Not really. Bashir's just performing surgery on a patient. What that patient does as a result of that surgery is not Bashir's responsibility.
Weird or "no shit" moments in Star Trek
- Thread starter Turd Ferguson
- Start date
We're not talking "technicality", Bashir can't ignore the reason for the surgery and mainly that that reason is to influence the election on a planet. I think it would be easy to convict Bashir on these bases knowing that Starfleet graduates have a reputation for telling the truth even to their own detriment. We're not talking removing a mole here. A sex-change operation is not something to be taken lightly.
An argument can be made that since Quark becoming a woman solidified Zek's rule, returned stability to the Ferengi Alliance and helped Ferengi women be granted rights, the involvement of a Starfleet surgeon was considered a non-issue.
An Argument could be made that the prime directive was edicted precisely to prevent that kind of self-serving arguments. The worst things in the world have been done with the "best of intentions"...
Plastic Surgeons...paying customers...in Hollywood...huh?
And yet, how often are violations of the Prime Directive forgiven in favor of the greater good? The answer is all the time.
As a matter of fact, I believe Bashir's interventions are free. I think I can quote Quark on that: "Bashir? how good a doctor can he be? He doesn't even charge."
It's not up to Bashir to decide what's the greater good for an entire planet! At the very least that kind of thing should be approved by the higher-ups. Besides with that kind of "the ends justify the means" mentality, they don't need a section 31!!!
How do we know Sisko didn't approve it?
Exactly. It wasn't Bashir's call. A person comes in, asks for a sex change, you give him a sex change. It's apparently a painless and completely reversible operation. Bashir ought to get in trouble if he decides to pick and choose who he can treat based on his own concerns for the moral dictates of a foreign government.
Deciding not to perform such an operation because you think it "isn't right", sounds like a dystopian future to me.
Beside, if Bashir didn't perform ethically dubious medical procedures on his friends, he wouldn't have anything to do at all.
I never consciously realised this before. o.O
Insurrection: If they asked the immortal aristocrats if they were willing to share the benefits of the whatever particles with billions of people from the federation and they said: "No!" then they would look like egotistic assholes and it would be hard for Picard to defend them... If they answered "Yes" then there wouldn't be any conflict and the movie would be pointless. So the "brilliant' solution found by the writers is that no one ever asks them the question... Sure! That's plausible!Also, no one among the immortals ever says anything about the problem of either keeping everything to themselves or sharing with others... They just act like that question doesn't exist, even though it's central to the movie!
Congratulations: You've just concocted the most implausible plot point EVER!!!
The Baku had no problem with people moving to their planet. They wouldn't have even known.
They did have a problem with the large empire coming in and strip-mining their planet overnight (sorry "sharing their bounty")
You could argue that moving people from the Chagos Islands and replacing it with a military base is justified for the greater good. After all, it was only 1000 people.
I distinctly remember Picard asking how many people before it becomes wrong. We may decide that destroying a planet for the chance of extending life, or building a military base, or strip-mining dilithium, is worth the forced relocation of 10 people, or a thousand, or a million, but you have to accept that there is a valid argument either way.
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It wasn't their planet. They'd been living there for a few centuries. Billions of people could have benefited from those rings. In the show, Picard made the opposite decision with even less to go on, for the greater good. I'm on the nominal villains' side. The Space Elves didn't have a leg to stand on. They wouldn't have lived forever anymore, but that wasn't a natural state of being anyway, and many others would have been healed from injury and sickness. The film's aesop was definitely broken.
That isn't my point. We don't know what the Baku had a problem with because the questions were never asked. As for Picard, he tried once to remove people de force from a planet in a situation very much like it. So when it's Picard who does it, it's good. When it's someone else, it's bad. That's a double standard for you!
Which brings up an interesting question. I can understand that in his early days, he would have had trouble with something as complex and delicate as a face, but by the time of DS9, was Odo really incapable of mimicking a human face better, or was it by choice ? (For example, as a reminder of his early days, or how different he is from solids, or because he had grown accustomed to it, or ....)
Why would that not be true? Odo didn't shapeshift to look like that; it's the episode after he loses his abilities. Bashir did that surgically.
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