would we stand with an alien society?
If an "uncontacted" group here on earth suddenly arrived at the nearest "civilized" settlement and asked for help curing a disease ravaging their people, would you advocate we turn away?
What if the disease is something easily cured with modern medicine?
A blanket rule to not "interfere" with civilizations based on an arbitrary criteria (in ST: warp capable) is immoral.
That's a misrepresentation of the Prime Directive. The prime directive has an exception for cases where societies already knows about interstellar civilizations and Starfleet can intervene if it's contacted first. See Saru's case.
The arbitrary criteria I spoke of is slightly different. 🤷♂️