Spock the Impaler
July 7, 2015 11:28 AM   Subscribe

Spock the Impaler: A Belated Retrospective on Vulcan Ethics - Peter Watts As you know, Bob, Nimoy’s defining role was that of Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock, the logical Vulcan who would never let emotion interfere with the making of hard choices. This tended to get him into trouble with Leonard McCoy, Trek‘s resident humanist. “If killing five saves ten it’s a bargain,” the doctor sneered once, in the face of Spock’s dispassionate suggestion that hundreds of colonists might have to be sacrificed to prevent the spread of a galaxy-threatening neuroparasite. “Is that your simple logic?” The logic was simple, and unassailable, but we were obviously supposed to reject it anyway. posted by CrystalDave (67 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
The surgical transplant trolley paradox has an obvious rebuttal. If word gets out that doctors are sacrificing the occasional patient for spare parts, no-one will ever go to a doctor again. From a purely beep-boop Vulcan logic greater good utilitarian standpoint, that's a substantially worse problem than having a few patients die waiting for organs.

Killing one to save five makes sense. Killing one and dealing with a population actively terrified of basic medical care for a generation doesn't.
posted by figurant at 11:46 AM on July 7, 2015 [18 favorites]


If word gets out that doctors are sacrificing the occasional patient for spare parts, no-one will ever go to a doctor again.

You don't say...
posted by DreamerFi at 11:57 AM on July 7, 2015 [6 favorites]


"Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." -- James Nicholl, as quoted on Watts's home page (previously)
posted by Zonker at 11:58 AM on July 7, 2015 [10 favorites]


I think this guy is an interested writer, and I'll probably read more of his fiction next time I want to feel like shit about things, but I can hardly ever make myself feel like trolley paradox stuff is a very interesting model of reality. Maybe that's just some kind of defense mechanism in action.
posted by brennen at 12:01 PM on July 7, 2015


It's sad that the first thing I think of is how will the insane Republican/Tea Party types take this as "proof" of death panels and continue their struggle to ensure that the few have healthcare rather than the many.
posted by juiceCake at 12:02 PM on July 7, 2015


It's worth noting that people who actually think in these strict utilitarian terms are typically quite dangerous to the rest of us.
posted by lodurr at 12:27 PM on July 7, 2015 [10 favorites]


Humans are bad at Spocking things. Communist regimes have been perfectly comfortable making these sort of supposedly pragmatic decisions for the greater good, and they murdered somewhere around 100 million people. The slaughterhouses of history were built and manned by people who thought they were utterly reasonable.
posted by maxsparber at 12:40 PM on July 7, 2015 [13 favorites]


James Nicholl, as quoted on Watts's home page

::cough:: Nicoll. (He came to my LJ to correct my spelling of his name once, so I felt obligated to share the correction.)
posted by suelac at 12:42 PM on July 7, 2015 [8 favorites]


It's worth noting that people who actually think in these strict utilitarian terms are typically quite dangerous to the rest of us.

Plus, let's face it, they've usually lied about having done that utilitarian thinking and skipped to the murder part.
posted by Artw at 12:44 PM on July 7, 2015 [20 favorites]


I think the trolley paradox is a perfect metaphor for self-driving cars, actually.

Eventually (idk how long) self-driving cars will be better in every driving situation than humans are, in the sense of how many people are killed per person-hour of car time.

But some people will still die. And some of those people would *not* have died if they were in a human-driven car.

Overall, fewer people will die. But *different* people will die.

Yeah, I support self-driving cars. It's throwing the switch instead of pushing a guy onto the track, so I can say ok.
posted by nat at 12:45 PM on July 7, 2015 [7 favorites]


Plus, let's face it, they've usually lied about having done that utilitarian thinking and skipped to the murder part.

This is kind of the vibe these thought experiments always gave me; whenever I would raise objections about how you couldn't possibly know that killing X person saved Y people the questioner would get annoyed. "Just ASSUME you know for sure!" Well then I am not in the real world, which is devoid of such clarity, but instead in your weird fantasy world that is strangely hell-bent on forcing me to have to murder someone. It's creepy.
posted by emjaybee at 12:54 PM on July 7, 2015 [26 favorites]


Well if you're going to ask those kinds of questions you're clearly a troublemaker and better off in the gulags...
posted by Artw at 12:56 PM on July 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'll just leave my trolley problem generator here then.
posted by Zarkonnen at 1:00 PM on July 7, 2015 [41 favorites]


Eventually (idk how long) self-driving cars will be better in every driving situation than humans are, in the sense of how many people are killed per person-hour of car time.

Self-driving cars were better than humans before they became horseless.
posted by ocschwar at 1:05 PM on July 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


I feel like communist genocides are false spocks. They may claim that there is a logical explanation, but clearly it is an emotional decision to weed out a region, ethnicity, or enemy.

Also, I LOVE this trolley problem generator. So much for productivity today.
posted by lownote at 1:09 PM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]




Overall, fewer people will die. But *different* people will die.

I was just having this conversation on a road trip this weekend. As uncomfortable as self-driving cars make me in a knee-jerk sort of way, I looked around the busy coastal secondary road we were on and said, "I cannot honestly say I trust the judgement of any of these people more than I would a piece of Google software."
posted by George_Spiggott at 1:12 PM on July 7, 2015 [10 favorites]


It seems to me that he doesn't really know much about medical research. While it is made as safe as possible, there are some situations where patients are killed while trying to solve a problem. For example, the beginning of open heart surgery:

Dr Gibbon subsequently operated on 2 additional patients in July 1953, both of whom were young girls about 5 years of age with atrial septal defects. These two patients died at surgery with difficulties again of imprecise diagnosis of atrial septal defect and complications related to bleeding during long time periods on the heart-lung machine. After these two cases, Dr Gibbon, quite upset at these failures, declared a moratorium on open-heart surgery with his heart-lung machine.
posted by TedW at 1:13 PM on July 7, 2015


I'll just leave my trolley problem generator here then.

Beautiful work.
posted by brennen at 1:13 PM on July 7, 2015


People are the worst possible solution to any problem, except for ever other solution.
posted by blue_beetle at 1:14 PM on July 7, 2015


Just get a B Ark, though then your entire civilization will die due to disease caused by unsanitary telephones.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 1:16 PM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


The Nuremberg code permits only one exemption allowing a researcher to put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few: self-experimentation.

In general, those who would kill a few are incompetent to help the many. Ethical violations are a good indication that little thought has been put into experimental protocol. Example: the Tuskegee experimenters sometimes went years without following up with their subjects. There are giant gaps in their data because they couldn't even be bothered to keep track of the people they were murdering. Killing the few is, as a rule, a lazy shortcut, an indication that the goal is not being seriously pursued.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 1:18 PM on July 7, 2015 [24 favorites]


The Nuremberg code permits only one exemption allowing a researcher to put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few: self-experimentation.

It's worth noting that, in the Star Trek episode that Watts cites ("Operation -- Annihilate!"), Spock does volunteer himself as a test subject for an experimental procedure to rid the colony of its neural parasites, even though it temporarily blinds him (a condition at first assumed to be permanent), which is a presaging of his solution to the real-life Kobayashi Maru scenario in ST:TWOK.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:28 PM on July 7, 2015 [11 favorites]


Killing the few is, as a rule, a lazy shortcut, an indication that the goal is not being seriously pursued.

Anyone who says they're going to kill a hundred people to save a million can be relied upon to achieve the first part.
posted by George_Spiggott at 1:31 PM on July 7, 2015 [14 favorites]


Overall, fewer people will die. But *different* people will die.

If most people rented a small plane to travel across the US rather than renting a seat on a bigger plane flown by a professional pilot, then the rate of fatal air travel accidents would be a lot higher. And the chances of any random person dying in a plane crash would have a lot more to do with their personal amateur piloting skills. But it's not really much of an ethical dilemma to choose which system makes more sense to use.
posted by burnmp3s at 1:43 PM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


figurant: "The surgical transplant trolley paradox has an obvious rebuttal. If word gets out that doctors are sacrificing the occasional patient for spare parts, no-one will ever go to a doctor again. From a purely beep-boop Vulcan logic greater good utilitarian standpoint, that's a substantially worse problem than having a few patients die waiting for organs.

Killing one to save five makes sense. Killing one and dealing with a population actively terrified of basic medical care for a generation doesn't.
"

Of course, Vulcan patients would not stop going to the doctor because of this.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:52 PM on July 7, 2015 [5 favorites]


Of course not. And if we were vulcans, this would be a much less pleasant place to live in.

Of course, if we were vulcans, we wouldn't care.
posted by lodurr at 1:57 PM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


Of course not. And if we were vulcans, this would be a much less pleasant place to live in.

I don't know, "live long and prosper" seems like a much nicer sentiment than "fuck you, I've got mine", which seems pretty popular on Earth right now.
posted by TedW at 2:06 PM on July 7, 2015 [11 favorites]


I'm finding it hard to believe that this guy knows what he's talking about, since he doesn't seem to think there are credible alternatives to utilitarianism / consequentialism -- he seems to think no one could imagine any reasoned justification for distinguishing between acts and omissions, so that anyone who wants to is obliged to give up on logic and start mumbling about "cowardly" squeamish feelings. It's a bit ironic, given that I've always pictured Kant as the most Spock-like Spock to ever Spock (personality-wise and actual tenets of Spock's philosophy aside).
posted by Aravis76 at 2:18 PM on July 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


I don't know, "live long and prosper" seems like a much nicer sentiment than "fuck you, I've got mine", which seems pretty popular on Earth right now

yeah, this bugged me about vulcans as a kid. It seemed inconsistent. Like, they weren't really "logical", they were just kind of more enlightened. That was kind of unsatisfying to me as a kid. I wanted to see them be really super logical about shit.

Now I prefer it the way you put it, but it's still a little inconsistent with the presentation.

Also, becoming aware this wasn't their innate nature (Amok Time) was one of the first times I started to question the monoculture/monoclimate thing in SF. I kept thinking, 'we have other cultures here on Earth, why can't there be vulcans who are different?'
posted by lodurr at 2:33 PM on July 7, 2015


THAT'S WHAT ROMULANS ARE
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:00 PM on July 7, 2015 [15 favorites]


There's a hidden implication that every warp-capable species achieves a certain level of cultural singularity in which the spoils of all the world from every conflict and compromise go into a single pot of collaborative totalitarianism.
posted by aydeejones at 3:13 PM on July 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


(at least on a planetary level as seen with Romulus / Remus / Vulcan, not necessarily just the species level)
posted by aydeejones at 3:14 PM on July 7, 2015


I don't know, "live long and prosper" seems like a much nicer sentiment than "fuck you, I've got mine", which seems pretty popular on Earth right now

yeah, this bugged me about vulcans as a kid. It seemed inconsistent.


I always took the opposite view. It is reasonably objective, doesn't invoke any supernatural deities, and is positive, which, logically, is how you want to address your fellow citizens. But before getting too worked up about it I can remember some other words of wisdom and repeat to myself "it's just a show, I should really just relax."
posted by TedW at 3:17 PM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


Spock is a fictional character. Although that original series episode where he had his seven year itch and his fiance' chooses Kirk to fight the honor duel is one of the greatest tv shows ever made.

As to ethics and killing innocents look at the home page of antiwar.com any day. Right now the #3 story is:

Saudi Strikes Kill 169, Mostly Civilians, in Yemen
45 Civilians Killed in Airstrike Against Aden Market

posted by bukvich at 3:17 PM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


There are real life human being who have neurological injuries which make them incapable of feeling emotions. They are, surprisingly utterly unlock Spock, and can barely function.

These unfortunate people are basically paralyzed by indecision; they have no "gut feeling" about things and they have the same problem as the rest of us calculating the relative merits of chicken vs. steak, red tie vs. blue tie on an entirely logical, rationality-based level, and so they can't decide. I mean, I feel indecision and I presume everyone else does, but these people are literally unable to decide these tiny contests.
posted by Sunburnt at 3:29 PM on July 7, 2015 [5 favorites]


This author is a moron. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" was never meant to be taken literally. Any person who paid careful attention to the rhetoric of the film (a.k.a. the filmic text) would have gotten this. Hint: Spock is half human. If you're going to logically analyze Star Trek, at least do it correctly.
posted by polymodus at 4:29 PM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


Anyone who says they're going to kill a hundred people to save a million can be relied upon to achieve the first part.

Counter-example to the spirit of this statement: vaccines.

We know vaccines will kill some people but we administer them anyway. Because they will save many more.
posted by Justinian at 5:07 PM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


(The difference is, of course, that we don't make most of these decisions cold-bloodedly).
posted by Justinian at 5:08 PM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


For what its worth, I agree with him that it seems like the primary distinguishing feature of which scenarios we find acceptable (or even laudatory) and which we find abhorrent is the immediacy of the sacrificed parties. As he says, it's all about whether we are directly getting our hands dirty.

Which is totally problematic and indefensible but still feels like the right choice when presented as a trolley problem.
posted by Justinian at 5:19 PM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


I don't know Justinian, I've often thought that a morality based on proximity was both defensible and descriptive of a lot of how we actually work through ethical questions.

If the trolley is rushing towards one of my kids, I'm not going to hesitate (much?) about turning the lever and killing, say, my cousin who is on the other line.

If the trolley is rushing towards my cousin, I'm not going to hesitate (much?) about turning the lever and killing someone I don't know who is on the other line.

If the trolley is rushing towards someone I don't know, I'm not going to hesitate (much?) about turning the lever and killing a dog wo is on the other line.

A dog (social animal) trumps a squirrel.

A squirrel trumps a frog.

A frog trumps a fly.

A fly trumps a plant (maybe?)

etc, etc, etc,

My point is that relatedness (genetic proximity) is connected to who we would save and who we would sacrifice. And it seems both natural and ethically reasonable to think in this way.

I know it's not a complete system of ethics but there's something there, I think.
posted by kaymac at 5:35 PM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


what if the plant is a venus fly trap though
posted by RobotHero at 5:39 PM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Does it have a live fly inside it?
posted by kaymac at 5:46 PM on July 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


Something I read recently, about the episode City on the Edge of Forever.

This episode ends with a similar kind of problem. An innocent woman, preaching a philosophy of peace, who would have delayed the U.S. involvement in WWII and lead to Germany winning the war, is about to be run over by a car. You're a time-traveler from the future who knows the consequences of this, do you save her?

In the version that was aired, Kirk lets her die. In the original script, Kirk couldn't bring himself to let her die, but Spock could.
posted by RobotHero at 5:58 PM on July 7, 2015 [5 favorites]


This is kind of the vibe these thought experiments always gave me; whenever I would raise objections about how you couldn't possibly know that killing X person saved Y people the questioner would get annoyed. "Just ASSUME you know for sure!" Well then I am not in the real world, which is devoid of such clarity, but instead in your weird fantasy world that is strangely hell-bent on forcing me to have to murder someone. It's creepy.

See also: every weighty moral decision the player has to make in every RPG plot ever.
posted by hyperbolic at 6:11 PM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


Star Trek morality (in the original series) is actually quite consistent, and lines up with what our society generally considers right behavior. The key concept is personal freedom of choice. In "Operation: Annihilate!" McCoy believes that it would be wrong to destroy Deneva, even if it saves millions of potential future victims, because they would be killing hundreds of people who can't currently make that choice for themselves. In "Wrath of Khan" Spock willingly sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, but the few must make the choice to sacrifice themselves. Anything else is monstrous.

The Trolley Problem extends this moral intuition to the point where it almost becomes absurd, but we still make the same kind of judgement as in Star Trek. When you stop the trolley by switching the track and it hits the unfortunate lineman, the justification is that you didn't cause the situation. The trolley is already broken, so by switching the track you're just managing an ongoing catastrophe as best you can. The lineman doesn't get to choose if he wants to die, but you didn't actively choose to kill him either. Pushing the fat man onto the track is wrong (just like blowing up Deneva) because you are actively choosing to kill someone.

Again, the key intuition is that we don't get to choose to kill people against their will, because no one has the right to make that kind of decision. (And yet we do it all the time.) No one truly has the right to be the hard man making the hard decisions, and when people do take it upon themselves to become that person it's usually the beginning of a slippery slope to corruption. Ends justify the means, and before we know it we're invading other countries and deciding who deserves to get life saving medicine and who doesn't.
posted by Kevin Street at 6:16 PM on July 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


I always thought the "The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few" was a self-sacrifice thing, not a sacrificing others thing. Like if you knew a Vulcan was on one end of a trolley problem you'd have their implicit permission to pull the damn lever if it saves more people on the other.

I mean the whole point of the Vulcan logical philosophy was to prevent emotion and ego from creating wars and devastation. I think that they would recognize the inherent dangers in making mortal decisions for others who are capable of making those decisions for themselves.
posted by Zalzidrax at 6:18 PM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


The problem with the Trolley problem is that it's presented as a one shot without consequences, and in the real world, anything that's presented as having no consequences is actually a half truth -- there are no consequences, for the presenter. You are screwed.

That the man is fat is beautiful misdirection, to make us think we're devaluing the person because they're fat. Actually, we're afraid that if we try to push the man over, we're now involved, and perhaps this fat man will take us to our deaths too (and if not him, his family).

The part of your brain that predicts the consequences of your actions ignores the supposition that there aren't any. It just sits there, generating possible futures.

We could probably do experiments proving this, by telling people of all the glory, wealth, adulation they won't get for having saved all these people. Prompt the piece that isn't supposed to be listening, and it's off to the races.
posted by effugas at 6:56 PM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Fascinating.
posted by spock at 7:08 PM on July 7, 2015 [24 favorites]


spock wins peak eponysterical
posted by effugas at 7:14 PM on July 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


The equations presented here are fairly abstract.

Try this: an occupying invasion force threatens to kill your family unless you betray everyone that you know personally that doesn't love the idea of the occupying invasion force invading your country?

Weigh the values. Now that's a thought experiment. A complex one.
posted by ovvl at 7:29 PM on July 7, 2015


That the man is fat is beautiful misdirection, to make us think we're devaluing the person because they're fat.

I... think the man is fat because he has to be large enough to stop the trolley...
posted by Justinian at 7:47 PM on July 7, 2015 [5 favorites]


Yeah, that's come up before. RobotHero did some math assuming that the fat man stops the trolley through friction over some distance and estimated that he'd have to be between 180 and 2600 pounds depending on the size of the trolley, its speed, and the distance you have to play with.

I did some toy math a bit before that assuming that you only had a short distance to stop the trolley so you'd have to stop it with momentum transfer like those water or sand-filled impact attenuators they put in front of immovable objects. Anyway, if you assume that, and if the math from some ancient thing I found is right, he'd have to weigh at least several tons.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:45 PM on July 7, 2015


A nice reminder of how annoying utlitarianism is.

Mostly it's the question begging. Murdering someone and failing to save someone are not "ethically identical" unless you already accept at the beginning that ethics is about tallying outcomes. The assumption that this analysis trumps all others (like basing ethics around acts) consumes the brain and all other proposals are "refuted" by saying that if you add up outcomes it turns out you're wrong.

So anything people do for fun or profit--selling GMOs, vaccinating kids, torturing terrorist bombers, harvesting organs, throwing people off bridges--becomes an easy decision and opponents irrational or illogical. Such a simple algorithm!

But there's also the handwaving issue. I once heard the Folk theorem described as "you can prove any damn thing with game theory" and sure enough, if a utlitarian doesn't like something they will invent a scenario why that sort of thing--GMOs, vaccinations, harvesting organs, torturing terrorists, throwing fat guys off bridges--has bad long term consequences. It's a good thing, obviously, that most utilitarians are perfectly humane and want to invent reasons not to be cruel. But of course this means not even an algorithm at all, as it doesn't have a definite outcome. So what's the point?

I long since started responding to scenarios involving utilitarian assumptions by just saying I'm not a utilitarian instead of getting into hypothetical conundrums. Needless to say I was very happy with the ending of Cabin in the Woods.

@Justinian: Yes, the person has to be fat enough to stop the trolley. The point is to prevent the freshman philosophy student from saying "I'll jump in front of the trolley myself" and get out of the question.
posted by mark k at 8:53 PM on July 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


You see a trolley rushing towards a kitten clutching the only existing copy of the Bible. In front of you is a lever, which lets you redirect the trolley towards a virtue ethicist and Immanuel Kant clutching the Mona Lisa instead.

WHICH TRANSLATION?
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 8:54 PM on July 7, 2015 [5 favorites]


I think the world would be a better place if we rounded up all the utilitarians and shot them into the sun.

It's OK. You might think this is awful, but rest assured I have perfect knowledge of all future states and a foolproof method of calculating utility accurately, just like all the people in the shipping containers strapped to those rocket boosters.

(I don't need to be in there, because I'm special and know better. Yay Sidgwick!)
posted by obiwanwasabi at 9:09 PM on July 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


Does anyone else remember how many people, even in the context of WWII history at school, use the argument that the Japanese civilian deaths caused by the atomic bombs were justifiable because so many soldiers and other civilians would have died if the war had continued? I don't want to get into whether using the atomic bomb was the correct decision or not, but I definitely see this disturbing shrug-off of accountability and guilt of causing mass suffering within the argument of saving innumerable future people by killing present people.
posted by branravenraven at 9:22 PM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh! That's the problem with utility functions. They're so significantly biased to the decider of utility, and everybody knows it. We basically set up structures with competing interests so that the only things that actually can be pulled off are the things with global utility. Everything else gets shut down by some actually powerful local utility function.

Put another way, the average person isn't of much use to the average other person. Pure utility functions, if indeed people aren't operating on global utility and maybe even if they are, make for dangerous societies indeed.
posted by effugas at 9:32 PM on July 7, 2015


If you're going to logically analyze Star Trek, at least do it correctly.

This is a breathtaking sentence.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:07 PM on July 7, 2015 [7 favorites]


A dog (social animal) trumps a squirrel.

A squirrel trumps a frog.

A frog trumps a fly.

A fly trumps a plant (maybe?)


But what about the little old lady? We've been resigned to her death ever since the fly-swallowing incident, but maybe it could have been prevented?
posted by hippybear at 12:52 AM on July 8, 2015 [8 favorites]


Peter Watts seems to have forgotten "The Search for Spock" and "The Voyage Home" that turn this on its ear.

Spock even questions the idea of taking two whales forward in time, against their will, to save the *entire* human race.
posted by kmartino at 4:33 AM on July 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


Sorry, I can't afford to kill 100 people. How many people can I save if I only kill 30? Can I still apply the "kill 2 save 10 free" rebate?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 4:52 AM on July 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


Sorry, I can't afford to kill 100 people. How many people can I save if I only kill 30? Can I still apply the "kill 2 save 10 free" rebate?


Killing in bulk is always cheaper. Two can die as cheaply as one.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:32 AM on July 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


"I can tell you that Mr. Jones, the chairman of the planning and zoning committee, is a philosopher."
"Now, I say, Mr. Holmes, this is quite extraordinary. However did you know that?"
"It is quite elementary, I assure you. I happened to observe that a children's hospital has been built across every other track, just after every railway junction in the district."
"Astonishing!"
posted by gauche at 8:08 AM on July 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


> Spock even questions the idea of taking two whales forward in time, against their will, to save the *entire* human race.

I think you mean save the population of Earth.. Later in life, when Spock witnessed the destruction of Vulcan, and had to live in an ice cave for what he could presume was the rest of his life (until he was received a highly improbable visitor), he had time to think about the fact that there were Vulcans at other stars and in between, just as there were humans all over the place.

In any case Spock does the thing that ethicists don't let you do in these usual scenarios-- he asked the whales for permission. It's ethical to ask the fat man to jump in front of the trolley, or at least for his consent to be pushed (by analogy, the whales can't make their own way to the future).
posted by Sunburnt at 9:34 AM on July 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Justinian: "We know vaccines will kill some people but we administer them anyway. Because they will save many more."

Not so much a problem, though, since the people in the small group are part of the large group.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:23 PM on July 8, 2015


Does anyone have a sense of when "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" started being applied to unwilling participants? That is, the phrase has been around since Kahn, but it only feels like recently that I've begun seeing it used to justify utilitarian murder, rather than self-sacrifice. It was clear from the movie that it was meant to be applied only for self-sacrifice, that it was just and noble to sacrifice oneself for the many, but that that was clearly going above and beyond normal moral requirements, and (relatedly) there was no moral obligation to murder a few to save the many. It never would have crossed the minds of the writers for Spock to suggest that, being so vital to the safety of the ship, they should spare him and chuck some redshirt in there instead. Yet I feel like recently I've seen the phrase being used in, eg, war arguments, justifying Hiroshima and drones and so forth. Is this just an accidental perception, or is there something going on? Either an increasing number of rightwing nerds, or perhaps a much wider demographic of non-nerds who get the phrase from the recent rightwing (IMHO) ST movies? Whatever the cause, it's bumming me out to see Spock so misused -- Watts included.
posted by chortly at 5:51 PM on July 8, 2015


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