![]() ![]() In the very first episode of TNG, ‘Encounter at Farpoint’, Picard and his crew free a being who was trapped by the Bandi to serve their purposes. Moving forward to Captain Picard’s mission, we see more examples of balancing the interests of an individual or minority against a majority: In ‘Metamorphosis’, when Zefram Cochrane asks Kirk to keep his location secret, even though many people would like to know where he is, Kirk agrees to help Cochrane. In ‘The Devil in the Dark’, Kirk protects the mother Horta and her children against the interests of the Federation, which is mining her home and killing her eggs. There aren’t many occasions in Captain Kirk’s mission where he’s forced to balance the interests of a minority against those of a majority but, when they do occur, he favours the minority: ![]() It’s clear that Spock is enunciating his own version of a utilitarian philosophy when he says this.īut what about Starfleet in general? Do other Starfleet officers subscribe to this utilitarian philosophy? We can hear distinct echoes of this utilitarianism in Spock’s statement about “the needs of the many” five centuries later. Simplistically, if we make two people happier at the cost of making one person sad, we have increased utility and that is therefore a moral action. Nett utility is measured by taking the total increase in well-being and deducting any decrease in well-being. The goal of utilitarianism is to maximise “utility”, which is usually defined as the well-being of sentient beings. An early Human utilitarian philosopher, Francis Hutcheson, writing in 1725, defined a moral action as one “which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers. Spock says this twice in ‘The Wrath of Khan’: the first time, he is justifying his decision to hand command of the Enterprise to Kirk the second time, he is explaining his decision to sacrifice his life to save a ship full of cadets and his friends. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |