Scenario: "First world scientists have been monitoring a ancient tribe of indigenous people whom have had no contact with the world outside their isolated lifestyles upon a platue. The only access to the plateau is by heliocopter and leaving the plateau is deemed by local superstition as a trip to hell. The tribe is unaware they are being studied and have no suspicion of being monitored by outsiders. In fact they have no concept of "outsider" in their culture. Nor are they aware of the satelites that pass over head and aid in the research that the scientists are doing. They are however culturally mature and demonstrating an ability in mathematics and natural sciences. Sophisticated agriculture and legal systems. A volcanic eruption has recently wiped out their agriculture and they are starting to loose members of their tribe to starvation. It appears that their tribe is doomed as further eruptions suggest that the entirre plataeu is about to explode." **** The scientists face a dilemma. Should they reveal themselves and evacuate the plateau or should they just leave, and not assist the remaining members of the tribe in avoiding what appears to be certain death. The scientists have the means to assist and the question is should they? Of course this scenario is making reference to the Trekian [sci fi] principle called the Prime Directive. Questions come up such as : Is it ethical to monitor a society with out their conscent or knowledge? Is it morally acceptable to allow them to live or die as their circumstances dictate? Is it ethical to refrain from assistance when needed? It also raises the possibility that we as a race may also be the target of a "prime directive". Are we possibly being monitored by some technological superiior alien race.....etc... Is the Prime Directive an example of sophisticated morality or is it a form of elitist BS....? If we can take both perspectives can we see the value or non value in this Directive. Care to discuss?
The hypothetical scenario above actually has been happening all the time in our everyday life. Just think of places like Africa (at least most of which) and South West Asia vis-a-vis Western Euro, the States and Japan. The latter 1st nations would of course, however miniscule it might be, help the formers abiding by the principle of utilitarianism in which people's 'lives' be the priority over dignity, etc. In social level, therefore, it is 'good' to help out others when people's lives are at stake. However, in individual level, I would never help a person if I determine the person has no potential of helping him/herself. With Nietzsche, it is more difficult to help/give a begger than otherwiese. We, help our friends for certain reasons: The bottom line is that we help each other because we 'recognise' each other as equal: Without this fundation of 'recognised equality', the relationship would be but that of slave and master. That is, it creates totally different context/meanings if I give money to a begger in Philadelphia, or I give/provide money to my best buddy: in the former case, I do so out of recognised inequality; in the latter case, I do so out of recognised equality. Hence, at any rate, the principle of the Prime Directive is well torlable in individual relationships insofar as one abides by the priciple of equality. Hierarchy is the key here: People (certianly I) don't like it when they are put in a hierarchical system in which they become either inferior or superior. When I help a begger in Philadelphia, I am putting the begger and myself in a hierarchical grid in which I am superior and the begger be inferior: When I help my best buddy, there is no need to put him or myself in such a hierarchical grid because, to begin with, I perceive him/her as 'equal'. best,
interesting slant on the issue.....certainly unexpected...thanks Do you think the Prime Directive impilies a heirachical relationship? I suppose it must in that it is covert in it's operation is it not?
Surely it implies the hierarchical relationship albeit its goal is precisely to avoid the hierarchical relationship. best,
Captain Picard violated the Prime Directive dozens of times. He was not court-martialed because it was ruled each time that there were extenuating circumstances. No rule can be absolute. If it's good enough for Star Fleet, it's good enough for me. The loss of an entire culture is something that can never be compensated. If that loss is by contact with a more advanced culture, then it shouldn't happen. But if that loss is due to the more advanced culture failing to intervene in a natural disaster, that isn't right either. It's better to have the culture still alive and contaminated than to lose it.
The captain just made decisions by abiding the principle of utilitarianism no more no less. I assume that the circumstances in which the captain made decisions were of societal in nature (i.e., dealing with a large number of people rather than individuals). Under such circumstances, of course uisng the principle of utilitarianism is more rational than that of Prime Directive. What I have reservations about you, Fraggle, is those senteneces below: and also said: I thought I had an impression that you are making decision case by case as the former sentence confims, while the latter sentence assumes otherwise. Are you being opportunistic here? best,
What do you feel is the main thrust of the philosophy behind the Prime Directive? It is true I guess to say that star fleet has taken the role of God like significance. Yet they have decided to exercise self restraint from ramant exposure. Is it becasue of the negative impact they may have on a cultures evolution? Is it simply about respecting the need for cultures to evolve under their own steam? Was it because they found that premature intervention in another culture would bring about disasterous consequences? Can the English colonisation of Australia [regards aboriginals] or similar, be seen as an example of premature intervention in another races culture? Is it all about "Culture shock"?
Perhaps a bit flippant, but not opportunistic. Star Fleet clearly agreed (agrees? will agree?) with you that no rule can be absolute, not even one as sacred as the Prime Directive. That you have to look at each individual case. I am merely agreeing with both of you. Yes. You don't know what ideas and inventions a culture might develop on its own if you contaminate it with other cultures. Of course at some point cultures can't help discovering each other and then they can't help being influenced by each other, and civilization as a whole which is an amalgam of many cultures has produced some remarkable stuff. Which brings us to your next point. For two cultures of more or less equal levels of advancement to interact is one thing. But when a civilized culture intrudes into a Neolithic one, the pre-modern people always seem to lose nearly everything, rather than being invited to contribute anything beyond folk art. I don't see the difference between that and Europe's occupation (you use a nicer word which I think is not fair or accurate) of the Americas. Or the high-handed meddling in the affairs of sub-Saharan Africa that has been going on since civilizations started springing up within easy exploiting distance. The Australians have had an enormous amount of European culture injected into their own and have lost just as enormous an amount of their own. Yet how much Australian culture have the rest of us absorbed? In America we know about walkabouts and didgeridoos and that's about it. We know more about the Maori because we all saw "Whale Rider" and they're pretty sad too. If you take Australia as your reference standard, the answer is a no-brainer. England 1, Australia 0. In some cases we like to brag about what the "natives" have gained by being "assimilated." Schools, clean water, Jesus, reduced infant mortality, etc. I'm not sure the Australians were bad enough off to need any of that. The North Americans, who unlike the Aztecs and Incas were still in the Neolithic Era, were made far worse off by the occupation. Our diseases killed something like 90 percent of them, we shoved them onto reservations where they don't have the opportunity to follow their own culture or ours, their poverty is unconscionable, and Jesus hasn't been much help. In places like Africa and the Neolithic pockets of Asia and Oceania, "public health" and reduced infant mortality have only served to bestow population pressure on peoples who have no experience with it and no "right" cultural way to deal with it.
First of all, I doubt that the core principle of the Prime Directive is about respecting 'the need' for cultures to evolve under their own steam (your own included I assume). I doubt that there is any sort of 'need', as in necessity or requirement, be the major thrust of the Prime Directive. Insofar as it is a 'need' (i.e., necessity or requirement), it is applied always within a hierarchical relationship in which one imposes its values to others. For instance, if I'd say "it is the need of our human kind to educate ourselves", then you are still implicitly imposing the need of education to others while others might not agree with you. Basically, this is the kind of justification English had when they colonised third world nations in the 19th century: They thought "it is the need for human kind to be civilised so that we can respect each other". In effect, they can pretend as if they had some sort of a task, a mission or an obligation: they started massacring others. I believe that the core idea of the Prime Directive is about respecting/affirming the self and no more no less wherein there is no hierarchy between yourself and others. As I noted earlier, the reason why you don't give money to a beggar is not because you recognise that the beggar has this universal need for him to improve upon his own effort; rather, it is because you feel that you are equal to him. If you give money to a beggar, you are supposing that somehow you are 'superior' to him (even if you don’t suppose so, the result would already put you in a position of superiority on your part). But, again, the principle of the Prime Directive rejects this binary relationship of master and slave completely. Another example - think about so-called 'affirmative action' in the States - however the outcomes may be, it inevitably presupposes that Blacks are not recognised as much as others (and especially as much as other minorities). If they are indeed equal to English, Germans, Chinese, Italian, Spanish or even Irish, why are they so 'privileged' that they have the exclusive right over others? The idea of affirmative action relies not upon the principle of the Prime Directive; instead it relies upon that of utilitarianism. In utilitarianism, it doesn't matter whether you are equal to others or not for it merely concerns about the amount of pleasure within a population. And you said: You see the two totally different outcomes of the same event between 'two cultures of more or less equal levels' and 'a civilised culture vis-a-vis neolithic one'? If English interacts with French, it is called 'cultural exchange' or 'healthy economic competition' in which their values are equally recognised each other; while if English interacts with populations from any third world nation, it is no longer viewed as interaction but rather as exploitation. That is, you don't even think about the need of the Prime Directive in the former case because, to begin with, English and French are already 'equal' in their values. The concern for the Prime Directive inevitably comes into effect when one cannot recognise others (usually for economic reasons) as equal. First of all, usually when you say ‘Europe’ in Europe, it refers to Continental Europe excluding the UK (due to their distinct cultures. Only in the States, do you find people say ‘Europe’ without heeding to the internal dynamics and differences within). At any rate, I do, however, see many differences between that (English vis-a-vis Australia) and European conquest(and colonisation) of the Americas. First of all, I would advisably say that Anglo/English colonisation of 'primitives' is distinct from Spanish/Portuguese conquest of the world. Other than the difference in the time periods (i.e., pre industrialization vis-à-vis post industrialization), the Anglo's case is a pure-calculated-economic-utilitarian-exploitation without heeding to the recognition of the indigenes people, while the Spanish's case has more or less to do with conquering other nations (rightly so – hence we characterise the era as “the age of conquest”) . Further more, you often time hear terms such as “English colonisation”, whilst you don’t hear “English Conquest”. On the other hand, the word ‘colonisation’ and ‘conquest’ go hand in hand in the case of Spanish. In any event, ‘the need’ for something is hardly the philosophical thrust of the Prime Directive. The word ‘need’ exists in the scheme of utilitarianism, but not in the scheme of the Prime Directive. I prefer ‘equality and recognition’. best,
From California I look to the distant east and I can just barely make out Europe, a bunch of countries in which the Greco-Roman branch of Mesopotamian civilization took root. I look just across the ocean to the west and I see a bunch of countries in which Chinese civilization with an overtone of Indian took root. Those are as different as night and day. The disparities between England and France or Germany are far smaller than those between China and Japan, which you lump together as "the Far East." So you're right, I do regard Europe as just one rather homogeneous place. I look west and south to the future. In Europe I only see the past. And because of my geography I'm also talking about the occupation of North America, which was perpetrated for the most part by England and France, not Iberia. It was they who brought smallpox. Still, after our independence we continued the colonial tradition of wiping out the native cultures. There's another thread going on about the definition of civilization. The reason that "conquest" is used in the case of Latin America is that there were civilizations there and they were "conquered." ("Obliterated" would be a more accurate term but who's quibbling.) It was still the Mesolithic Era north of the Rio Grande, no civilizations to conquer. Just land to colonize, inhabited by some quaint hunter-gatherers. India had a civilization. Don't you have the decency to call that a "conquest" or an "occupation" rather than a "colonization"? The poor Indians had just barely gotten their country back in shape after centuries of Mongol occupation. I am not suggesting that anything happening in the real 21st Century world is equivalent to anything happening in the idealized future of Star Trek. Everything I know about Roddenberry supports my belief that he intended for us to regard the Prime Directive as something noble, not a political keno game like affirmative action. When the English interact with the French neither has an unfair advantage. They can trade goods and wares and ideas the way human communities have done for millennia without either one threatening to erase the other's culture from future history books. That's simply not true when the English or any other modern country interact with those last remaining Stone Age tribes in New Guinea and elsewhere. And it's not true in the hypothetical Roddenberry examples of humans with travel by transporter, food from a replicator, and cancer cures from a ray gun, interacting with people on planets that are about where we are now.
I find it strange that when I attempt to consider the ethics of this directive I hit a wall. A sort of confusion about values such as the value of life versus the value of self determination. The value of survival over the value of cultural integrity. On one hand the directive appears to be just as brutal in it's non-action to it's opposite being action in the form of colonisation or conquest or just plain discourse with a "not so" advanced culture. In some ways the notion seems to me to extend to a problem of numbers. If being a galactic leader what determines who should be aided and who should not be aided. With the assumption that there are many, many different ciultures at various stages of evolution throughout the galaxy. Where does the federation start or stop in it's cultural diversification and assistance policies? Just the mere sight of one of their vehicles in the sky would dramatically change a culture that has no knowledge of ET's even if humans were those ET's. So may be it comes down to numbers or volume of need and how to conserve resourses. Also the idealism of cultural evolution maintaining integrity at all costs, until that culture is ready for integration in to a Federation.[ if it survives it's evolution] and who determines such a moment of integration. Their technology or their cultural maturity? As suggested in the Trekian theme it is the technology that in the final wash does the determining [ warp tech] and not cultural maturity. Yet it is in the federations interests to monitor a cultures technological evolution because even an immature race can develop awesome destructive capacity that could spill over and compromise federation interests. It is as I said strange when attempting to understand the issue on ethical grounds and this is possibly due to a lack of over view [eternal] perspective. Scenario: A post-industrial age culture has developed radio reception. They are being monitored by the federation in a covert operation, and the federation are startled to find that this young culture have been monitoring the Federations radio transmissions long before the federation took an interest....hmmmmm...
It appears that your categorization of nations is based upon, for the most part, geography and ethnicity alone. However, considering the topic we are discussing herein, I believe those factors are but of minor significance. In fact it would be quite irrelevant to use them in pondering the notion of the Prime Directive. You said: To clarify - I have never lumped together China and Japan as 'the Far East". Please pay more heed to what I write. I in fact categorised Japan as part of Western Euro and the States in the very first reply I made in this topic (see my post above). The reason why is obvious. Unlike the way you categorise countries (via geography/ethnicity), my categorisation is determined by economic, social and political factors. Also, please pay heed to what Quantum Quack's categorisation of nations: He rightly uses the term 'first nation' (or more precisely 'first world nation'). This term implies that economic factor be the standard by which nations’ values are determined. After the industrial revolution, the idea of geography has been depleted considerably due to the dominance by information technology. Geography, however, is still regarded in the fields like climatology. Why, again, I never lump together Japan and China is precisely for that reason - Japan is far from the 2nd/3rd nation, in fact it is closer to Germany than to China. Second, the reason why I had an empahsis on dividing the UK and the Continent also has to do with their distinct economic/social systems. If you compare the economic structure of Germany and Japan, you would find more similarities between them than, say Germany and the US(or the UK). Just look at the last two pages of the Economist magazine. Irrelevant. It does not matter if India had or didn’t have civilization. What matter is the degree of socio/economic development of a nation. Any nation which hadn’t ‘industrialised’ (or hadn’t undergone the process of industiralisation) before the 19th century now is called as 2nd/3rd world nation: India belongs to this category regardless of the existence of its civilisation. I insinuated the importance of industrialisation in one of my replies above. But as I pointed out, your notion of the Prime Directive, unlike that of mine, is quite utilitarian in its nature (since your emphasis is on ‘the need’), the ‘political keno game’ of affirmative action fits quite well into your scheme of the Prime Directive. Incorrect, even if two nations are more or less equivalent in overall power, one does threaten and try to erase/modify the other’s culture: Just look at the entire European history. And see how, for instance, French are still very afraid of Germans. And pay heed to their micro/macroeconomics. One of the reasons why the European Union is not working as much as it was expected is precisely because Europe as such is defined not by ethnicity, but by nation. In that each nation claims its validity over other. Should there be conflict between them, they would do however it takes to defend their sovereignty. The reason why people can now say that Germany and France are equal in their values is because they have both, for the most part, succeeded in defending their values from numerous threats and forces. Thus only in the retrospective sense, can we say that “German and French are equal”. No pain No gain indeed. Equality is like Freedom, it is a set of process without its finalisaton. It is simply that, in a sense, European nations have been fortunate enough that such competitions have been constant throughout their history.
