There are a lot of mental gymnastics involved in making “if you kill this sapient orchid monster, you will get back the two people it ate” into a moral quandry when it was actually the only moral choice Janeway had; I will brook no disagreement.
Because if killing 1 person to get 2 back is moral, we should be taking random people out of streets and kill them for spare parts to use in transplants.
I mean, he wasn’t an LLM. Dude had a distinct personality, even if it was composed of two others. I don’t see this kind of disdain for the Trill.
Edit:
I think the decision to kill Tuvix was the right one, in the circumstances that Voyager was in. If they were in Federation space, the issue would have been far tricker, and more may have been attempted. I feel that the Federation’s largest asset is near-complete access to basically any resource, so to my mind the whole point of the episode (and Voyager in general) was seeing a post-scarcity society be forced to deal with the cruel calculus of necessity.
It feels like interpreting Tuvix as a non-person with no identity or voice cheapens the message of the episode in a way that seems directly contradictory to the greater philosophy of the universe depicted. I don’t think Janeway was satisfied with her decision, I don’t think anyone was, and I think there’s value in holding on to that dissatisfaction and using it to shape their actions going forward, and that absolving that decision of it’s full weight would in many ways make the values of the Federation ring more hollow to me.
There are a lot of mental gymnastics involved in making “if you kill this sapient orchid monster, you will get back the two people it ate” into a moral quandry when it was actually the only moral choice Janeway had; I will brook no disagreement.
Because if killing 1 person to get 2 back is moral, we should be taking random people out of streets and kill them for spare parts to use in transplants.
But Tuvix begged not to be killed!
It’s just clearly wrong and I still hold it was the wrong choice for Janeway and the crew.
Exactly. This is just the trolley problem.
Tuvix was not a random person though
We should be taking… Specific… People?
Fixed that for you
I mean, he wasn’t an LLM. Dude had a distinct personality, even if it was composed of two others. I don’t see this kind of disdain for the Trill.
Edit: I think the decision to kill Tuvix was the right one, in the circumstances that Voyager was in. If they were in Federation space, the issue would have been far tricker, and more may have been attempted. I feel that the Federation’s largest asset is near-complete access to basically any resource, so to my mind the whole point of the episode (and Voyager in general) was seeing a post-scarcity society be forced to deal with the cruel calculus of necessity.
It feels like interpreting Tuvix as a non-person with no identity or voice cheapens the message of the episode in a way that seems directly contradictory to the greater philosophy of the universe depicted. I don’t think Janeway was satisfied with her decision, I don’t think anyone was, and I think there’s value in holding on to that dissatisfaction and using it to shape their actions going forward, and that absolving that decision of it’s full weight would in many ways make the values of the Federation ring more hollow to me.
Me when I skim and then jump to conclusions