this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Risa
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Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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I'm not hear to debate anyone, but if you think it is ok to kill a currently living being to resurrect a dead being, then you are fucked in the head. Tuvok and Neelix died painlessly and unaware in an accident. Tuvix was murdered, and was made fully aware of their fate beforehand, to the point where they even begged to be spared.
I think from their perspective Tuvok and Neelix weren't "dead", which was why they were more inclined to "correct" the situation at hand and save their crewmates while they still had the chance to do so.
Regardless, it's a fucked up decision, I don't envy it.
There's a line in the episode around that point:
But that's the whole point of the episode - it's a moral quandary with no real "right" answer. It's Hugh of Borg all over again.
The episode did its job challenging viewers with the question, because people still argue about this today. But to me there's an actual, unambiguous answer: 4.823 seconds after transport autosequence initiation, when the emitter array completed the materialization cycle.
On the other hand, Tuvix creeped me out.
WELL THAT'S ALL RIGHT THEN!
One for one, sure. One for two? I can see the argument.
So what if you could save five lives by harvesting the organs on one little old person?
How many people could we save if we harvested you for spare parts? You can't, or at very least shouldn't, make moral decisions on arithmetic alone.
It's not an equation to be worked out. It simply boils down to respecting the wishes of a currently living and conscious being. Otherwise anyone's life could be forfeit based purely on some arbitrary valuation of what that life is worth. Why don't we just harvest your organs and give them to people we deem more useful, ya know?
If I had come about through the unwilling merger of two people, and my death could restore those people, it's probably ethical to kill me to make it happen.
I don't think it's necessarily reasonable to call the two component people dead either. Death is a not a particularly well defined term, but we don't tend to apply it to people who might get better.
The knowledge that you live in a society where you could be legally killed at any point for the greater good, and the resultant fear and uncertainty probably would cause more harm overall than doing so could actually alleviate.
What you are saying is it is ethical to kill a being that has specifically said it doesn't want to die, in order save two others.
Same reason it's ethical to kill billionaires and eat the rich.