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Prime Directive
catstarsto
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A few statements about womens rights has had me thinking about the ethical and political choices that came into debate in past TNG episodes. Interfering in other cultures traditions and ways of life will always have negative consequences. As Picard had mentioned in an episode where the Prime Directive came into question, "it is more then just a set of rules, it is also there to protect us." You cant start a war over emotional beliefs, if you loose the fight, you loose your ability to exercise them further...so much to think about when governing and dealing with diplomacy.
EXAMPLE DEBATE:
Now on further thought concerning this subject of how UFP handles things, I am reminded of the womens rights issue that came into question concerning the episode where some Ferengi (..lol, it always starts with Ferengi) they release a woman who give off pheromones that are more potent then an Orions. Causing people to ...be happy!
She was to be an arranged marriage to wed a head of a people to seal the deal of peace. During the episode things do get more complicated (watch it to see where im coming from) but after giving it some thought, while my culture and also the fictional one in the show are against this type of thing, it would have been violating the prime directive and the arranged peace agreement that would keep things going smoothly between 2 races.
So what would Caitian Picard of done? He would have made her wear a space suit the entire time she would be near others for the remainder of the trip, which wouldnt be very often as she would be locked in her quarters with armed guards preventing any contact with others. If anyone needed to communicate with her it would be through a com badge or intercom. Needing also an executive order from 2 senior officers to open the door! Her escort to the transporter would also be in a space suit, and she would leave it on until delivery and the captains mandate was completed.
Now not just that example issue, but any other that came up in a Star Trek episode, and you feel needed an alternate resolution, feel free to share. This thread is for debate and discussion on the Prime Directive. (please no real names of people or RL politics that would violate forum rules)
EXAMPLE DEBATE:
Now on further thought concerning this subject of how UFP handles things, I am reminded of the womens rights issue that came into question concerning the episode where some Ferengi (..lol, it always starts with Ferengi) they release a woman who give off pheromones that are more potent then an Orions. Causing people to ...be happy!
She was to be an arranged marriage to wed a head of a people to seal the deal of peace. During the episode things do get more complicated (watch it to see where im coming from) but after giving it some thought, while my culture and also the fictional one in the show are against this type of thing, it would have been violating the prime directive and the arranged peace agreement that would keep things going smoothly between 2 races.So what would Caitian Picard of done? He would have made her wear a space suit the entire time she would be near others for the remainder of the trip, which wouldnt be very often as she would be locked in her quarters with armed guards preventing any contact with others. If anyone needed to communicate with her it would be through a com badge or intercom. Needing also an executive order from 2 senior officers to open the door! Her escort to the transporter would also be in a space suit, and she would leave it on until delivery and the captains mandate was completed.
Now not just that example issue, but any other that came up in a Star Trek episode, and you feel needed an alternate resolution, feel free to share. This thread is for debate and discussion on the Prime Directive. (please no real names of people or RL politics that would violate forum rules)
Post edited by catstarsto on
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Take for instance, the "hook" of Into Darkness. The Enterprise was engaged in an ethical mission: attempting to prevent a natural disaster from devastating an indigenous population that could do nothing about it. The mission went wrong and Spock became trapped in the volcano, but because of the Prime Directive, was not allowed to move the Enterprise into position to rescue him (nevermind how they got it there in the first place without being noticed).
The natives, seeing the Enterprise, turned to worshiping it. Was this necessarily a bad thing? It changed the course of their culture, but who's to say that one of the aliens who would have been killed in the volcano didn't later grow up to be an alien Plato? If the religion persists, some anthropologist in a later age might realize "oh my gosh, that wasn't a god, it was an alien space craft!" This might turn the aliens to a state of xenophobic paranoia, or they might say "Hey, there's aliens out there. We'd better make ourselves presentable," and turn their entire culture around like humans did after first contact.
Another example, going back to the very roots of the Prime Directive: The NX's mission where they came up with a cure to a plague that was driving a species extinct, but didn't reveal it because said species was holding its sister species in a state of slavery and preventing it from advancing. Wouldn't it be better to advocate for equality? Who's to say that some of the people who then died from the plague wouldn't do just that? Did they really have to doom one species to extinction to help the other?
tl;dr: The Prime Directive can stop people who have the power to prevent suffering, death, or even extinction to do so.
I suspect that, out of universe, the only reason the Prime Directive exists is because the Star Trek writers needed a way to explain why no spacefaring civilization had ever contacted Earth in real life.
Thats why I made this thread, with all of the times in star trek that the Prime Directive came up, they teased us with (what would you have done?) As a star fleet officer, you would have no choice but to follow it...but there are extra ordinary circumstances and moral/philosophical debates that are still left unfinished I think from the shows. Its perfect for 10forward debates and opinions.
I dont remember Spock in a volcano, I do remember Kirk trying to lead a bunch of tribals and nearly getting killed when they rebelled. The Enterprise episode would have been a tough one to walk away from, but as evolution is real in that reality, keeping them from their natural evolution process would hurt the society in the millenniums yet to come. From a future stand point, a people who are going to replace the current ones would most likely advance further then the ones that enslave them, so yeah i would have walked away...but probably have resigned from star fleet too. Doing that once would have been all I would have ever wanted to do it.
Another one people dont talk about much is the pleasure planet, where wesley was sentenced to death for falling in the flowers. The jokes aside about not liking the character, that would have been another tough one, but i think i would of had a solution to prevent bad diplomatic relations. Remember when tasha yar killed that one woman with the poison hand weapon? She was killed by the poison, but dr crusher recived her intime to revive her and she did live.....sooo, once they seen Wesley die and it was confirmed, they could have done the same thing. They did offer leeway since the federation was a different culture then their own, so they would have certainly returned his body to the mother...situation resolved. "CatStar saves the day" =^.^=
As for the colors...they are there to represent communication through color advancement and recognition patterns like in "Close Encounters of the 3rd kind" ...didnt believe that...ok, you got me, I just changed colors to make it easier to read when I had to switch to my ipad later that day. ^^;
Quite simply, the crew of the Enterprise should have allowed the volcano to erupt and let nature take it's course.
Harsh? Yeah, well, that's what it would sometimes mean to be a Starfleet Captain, and the reason prospective commanders must take (and pass) that bridge officer's test which means sending someone to their death...
I would cite Insurrection, but that was not an issue of the Prime Directive, but of Picard following orders and trying to use the Prime Directive to guilt a senior officer into changing a plan which had wider implications and applications for good, than the lives of a few dozen people (who were never in any danger of being killed, simply of being re-located (humanely) and returned to the natural life/death cycle of their species...
If Picard had a Real Set of Stones, he would have ignored Sarjenka's plea for help, and court-martialed Data for failure to obey standing orders, and conduct unbecoming an officer...
JANEWAY: The one that's made of binding principles. We have our own set of rules, which includes the Prime Directive. How many times have we been in the position of refusing to interfere when some kind of disaster threatened an alien culture. It's all very well to say we do it on the basis of an enlightened principle, but how does that feel to the aliens? I'm sure many of them think the Prime Directive is a lousy idea.
PARIS: Even we think so sometimes.
CHAKOTAY: I know of many times when Starfleet personnel have decided on strong ethical grounds to ignore it.
KIM: Still, there's a reason why it's Starfleet's General order number one. On the whole, it does a lot more good than harm.
-- VOY: "Prime Factors"
The Prime Directive is fictional. It is an instrument that is just as malleable as anything else in the Star Trek franchise. An instrument of plot that has been bent, broken, twisted, and ignored in any number of ways.
In terms of your example, the Ferengi Alliance are not part of the Federation. They are not a member world. They might be considered an ally of the Federation, but there is simply no way the Federation can dictate what the Ferengi do, or intervene in their affairs if it is not a threat to Federation security.
DS9 addresses the Prime Directive in regards to the Ferengi by replacing Sisko with Odo in most of these incidents. With Odo as part of the Bajoran Militia (and not Starfleet or a member of the Federation), the antagonistic relationship between Odo and Quark is left alone for the sake of the Prime Directive by 'outside' influences in the form of Sisko or other starfleet officers on DS9.
"Caitain Picard" would have dealt with it the same way "Human Picard", "Vulcan Picard", "Horta Picard", or "Orion Picard" would have dealt with it.
Which is mind your own business, because the Ferengi are not bound by Federation law. Roll your eyes. Bite your tongue. Give a disapproving look. Frown upon their actions.
But in the end, it is their decision. And if Starfleet has not acted before, there is no reason for them to start acting now. You can't put the Genie back in the bottle.
The planet was worth more then just another resource to drain, if they had taken time to study it further, they could have just attempted to recreate the conditions on a holodeck. Or crafted another Genesis to use on an asteroid within the Brier Patch...stranger things have happened. I mean yeah, it was their home for a few hundred years and technically it was just a matter of how you wanted to interpret federation laws on how to handle it. The same argument came up with the Indian tribes needing to be relocated by the cardassians. I think I would have left the people on the planet and setup a new research lab away from their settlment for the mis-shapen aliens to work with the federation on how to adapt to the planet, in order to recreate it somewhere else. being in federaton space, the leader who wanted revenge should have been taken into custody for plotting to destroy something that might have been cultivated and reproduced. Hey, these kinda debates can get really deep into thought!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-qRRd7wtGo
But then you get into the very messy and controversial question over what qualifies as 'suffering', 'death', and 'extinction'.
All three terms are absolutions. But when you get involved in things such as personal opinions, cultural norms, and sociological trends -- they stop being absolutions and start becoming ambiguities.
That is why the Prime Directive exists. Because everyone has their own definition on what it means to suffer. People have their own opinions on what it means to be 'alive' and some cultures have their own opinions on what it means to die -- if you can die (because some cultures and religions don't believe you can truly die), and extinction is a scientific term that to this day continues to be debated and redefined.
For instance, subspecies vs. species. If one subspecies of animal dies... does it count as extinction? Not all scientists can agree on such things. You go deeper, and deeper, and you start educating yourself on what makes a 'species'. Or what makes a 'culture'. You have various definitions for all of these things from different people from different walks of life.
And that's just on planet earth.
Now apply that to an entire galaxy with alien worlds and alien people.
To say the human definitions of such things make Starfleet 'morally obligated' to intervene is no different than times in our own history where people from one part of the world came to another to 'save' the 'savages' from 'killing each other', to 'save' their 'soul', or to 'save' them from 'suffering' through the 'advanced' technology the new arrivals carry with them.
All of which has ended up badly for those they were trying to 'save from themselves'.
Janeway consistently, arrogantly assumed and destructively plowed through the prime directive all the time despite her claims she "bent it on occasion", i mean there was a planet full of people who called voyager a star and eventually tried to destroy the ship, their whole existence driven to get to the "skyship" on one occasion and yet she had no intention of correcting the issue the best she could although the doctor tried.
in DS9, Sisko never went as far as crossing the line, however he did bend the directive on occasions, the Tosk issue, Sisko didnt directly get involved in how another species works however he did state that from his side "we dont operate like that on our side" and the enemy commander understood , however without consent O'Brien took it on himself to violate the prime directive and Sisko just let it happen despite Odo's objection. while Sisko never got involved in such a thing too often as he was not put too far into it, his other officers have gotten a little more deeply into violating the directive.
Enterprise is a no brainer, there was no established prime directive throughout the 4 year run and the most blatant prime directive violation was the enterprise crew deliberately causing a civil war to destroy the superweapon.
TOS was still discovering itself however there were multiple directive violations by Kirk himself or his crew.
since jjcrap isnt canon as far as i am concerned, not touching that, not even with a 5000 ft barge pole.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Not touching this one, letting large amount of people die to save few, not my cup of tea.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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im guessing your talking about the plot to Insurrection? A number of times it was based on the vulcan addage, "the needs of the many, out weigh the needs of the few" ..so what do you think, was Picard right to help the villagers, or was he letting his emotions dictate his actions?
...and would you have used the holoship?
It's one of the examples I was thinking of.
Insurrection should have been handled they way the Cardasian war treaty should have been, give the Bak'u and the colonists the time to do the right thing, if they won't then forcefully relocate them.
Move the Cardassians over to the Cardasian side and the other colonists over to the allied side, give them time to move all their farms and stuff over, and no leaving worlds on one side or the other.
Give the Bak'u the time to move back to the Bak'u home world then suck the magic planet dry, if they wouldn't leave in time beam all their villages and people onto a couple of Galaxy Classes and move them back.
It's harsh but the Bak'u were effectively holding the Federation over a barrel and the Cardasian treaty was the direct cause of the Marquis / Cardasian war.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Federation: We have high-minded morals and such so we won't interfere in your development.
Aliens: WE'RE DYING, @SSHOLES!
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
The Prime Directive issue, or lack of it, was quite simply that the Prime Directive did not apply as they were warp capable nor indigenous to the planet...
Yes, absolutely...
Without hesitation... :cool:
In my head canon, Marcus studied under Admiral Dougherty during his time at the Academy
In-Universe reason: Because Alt!Kirk is a totally green loose cannon who doesn't give a **** about whether what he does actually makes sense.
Out-of-Universe reason: Because ya gotta admit, the visual of the Enterprise rising majestically out of the ocean was something to see.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
except there's a BIIIIG differance between the Cardassian treaty and the Bak'u. the planets in the case of the Cardassian treaty where federation settlements made by Federation citizens. (and even then it was a bit of a bad deal) the Bak'u where neither. they had not, unless my memory is failing me, ever made any sort of contact with the UFP. and where living, what the Federation belvied, was a simple agrarian lifestyle without much in the way of technological development.
The Federation however somehow concluded this world was "their space" (which introduces the obvious question of... ok had things proceeded normally and the Bak'u one day developed warp flight what would the UFP do? walk up and say "ohh congrats you're in our space, join us or umm... die?)
Comparing this to the cardassian front is kinda wrong, look at it from this PoV, what would your reaction be like today if a bunch of aliens beamed down to earth and said "yeah need your world for an experiment. we're moving ya"
I think we'd object. rather strongly
At least it was better than Star Trek V.
Speak for yourself.
A free and permanent one-way trip far away from Earth? Where do I sign up? Hell, I'd even betray the rest of my species for a first-class seat in the holoship. I'd ask them if they wanted any help moving their stuff in.
If there's a nuclear war happening on a pre-warp planet, don't interfere. That's part of their cultural history, we have no right to intervene. But if there's an asteroid on a collision course with a pre-warp planet, and the inhabitants don't have a snowball's chance in hell of stopping or even surviving it, then the moral thing to do is discretely prevent the disaster.
As for the situation in "Insurrection", I say leave the Ba'ku alone. They're not hurting anyone, and the truth is nobody needs to live forever anyway. Just look at what happened to Quinn.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
I don't think it has so much to do with the 'living forever' part as much as the part where Federation medicine could be advanced drastically with the metaphasic radiation that would have been collected and subsequently released to Starfleet Medical for research and development.
Saving the pariahs of the Ba'ku were in the short-term, and were likely not one of the Admiral's biggest concerns.
However, the regenerative properties the planet had could have been used to save millions or trillions of lives, and improve the quality of many lives by correcting genetic defects or other disabilities that 'modern' medical science can not fix.
For example, if the Ba'ku succeeded, Geordi LaForge might have been able to permanently regain his eyesight (rather than temporarily) with enough medical research.
This, I think was how the Admiral was able to talk himself into going along with this plan. He could have easily invoked the "Needs of the Many" defense, and in fact I would have sided with him. The relocation of the Ba'ku might be ethically questionable, but if the outcome would be to wipe out injuries and diseases in trillions of lives throughout the Federation (and elsewhere) for years to come... is that worth the relocation of a few hundred lives of non-native people?
Wrong? Yes. Wrong for the right reasons? Maybe.
TOS had the Enterprise attempting exactly that (diverting an asteroid) to save the planet of low-tech American Indian-descended people in "The Paradise Syndrome". It seems that the policy in the case of "threat that the pre-warp civilization can not handle" is to attempt to defuse the threat, but to do so while keeping the pre-warp civilization unaware of their presence. In other words, help them, but stay hidden.
The "warp drive" dividing line for the Prime Directive also seems to assume that almost nobody ever attempts sublight interstellar travel. However, (excluding the Botany Bay), we have seen at least two subversions of this. In the TOS episode, "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky", the worldship Yolanda is carrying a civilization to a new planet, but the inhabitants have forgotten their origins.
Also, in the previously-used-in-this-thread Enterprise episode "Dear Doctor", the aliens asking for help had deliberately sent out sublight explorer in order to SEARCH for a more advanced race for help. The fact that they were traveling slower than light rather than faster is kind of academic--it's still interstellar flight, which should have qualified them as "advanced enough for contact".
Let's do a little thought experiment for that last one--what if Humanity had sent a slower-than-light ship to Vulcan that arrived there a couple of years before Cochrane tested his warp drive? Would the Vulcans have refused to speak to them because their ship was slower-than-light even though it had traveled interstellar distances?
(Not to mention that as both physics and politics tells us, the Federation is already having some kind of influence on its neighbors simply by existing.)
There comes a time when the PD seems less like a statement of principle and more like a bad storytelling device and/or all-purpose excuse to duck any and all responsibility.
That is exactly what it is. It is an illogical, impractical, malleable thing that pays lip service to a reality that simply can not exist.
It is the same illogical nonsense as why genetic augmentation is banned in the Federation. There is no logic behind it -- the idea of 'Khan' and his superhuman buddies not being the 'norm' in the Federation simply can not be reconciled. Man is something to be overcome. Khan represents what 'modern' humans would have become in Kirk's time. The 'Eugenics Wars' is a silly plot device to explain that there are somehow 'normal' humans instead of genetically-superior humans as a result of science advancement, something Kirk and the Enterprise and the Federation is all about. Except when it comes to that.
The Prime Directive is the same as the ban on genetic augmentation in Star Trek. It exists because it is a symptom of bad writing and a bad storytelling device. The only in-universe reason both things exist is basically:
"Because shut up, that's why!"
The crew (main cast) are the heroes of the movie, so we are supposed to be rooting for them, but yeah, from data exposing the duck blind possibly contaminating a prewarp culture to picard dropping his command and using fed weapons to fight an unauthorized battle, i think lol, they would have all been court marshaled. Even the admiral was making it up as he went along.
But heres my problem with destroying the planet for the medical tech, ok to start with, there is no real guarantee they will be able to successfully be able to use it as described seeing as they know so little about it to begin with on how to even explain how the powers came to be to begin with, resembling the time they wanted to disect data in order to make more of him, with no guarantee he would survive or that they had the skills to understand his tech enough to be successful. PLus for the planet itself, its an unexplored world for the most part, they had yet to learn from the Baku on how things worked there yet. I think another colony location could have been worked out for those sauna, the ones who wouldnt make it, had already reached their biological limits anyways and had no real extraordinary priority to lengthening their lives. They where exiled criminals or something like that anyways, something resembling Khan. I would think, given the initial goals of star fleet, they would at least spend a few decades fine toothing the planet and its lifeforms and abilities...even under the surface could hold answers even the Baku may not have discovered yet. Ultimately, like I said before, it would come to how they interpreted their own rules....and how a Jag officer would determine land possession as it was initially federation space they migrated too. This subjects too complicated, remind me never to take up politics!! lol
The last episode he was in, he betrayed Star Fleet to warn the Bajorans if I remember right, that they where going to do ..something I forget now, but he ended up starting a war, then the traveler came down and pulled him outta the fire and left Picard to deal with it all.
Should Wesley be considered a fugitive?
You obviously don't want to invade aliens' lands and get them hooked on booze, etc., etc., but the concept of leaving things to their own evolution is philosophical nonsense - any interaction you have with them is itself an aspect of their evolution.
Very true, but still fun to reason out a, "what would you do" scenario. In RL, I would have also helped to defend someone from being ejected from their homes( Planes Indians...you cant just up and take something from another who was there first, IMO you then become conquerors and not explorers), when people are sick and hungry I aid them in any way I can. But when dealing with the politics of the times, like the prime directive for fed, or shoot first and yell later for kdf....you have to work around barriers and red tape to keep from being taken from a position to help and reach out. If they take your command, then what more can you do? Plus given the times, much like RL history, peoples attitudes changed to adapt to their society. Take how much more warlike Sparta was from Athens in ancient Greece.