Morality of prime directive

[dptullos]

Because you're not there for 'the society'. You're their for the people. Each of which has a list of rights that you need to watch like a hawk to provide and defend against the society.

It is not hypothetically impossible that Amishism is one of the most desirable ideologies in the star cluster/galaxy/universe/multiverse and that it will become bigger and bigger as individuals flock to join it, that's true. It is, however, incredibly unlikely. Much more likely is that it's devoured by ideologies that were built for and adjusted to more advanced living conditions and so can better get converts.

However you think not having the PD will go, it shouldn't be treated as, 'Oh the native culture will definitely be fine after having all it's fundamental principles changed.'

As for my point on birth rates, population growth is not infinite and we should treat it as having a 'cap' for this discussion. Otherwise you have a situation where the spaceAmish on the back of a napkin somehow fill the entire universe in a few generations because that's how ridiculous things get with a few generations of exponential growth.

So the 10%+ leaving rates would functionally obliterate spaceAmish communities that have hit their population limits in a few generations. That is hardly 'preserving culture'.



That's true, but it's also not what people mean when they say, 'native culture'. It's a whole system and way of doing things.

For example, I love eat sushi and teppanyaki and I watch anime. Does that mean that if Cloakieism becomes the predominant culture on Earth, that Japanese 'culture' has 'survived'?

I don't think so. I think it would mean Japanese culture is dead but had good food and an effective art style.

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You have no right to the company of other people. If your society decides to shun you, they have the right to do so. That's what "free association" means.

I also don't think that the Amish will grow to populate whole worlds in an imaginary future where humanity spreads across the stars, but I don't think I can predict the future. The odds are that we stay right here on Earth.

Christianity and Islam were born under radically different conditions that those of the present day. Christianity and Islam still exist. People still convert to religions which were born hundreds or thousands of years ago.

All of your space predictions are largely irrelevant, because we're nowhere near colonizing space. Since we aren't moving off Earth in any significant numbers in the near future, you're trying to predict the far future. If you've ever read any science fiction stories from the early 1900s, you can see how unreliable that is. We don't all have robot butlers and personal spaceships, like many people thought we would by now, so I wouldn't count on your ability to see what the future has in store.

Whatever the future holds, it will not be uniformity of the sort that you imagine. We will not be freed from the dead hand of history, and our families and our communities will continue to shape us. There is no "New Soviet Child" liberated from the shackles of the past, as you spoke of in one of your first posts. We are all the products of our environments.

 

[Valmond]

Amish planet might exist in hypothetical star trek future.
But it is extremely unlikely it would, if the people there had a choice not heavily weighed in favor of being Amish.

Amish society persists because they do not give the children the tools to make a choice, and even then a significant number of them leave.

 

[dptullos]

Amish planet might exist in hypothetical star trek future.
But it is extremely unlikely it would, if the people there had a choice not heavily weighed in favor of being Amish.

Amish society persists because they do not give the children the tools to make a choice, and even then a significant number of them leave.

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The choice is always heavily weighed in favor of being Amish, because it's all or nothing. You can't move to the city and come back to visit on weekends.

The larger debate is about...well, I'll give my side of things. Understand that I'm not trying to be objective.

Some people imagine that you can use replicators to produce children detached from culture, free individuals who will be able to freely pick and choose among cultures like they're in a buffet. I believe that we are always shaped by the beliefs and the culture of the people closest to us.

Regardless of changes in material conditions, we are all molded by our childhood experiences and the opinions of our parents and guardians.

 

[Zedalb]

Arguably the prime directive stops cultural genocide.
You can not uplift a species without changing the culture beyond all recognition.

Since any post supporting genocide is against the rules, it is ergo against the rules to not support the prime directive (I'm Joking mods)

 

[eyl]

2) The stronger argument in my mind: the North Sentinelese and uncontacted Amazonians are in danger from us because we have a world order of predictably abusive nationalist capitalist states. It's not some abstract issue of what happens when an advanced society meets a primitive one, it's that actually existing high-tech societies are run by the sort of people whose reactions to uncontacted tribes are predictably along the lines of "I bet tourists would pay a lot to see them" or "we need to clear them out to get to the oil" or "we've got to send some missionaries to preach to them, and if half of them die of some crowd disease they have no immunity to, well, at least they got to know the Gospel first so their souls will go to Heaven." The Federation is supposed to be better than us! They've got that enlightened rational tolerant space socialism they're so proud of! Picard lectures a twenty-first century person about how the acquisition of wealth is supposedly no longer the driving force in people's lives in his time! Shouldn't all that enlightenment they're clearly proud of (at times rather smug about) translate to being able to trust themselves to act more ethically toward less powerful outsiders?

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It's been a long while since I saw the shows, but from what I remember Picard's assertions in that episodes that the Federation has grown beyond material wealth are at least somewhat contradicted by other episodes.

More to the point, capitalism is not the only reason for exploitation or even conflicting priorities. Say, for example, that a pre-warp planet is discovered to have strategic resources such as dilithium (wasn't that the background to the plot of one of the TOS episodes?). Extracting it comes with conflict with the uplift mission (e.g. it has religious significance to the locals or is under the control of a less-cooperative local government). Do the best interests of the locals still prevail?

This is leaving aside the practical issue that I'm not sure even the Federation can logistically maintain multiple uplift efforts such as are being described.

 

[bookwyrm]

Honestly I think the idea of the Prime Directive is a surprisingly insightful admission of humility, though actually presented in the show somewhat arrogantly with the 'not yet sufficiently evolved' stuff. Frankly, it would be the height of ideological chauvinism and cultural supremacy to think that there's going to never be a situation in which there's no good right answer that can be acted upon by the Federation as somehow the only agents whose agency matters, and to try and set up a universal system of first contact and integration into the Federation and expect that to result in no harm inflicted by Starfleet in the violent penetration of the contacted cultures and the imperialist incentives that can be carried along with any 'civilizing mission'. Better instead to carefully study events as unobtrusively as possible and nudge aside external disasters on a case by case basis, until such time as there is no hope of that people not being subjected to the violence of first contact and being out on the galactic stage anymore, in which case open Federation diplomacy and aid sit on infinitely firmer ground.

The Federation may fail to do the maximum good under the PD, but it at least sets a floor for itself for actively inflicting harm as what would happen any time someone like Harry Mudd gets to hand out disrupters and Romulan Ale off the back of his tramp freighter while ostensibly supplying the local Federation peeps, or when Section 31 is tasked with maintaining the internal security of strategically located outposts and research centers that have been integrating recently contacted civilizations (I.E. doing a CIA).

 

[Arthur Frayn]

Now that I think about it, are there any episodes (aside from the Very Special Episode on ENT that's intended as the PD's origin story) where the crew encountered some problem they couldn't immediately solved without violating/skirting the PD and just flat out shrugged, said "Well sucks to suck guys", and moved on?

'Cause I feel like aside from the aforementioned ENT like 90% of the time the crew figures out a way to have their cake and eat it too.

 

[10ebbor10]

Now that I think about it, are there any episodes (aside from the Very Special Episode on ENT that's intended as the PD's origin story) where the crew encountered some problem they couldn't immediately solved without violating/skirting the PD and just flat out shrugged, said "Well sucks to suck guys", and moved on?

'Cause I feel like aside from the aforementioned ENT like 90% of the time the crew figures out a way to have their cake and eat it too.

Click to shrink...

I don't think so.

It is said to happen often in the background (60 or so civilizations that have gone extinct as Starfleet watches) but it would be rather weird for a tv episode to set up a prime directive plot, and then just skedaddle and do something else.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

2) The stronger argument in my mind: the North Sentinelese and uncontacted Amazonians are in danger from us because we have a world order of predictably abusive nationalist capitalist states. It's not some abstract issue of what happens when an advanced society meets a primitive one, it's that actually existing high-tech societies are run by the sort of people whose reactions to uncontacted tribes are predictably along the lines of "I bet tourists would pay a lot to see them" or "we need to clear them out to get to the oil" or "we've got to send some missionaries to preach to them, and if half of them die of some crowd disease they have no immunity to, well, at least they got to know the Gospel first so their souls will go to Heaven." The Federation is supposed to be better than us! They've got that enlightened rational tolerant space socialism they're so proud of! Picard lectures a twenty-first century person about how the acquisition of wealth is supposedly no longer the driving force in people's lives in his time! Shouldn't all that enlightenment they're clearly proud of (at times rather smug about) translate to being able to trust themselves to act more ethically toward less powerful outsiders?

Click to shrink...

Perhaps the Federation is enlightened because it's not a self-righteous crusader state? Perhaps you can't get one (the need to intervene to Make Things Right) without the other (the fact that because you're the ones deciding how to Make Things Right, you will inevitably end up with some self-serving definition of Making Things Right), and thus a Federation which was interventionist and started "trusting itself to act more ethically towards less powerful outsiders" would rapidly lose the enlightenment which led it to "trust itself" in the first place? Humans in the Federation, at least, came to become who they are in Star Trek because two sides who were full of righteous people who thought that their enlightened actions were the best way to run the world welped themselves into a war, killing 1/10th of the human population, causing mass devastation and immiseration to the rest, and ending up with a bloody, meaningless stalemate as the sole result. Given what the most likely sparks for WW3 actually were, I suspect that the spark that lit off WW3 was some sort of well-intentioned intervention/policy that set off shockwaves, and thus I can't help but feel that something like this is going to put a damper on the idea that intervention is going to be low-cost and desirable in most situations.

More importantly, the Federation has plenty of experience with their system being fragile, rare, contingent, and not obviously superior in a pure techno-industrial sense, which is going to be a damper on the self-righteous idea of both inevitable Federationalization and of its mandate to impose decisions made from its superior systems onto the galaxy - and both of these assumptions are what underlies the idea that interference is both just and noble. Its neighboring polities all have comparable technological levels and are relatively stable and comparably successful industrially, despite being a pseudo-Roman oligarchy (Romulans), a feudal monarchy (Klingons), a hypercapitalist oligarchy (Ferengi), an authoritarian police state (Cardassians), and an expansionist and apparently militaristic hegemony (the Gorn)... hardly a statement that your intervention is going to create a successful liberal socialist democracy or that liberal socialist democracy is the sole valid form of government.

3) Kind of related to 2), with its futuristic technology the Federation probably has a bunch of options that we don't. If we wanted to vaccinate the North Sentinelese against something we'd have to send a vaccination worker and defend that person and persuade the North Sentinelese to go along with somebody sticking a needle into them and we'd have to worry about the workers accidentally transmitting some other disease to them and so on. The Federation might well be able to just beam doses of the vaccine into people or something. If they do have to send a vaccination worker down, they can run the transporter biofilter on them to make sure they aren't carrying any known serious diseases, and if that person gets attacked they can just wave a phaser on wide-beam stun around; the attackers will sleep for a little while and then wake up and be fine.

Click to shrink...

The second Star Trek movie - and this is one of the JJ Abrams movies where Starfleet command is portrayed in a much darker light, not the mainline series - opens on the Enterprise mostly covertly stopping a volcano eruption with the only suggestion of a possible Prime Directive violation being the fact that Kirk is showing up in person so he can get the volcano temple's inhabitants to chase him and get the fuck out of the area. I've already mentioned this before, but the Prime Directive much of the time is treated as a guiding directive to minimize intervention and exposure to the greatest extent possible, not a bright-line rule which means that you need to leave everyone to die if an asteroid is heading in their direction.

Picard violated the Prime Directive nine times, and was promoted and given a high-level command despite this. The Prime Directive is generally not treated as black-letter law, but rather a default attitude - when in doubt, you should default to less interference rather than more, and if you engage in interference, you should be able to justify and defend your decision.

 

[LilyWitch]

not a bright-line rule which means that you need to leave everyone to die if an asteroid is heading in their direction.

Click to shrink...

To emphisis this. One TOS episode (season 3 "The Parardise Syndrome" an otherwise forgetable and racist episode) explicitly has this as its b-plot. An asteroid is headed towards a pre-warp planet and its not even a discussion. The Enterprise tries to do all it can to stop it even at risk of exposure without even wasteing time debating the Prime Directive.

 

[lotho]

Perhaps the Federation is enlightened because it's not a self-righteous crusader state? Perhaps you can't get one (the need to intervene to Make Things Right) without the other (the fact that because you're the ones deciding how to Make Things Right, you will inevitably end up with some self-serving definition of Making Things Right), and thus a Federation which was interventionist and started "trusting itself to act more ethically towards less powerful outsiders" would rapidly lose the enlightenment which led it to "trust itself" in the first place? Humans in the Federation, at least, came to become who they are in Star Trek because two sides who were full of righteous people who thought that their enlightened actions were the best way to run the world welped themselves into a war, killing 1/10th of the human population, causing mass devastation and immiseration to the rest, and ending up with a bloody, meaningless stalemate as the sole result. Given what the most likely sparks for WW3 actually were, I suspect that the spark that lit off WW3 was some sort of well-intentioned intervention/policy that set off shockwaves, and thus I can't help but feel that something like this is going to put a damper on the idea that intervention is going to be low-cost and desirable in most situations.

More importantly, the Federation has plenty of experience with their system being fragile, rare, contingent, and not obviously superior in a pure techno-industrial sense, which is going to be a damper on the self-righteous idea of both inevitable Federationalization and of its mandate to impose decisions made from its superior systems onto the galaxy - and both of these assumptions are what underlies the idea that interference is both just and noble. Its neighboring polities all have comparable technological levels and are relatively stable and comparably successful industrially, despite being a pseudo-Roman oligarchy (Romulans), a feudal monarchy (Klingons), a hypercapitalist oligarchy (Ferengi), an authoritarian police state (Cardassians), and an expansionist and apparently militaristic hegemony (the Gorn)... hardly a statement that your intervention is going to create a successful liberal socialist democracy or that liberal socialist democracy is the sole valid form of government.



The second Star Trek movie - and this is one of the JJ Abrams movies where Starfleet command is portrayed in a much darker light, not the mainline series - opens on the Enterprise mostly covertly stopping a volcano eruption with the only suggestion of a possible Prime Directive violation being the fact that Kirk is showing up in person so he can get the volcano temple's inhabitants to chase him and get the fuck out of the area. I've already mentioned this before, but the Prime Directive much of the time is treated as a guiding directive to minimize intervention and exposure to the greatest extent possible, not a bright-line rule which means that you need to leave everyone to die if an asteroid is heading in their direction.

Picard violated the Prime Directive nine times, and was promoted and given a high-level command despite this. The Prime Directive is generally not treated as black-letter law, but rather a default attitude - when in doubt, you should default to less interference rather than more, and if you engage in interference, you should be able to justify and defend your decision.

Click to shrink...

Also even though Kirk tried to obey the prime directive he was still spotted by the tribe, and they made a stone painting of the enterprise and started worshiping it. Maybe that's why the Rikers bring up the silly cosmic plan idea. Still it's the cost of doing business, they saved that species with the minimum interference sometimes you are caught though.

 

[10ebbor10]

The second Star Trek movie - and this is one of the JJ Abrams movies where Starfleet command is portrayed in a much darker light, not the mainline series - opens on the Enterprise mostly covertly stopping a volcano eruption with the only suggestion of a possible Prime Directive violation being the fact that Kirk is showing up in person so he can get the volcano temple's inhabitants to chase him and get the fuck out of the area. I

Click to shrink...

That's not what the movie does.

In the movie Spock explains how the tribe wouldn't have known anything had happened had the mission gone to plan, and Pike dismisses that as a technicality, thus indicating that the intended reading of the law is one that bans all interference, even if it is not observed.

Picard violated the Prime Directive nine times, and was promoted and given a high-level command despite this. The Prime Directive is generally not treated as black-letter law, but rather a default attitude - when in doubt, you should default to less interference rather than more, and if you engage in interference, you should be able to justify and defend your decision.

Click to shrink...

Not really the vibe I get when we go over the actual violations we see on screen. The one I get is that interference should always be avoided, unless the aim is to reduce previous interference.

Violation 1 :
In Pen Pals, Picard argues that they should leave the civilization to die. At this point, they haven't even bothered to check if they can save the civilization without being noticed, and when they do check that they discover that they can. Here, the civilization is saved only because another member of the crew performed a prime directive violation (contacting the alien species, which allowed it to call for help). Had everyone followed the prime directive as intented, then there never would have been a call for help, and the planet would have been destroyed.

Violation 2 :

An accident causes contamination when the cloaking system of an observation post fails, and Picard allows further interference to try and fix it by demonstrating to the people of the planet that he is not a god. If the guideline here had been that it's best not to interfere when you don't have to, then Picard should not have done anything. He could just have accepted that the failure of the shielding altered societal development, it is not like it was endangering the civilization or threatening their destruction. All it did was cause a religious revival.

But the fact that Picard willingly and seriously interfered, and that this interference was accepted, shows that Prime Directive policy places more value on the "original course" of a civilization than on minimal intervention.

Violation 3 :

Picard's ship is used by a Federation cultural observer to save a village of relatively primitive people from natural disaster which would have killed their entire civilization as it destroyed their entire planet. Picard had explicitedly ordered that this be allowed to happen, that the civilizations on the planet must not be rescued.

Violation 4 :

Picard is looking for debris on a planet, and is attacked by the native population, which they did not earlier detect due to sensor interference

So, that's not once but twice that Picard argues that the Prime directive must be followed by allowing a civilization to go extinct by planetary disaster.
And in the one instance where Picard has the option to just go away and leave, facing no civilization destroying consequences for leaving, he deliberately and seriously interferes to restore a civilization to it's previous path.



This is all suggests that the Prime Directive, at least in the era of TNG, is a fairly strongly worded document that puts such heavy emphasis on maintaining the original course of civilizations that even a smart, emphatic, capable man like Picard will repeatedly argue that civilizations must be sacrificed to it.

To emphisis this. One TOS episode (season 3 "The Parardise Syndrome" an otherwise forgetable and racist episode) explicitly has this as its b-plot. An asteroid is headed towards a pre-warp planet and its not even a discussion. The Enterprise tries to do all it can to stop it even at risk of exposure without even wasteing time debating the Prime Directive.

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TOS is very lenient towards Prime Directive violations in general.

According to TOS, overthrowing another societies government is not a prime directive violation if you disagree with that society enough, as we can see when Kirk kills Landru in "The Return of the Archons".

 

[MJ12 Commando]

That's not what the movie does.

In the movie Spock explains how the tribe wouldn't have known anything had happened had the mission gone to plan, and Pike dismisses that as a technicality, thus indicating that the intended reading of the law is one that bans all interference, even if it is not observed...

This is all suggests that the Prime Directive, at least in the era of TNG, is a fairly strongly worded document that puts such heavy emphasis on maintaining the original course of civilizations that even a smart, emphatic, capable man like Picard will repeatedly argue that civilizations must be sacrificed to it.

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Sure, but this is even in the reboot. The fact that Spock - a stickler for rules - considered this to not be a violation of the Prime Directive if Kirk was to not reveal himself. Pike's interpretation of what the Prime Directive means is deliberately intended to play off of Kirk being the Rogue Cop who Does What's Necessary, and it's notable again that none of the Enterprise crew treat this as some sort of deep insubordination and they just... do their jobs.

And your examples about Picard kind of prove the point because even though you believe Picard is extremely callous regarding the application of the Prime Directive, he apparently has nine apparently unambiguous Prime Directive violations in 3 and a half years as captain on his record, and his defense of those violations is saying that he did all of them deliberately with thought and certainty that doing so was the right thing to do, and this was accepted to the point where he was given continued command of the Enterprise and eventually promoted pretty high up. So even people who are apparently sticklers will routinely violate the Prime Directive and this is merely an issue that requires explanation, not a permanent black mark on a record that cannot be dealt with.

There is definitely an interpretation of the Prime Directive which you can use to claim that it requires leaving a civilization to die because a volcano happened, but this is clearly not the sole valid and intended perspective. When Prime Directive stories come up, the actual conclusion of the stories is generally, as @Arthur Frayn said, "the protagonists figure out a way to avoid the disaster without disrupting the society in question" and focusing on specific incidents where the Prime Directive is strawmanned - sometimes, as in Star Trek Beyond, with the implication that the strawman is a deliberate tool used by corrupt Starfleet officials to fuck Kirk over - isn't actually a disproof of the general thesis that the Prime Directive is not, in fact, supposed to be bright-line.

 

[Memphet'ran]

Perhaps the Federation is enlightened because it's not a self-righteous crusader state? Perhaps you can't get one (the need to intervene to Make Things Right) without the other (the fact that because you're the ones deciding how to Make Things Right, you will inevitably end up with some self-serving definition of Making Things Right), and thus a Federation which was interventionist and started "trusting itself to act more ethically towards less powerful outsiders" would rapidly lose the enlightenment which led it to "trust itself" in the first place?

Click to shrink...

If you look at my posts in this discussion, the criticism of the Prime Directive I've mostly stuck to is that in preindustrial society half of people died as children (at least in agricultural societies, hunter-gatherers may have done better because of lower population densities, I guess), and if that pattern holds on the various preindustrial pre-warp worlds in the Star Trek universe that's billions and billions of preventable deaths that strict non-interventionism commits the Federation to doing nothing about. I'm not even talking about contentious responsibility to protect stuff like handing a crate of phasers to Space John Brown, I'm talking about the equivalent of rolling up to fifteenth century Earth and immunizing people against smallpox, malaria, bubonic plague, etc., telling the locals about germ theory, and giving them some designs for improved sanitary toilets and sewer systems and water distribution systems; doing stuff that's just obviously good if you aren't deep in the perversity thesis. There are a lot of options besides "Prime Directive" and "self-righteous crusader state."

Actually, pointing out that a lot of pro-PD arguments are variants of the perversity thesis nicely touches on what makes me uncomfortable about a lot of them; lots of them have a noticeable similarity to right-wing arguments deployed to dissuade us from trying to improve real-world society and dissuade us from trying to help real-world poor people. "Even the most seemingly unambiguously helpful interventions will surely blow up in your face and make everything worse somehow, the world is so complicated that the safest thing is to just accept the status quo, if it's not your fault it's not your responsibility, helping them is actually disrespectful to them because it compromises their agency, helping them too much will destroy their work ethic and make them dependent on you," and so on; these are all arguments that would be right at home in the mouth of a Republican Senator talking about why he thinks welfare checks are a bad idea.

The second Star Trek movie - and this is one of the JJ Abrams movies where Starfleet command is portrayed in a much darker light, not the mainline series - opens on the Enterprise mostly covertly stopping a volcano eruption with the only suggestion of a possible Prime Directive violation being the fact that Kirk is showing up in person so he can get the volcano temple's inhabitants to chase him and get the fuck out of the area. I've already mentioned this before, but the Prime Directive much of the time is treated as a guiding directive to minimize intervention and exposure to the greatest extent possible, not a bright-line rule which means that you need to leave everyone to die if an asteroid is heading in their direction.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, they do seem to intervene to prevent very bad natural disasters, at least if said disaster is an existential threat to that entire world's population, at least some of the time, and at least if it can be done with no or minimal contact with the pre-warp society. That they do that much is to their credit. But I think "won't let an entire world's population be wiped out by a natural disaster" is a pretty low bar.

 

[Graviator]

Actually, pointing out that a lot of pro-PD arguments are variants of the perversity thesis nicely touches on what makes me uncomfortable about a lot of them; lots of them have a noticeable similarity to right-wing arguments deployed to dissuade us from trying to improve real-world society and dissuade us from trying to help real-world poor people.

Click to shrink...

I take issue with this thesis. "Will it work at all?", "Will it do enough?" and "At a cost cost we can actually afford?" are basic questions for any effort with a defined intention. And an assessment that the answer to any of these is "no" is grounds for criticism regardless of one's opinion on the underlying intention. There is nothing particularly right-wing about any of those questions, and indeed any institution's failure to ask them means it will have trouble carrying out whatever its intentions are.

Of course there's a fourth question, which is "is the intended outcome a good thing?" and which is very much political.

 

[dptullos]

I don't think any of the Federation's neighbors have their own Prime Directives.

"We must leave prewarp civilizations to develop without interference" doesn't make much sense when the Klingons will drop by to enslave them, the Romulans will install a puppet government, and the Cardassians will treat them like Bajor.

"Go where no man has gone before" indicates that there are vast stretches of space unclaimed by any warp-capable nations. If the Federation doesn't make contact with pre-warp civilizations, there's nothing stopping Klingon Captain Tserguz from turning that nice Bronze Age planet into his personal fiefdom. In fact, that kind of exploration and conquest should be something that several polities actively encourage as a means of relieving social tensions and bringing new conquests for the Motherland. Like Spain and the conquistadors.

I respect Suspension of Disbelief. Once you start thinking about the Star Trek setting without Suspension of Disbelief, it breaks down very fast. The Federation should be extremely militarized, given how many wars and crises they've experienced. They should be extremely dedicated to helping pre-warp civilizations rapidly obtain Federation membership, because the alternative is that the Klingons/Romulans/Cardassians/Breen/alien baddie of the week will help themselves to a nice new colony.

Given the Federation's neighbors, they should be behaving like NATO during the Cold War, not the happy hippy space UN.

 

[Memphet'ran]

I take issue with this thesis. "Will it work at all?", "Will it do enough?" and "At a cost cost we can actually afford?" are basic questions for any effort with a defined intention. And an assessment that the answer to any of these is "no" is grounds for criticism regardless of one's opinion on the underlying intention. There is nothing particularly right-wing about any of those questions, and indeed any institution's failure to ask them means it will have trouble carrying out whatever its intentions are.

Of course there's a fourth question, which is "is the intended outcome a good thing?" and which is very much political.

Click to shrink...

"Will this work?" is a sensible question, of course, but I think trying to use the perversity thesis to defend the PD naturally tends to lead to using it in kind of right-wing-like ways, because the PD forbids almost any intervention so if you defend the PD that way you tend to end up straining at gnats when it comes to possible bad effects of intervention while swallowing camels when it comes to suffering in the plausible status quo.

They should be extremely dedicated to helping pre-warp civilizations rapidly obtain Federation membership, because the alternative is that the Klingons/Romulans/Cardassians/Breen/alien baddie of the week will help themselves to a nice new colony.

Given the Federation's neighbors, they should be behaving like NATO during the Cold War, not the happy hippy space UN.

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I figure the Federation enforces some kind of no fly zone for outside powers around the pre-warp worlds in its territory.

 

[consequences]

Given the Federation's neighbors, they should be behaving like NATO during the Cold War, not the happy hippy space UN.

Click to shrink...

They observably don't actually need to though, at least to the extent of preparation that is needed for day to day non Borg or Dominion threats. Their equivalent of an oceanic research vessel can slap around the dedicated battleships of their neighbors who constantly lie to themselves that they could ever be considered peer competitors. After the neighbors pull a bullshit Hollywood Hacking to shut down the research vessel's defenses. While said neighbors are being vectored in to achieve a surprise attack by the rogue research vessel's parent nation's satellite network.

Meanwhile, the Romulan obsession with dominance and exploiting under races saw their Senate get vaporized. The Cardassians tried to exploit primitive cultures and failed so miserably that they left infrastructure all over the place because their delusions wouldn't let them blow it up and admit their total failure. The Klingons might as well be a Civil War O Clock meme.


And unless you invade Space Ukraine in their backyard, the Feddies really don't care what you get up to even to the extent of making vaguely disapproving mouth noises, so honestly I think they already are 2000s Space NATO. Cold War NATO behavior normally can't remotely be justified unless they're intended to go in and fight proxy wars for regime change, and when the Dominion stepped up as a console command spamming bullshit cheating Stellaris AI enemy that required serious effort, they made the pivot readily.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

They observably don't actually need to though, at least to the extent of preparation that is needed for day to day non Borg or Dominion threats. Their equivalent of an oceanic research vessel can slap around the dedicated battleships of their neighbors who constantly lie to themselves that they could ever be considered peer competitors. After the neighbors pull a bullshit Hollywood Hacking to shut down the research vessel's defenses. While said neighbors are being vectored in to achieve a surprise attack by the rogue research vessel's parent nation's satellite network.

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However, the Star Trek paradigm suggests that the things that create a good research vessel and the things that create a solid warship aren't actually so divergent (as they are in real life) that the real life comparison is somewhat misleading.

The Federation's few dedicated warships are notably more militarily powerful than their standard-build vessels but not orders of magnitude so. The Defiant-class is really good, but it's still got performance in-line with Starfleet vessels in general, it's not some quantum leap in actual capability. Sure, it's a lot smaller than Federation ships of equivalent firepower but I don't think it's implied that Defiant is actually significantly cheaper on an absolute basis than, e.g., a Sovereign-class.

 

[dptullos]

They observably don't actually need to though, at least to the extent of preparation that is needed for day to day non Borg or Dominion threats. Their equivalent of an oceanic research vessel can slap around the dedicated battleships of their neighbors who constantly lie to themselves that they could ever be considered peer competitors. After the neighbors pull a bullshit Hollywood Hacking to shut down the research vessel's defenses. While said neighbors are being vectored in to achieve a surprise attack by the rogue research vessel's parent nation's satellite network.

Meanwhile, the Romulan obsession with dominance and exploiting under races saw their Senate get vaporized. The Cardassians tried to exploit primitive cultures and failed so miserably that they left infrastructure all over the place because their delusions wouldn't let them blow it up and admit their total failure. The Klingons might as well be a Civil War O Clock meme.


And unless you invade Space Ukraine in their backyard, the Feddies really don't care what you get up to even to the extent of making vaguely disapproving mouth noises, so honestly I think they already are 2000s Space NATO. Cold War NATO behavior normally can't remotely be justified unless they're intended to go in and fight proxy wars for regime change, and when the Dominion stepped up as a console command spamming bullshit cheating Stellaris AI enemy that required serious effort, they made the pivot readily.

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I'm imagining how the Klingons would react to seeing Federation peace protestors demanding an end to conflict with the "plucky Klingon underdogs". They're probably misunderstood, and anyway a race with such weak ships couldn't possibly be warlike!

 

[The Last One]

If you look at my posts in this discussion, the criticism of the Prime Directive I've mostly stuck to is that in preindustrial society half of people died as children (at least in agricultural societies, hunter-gatherers may have done better because of lower population densities, I guess), and if that pattern holds on the various preindustrial pre-warp worlds in the Star Trek universe that's billions and billions of preventable deaths that strict non-interventionism commits the Federation to doing nothing about. I'm not even talking about contentious responsibility to protect stuff like handing a crate of phasers to Space John Brown, I'm talking about the equivalent of rolling up to fifteenth century Earth and immunizing people against smallpox, malaria, bubonic plague, etc., telling the locals about germ theory, and giving them some designs for improved sanitary toilets and sewer systems and water distribution systems; doing stuff that's just obviously good if you aren't deep in the perversity thesis. There are a lot of options besides "Prime Directive" and "self-righteous crusader state."

Actually, pointing out that a lot of pro-PD arguments are variants of the perversity thesis nicely touches on what makes me uncomfortable about a lot of them; lots of them have a noticeable similarity to right-wing arguments deployed to dissuade us from trying to improve real-world society and dissuade us from trying to help real-world poor people. "Even the most seemingly unambiguously helpful interventions will surely blow up in your face and make everything worse somehow, the world is so complicated that the safest thing is to just accept the status quo, if it's not your fault it's not your responsibility, helping them is actually disrespectful to them because it compromises their agency, helping them too much will destroy their work ethic and make them dependent on you," and so on; these are all arguments that would be right at home in the mouth of a Republican Senator talking about why he thinks welfare checks are a bad idea.

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Okay, so would you be comfortable with 1950's USA being given a time machine and being sent back to 15th Century Earth to perform these tasks?

 

[Zedalb]

Okay, so would you be comfortable with 1950's USA being given a time machine and being sent back to 15th Century Earth to perform these tasks?

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This is actually kind of the perfect example.

Would you trust any major modern government to contact uncontacted tribes and "uplift them"?
Right now on earth?

Even if you did would it be a good idea in the long term with every other nation on earth and all the potential abuse?

 

[Vyslanté]

Okay, so would you be comfortable with 1950's USA being given a time machine and being sent back to 15th Century Earth to perform these tasks?

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Good thing we're talking about the FALGSC of the Federation and not the US in the 50s.

 

[Memphet'ran]

Okay, so would you be comfortable with 1950's USA being given a time machine and being sent back to 15th Century Earth to perform these tasks?

Click to shrink...

Would you trust any major modern government to contact uncontacted tribes and "uplift them"?
Right now on earth?

Click to shrink...

I wouldn't, but as I said earlier:

2) The stronger argument in my mind: the North Sentinelese and uncontacted Amazonians are in danger from us because we have a world order of predictably abusive nationalist capitalist states. It's not some abstract issue of what happens when an advanced society meets a primitive one, it's that actually existing high-tech societies are run by the sort of people whose reactions to uncontacted tribes are predictably along the lines of "I bet tourists would pay a lot to see them" or "we need to clear them out to get to the oil" or "we've got to send some missionaries to preach to them, and if half of them die of some crowd disease they have no immunity to, well, at least they got to know the Gospel first so their souls will go to Heaven." The Federation is supposed to be better than us! They've got that enlightened rational tolerant space socialism they're so proud of! Picard lectures a twenty-first century person about how the acquisition of wealth is supposedly no longer the driving force in people's lives in his time! Shouldn't all that enlightenment they're clearly proud of (at times rather smug about) translate to being able to trust themselves to act more ethically toward less powerful outsiders?

Click to shrink...

 

[The Last One]

Good thing we're talking about the FALGSC of the Federation and not the US in the 50s.

Click to shrink...

Is there much difference between them from the perspective of a 27th century Federation? Like, I don't think the 24th century Federation has solved ethics and morality. To be honest, I'm not sure such a thing is possible.


Edit: @Memphet'ran the Federation is better than us, but they're not perfect. Their treatment of synthetic life, for example, isn't hugely different from 1950s America.