So far we've left there both morals and thinking. Won't soon be much left to hold onto in this timeline.
Not rescuing Nero: thumbs up or down?
- Thread starter Franklin
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Moral satisfaction is not justice, sorry. The Brothers Karamazov touches upon this in a very emotionally powerful way, showing that while we in our heart of hearts want those that do horrific things to die and taste what they wrought upon others, that is only selfish moral gratification, not justice.
Justice is the equalization of wrongs in society in an equitable way that leaves society better or the same, not an eye for an eye (which is a mutual degradation of society). There is no way murdering Nero and his crew is equalizing anything, as a few hundred men, despite what they did and on orders, amount to the billions of innocent lives lost. Equalization can only be brought through trial and proof of their wrong, demonstrating that it IS wrong and then punishing those in a manner proportionate, but still humane. That would be the equalization of wrong much more than simple vigilante justice.
You also have to understand that the Federation are built like Rawlsian deontologists. Justice is a good in of itself regardless of the consequences, truth is a good in of itself regardless of the consequences, etc. etc. What would Kant or John Rawls say about such an action? They would say those individuals who committed it are violating their ethical standards for moral gratification and not only is it wrong, but it degrades society. To put it in a simpler sense: What if everyone sought moral gratification instead of justice? Civilization would fall apart.
Justice is the equalization of wrongs in society in an equitable way that leaves society better or the same, not an eye for an eye (which is a mutual degradation of society). There is no way murdering Nero and his crew is equalizing anything, as a few hundred men, despite what they did and on orders, amount to the billions of innocent lives lost. Equalization can only be brought through trial and proof of their wrong, demonstrating that it IS wrong and then punishing those in a manner proportionate, but still humane. That would be the equalization of wrong much more than simple vigilante justice.
You also have to understand that the Federation are built like Rawlsian deontologists. Justice is a good in of itself regardless of the consequences, truth is a good in of itself regardless of the consequences, etc. etc. What would Kant or John Rawls say about such an action? They would say those individuals who committed it are violating their ethical standards for moral gratification and not only is it wrong, but it degrades society. To put it in a simpler sense: What if everyone sought moral gratification instead of justice? Civilization would fall apart.
Uh, that's back in the "Prime" timeline. Romulus is alive and well in the "NuTrek" timeline, and will be for 130-odd years at least. If "Spock-Prime" didn't tell the Earth government to find a way to clone some whales quickly, or else time-travel back and get some, that's more than Earth has.
So far we've left there both morals and thinking. Won't soon be much left to hold onto in this timeline.
Power and survival.
Isn't that why the Star Trek we all love was dying because it was full of morality and thinking that seemed false to this more cynical age?
Maybe this is just the Star Trek of our time that follows our own goals. Survival and the destruction over those who want to destroy us.
So far we've left there both morals and thinking. Won't soon be much left to hold onto in this timeline.
Power and survival.
Isn't that why the Star Trek we all love was dying because it was full of morality and thinking that seemed false to this more cynical age?
Maybe this is just the Star Trek of our time that follows our own goals. Survival and the destruction over those who want to destroy us.
So we have completely degenerated as a society? How nice.
EDIT: Civilizations survive by principles, not laws of nature. Power and survival are laws of nature, not principles. If our society has honestly devolved into following the most primal of urges then our civilization doesn't have much steam left in it. Looks like Toynbee and Spengler have been vindicated...
And Nero killed Kirk's Tapping Buddy the greech chick, so wtf, will the bastard. Since when did kirk ask Chang to surrender...? Enough is enough ;-)
I don't think so. I think it was dying because the last two films happened to be quite bad, and Enterprise didn't have strong enough characters for people to get attached to them or good enough stories for people to care.
Um, whose goals are you talking about?
(Man, this is starting to depress me.
)
Um, whose goals are you talking about?
(Man, this is starting to depress me.
No kidding
Setting aside the fact that Nero is genocidal maniac, he very clearly wasn't willing to accept help. How are you going to "rescue" a whole crew of pissed off Romulans from the future who are falling into an unstable singularity?
To put it another way, if I found bin Laden asleep in his cave, I would likely attempt to capture him. If I find bin Laden in a cave that is collapsing, but he might get away by slipping down some deeper tunnel, and he's also shooting at me, well then I'm shooting back. There's being moral, and then there's being foolish.
To put it another way, if I found bin Laden asleep in his cave, I would likely attempt to capture him. If I find bin Laden in a cave that is collapsing, but he might get away by slipping down some deeper tunnel, and he's also shooting at me, well then I'm shooting back. There's being moral, and then there's being foolish.
Deontology, sometimes it sucks to do the right thing.
The best thing would have been to ask for help, and upon refusal get the hell out of there because of the overriding concern of the safety of the crew. Blasting him into oblivion when he was already well on his way was not the ethical thing to do and smacks more of Klingon/Cardassian sensibilities than Federation ones.
Klingons don't fire on dying enemies, unless its to put them out of their misery.
That does raise the interesting question of what's more humane: being vapourized by a photon torpedo or turned into molecular spaghetti by a singularity.
That does raise the interesting question of what's more humane: being vapourized by a photon torpedo or turned into molecular spaghetti by a singularity.
Third, a lot of vigilantes must post here.Look at it this way, Spock was representing all of Vulcan when he decided Nero's fate. Does it speak well for the legacy of Vulcan and its philosophy that he made the decision he did? I'm not saying a rescue would've worked, or that Nero wouldn't have tried to thwart it, but bloodlust? Eye for an eye? Is that the Vulcan way? Does he now feel his mother's death is avenged? That's Spock?
The 2000 years of Surak and logic are a mere blip in the necessarily much longer cultural and evolutionary history of the Vulcan species. Without all the self-restraint imposed by a lifetime's worth of discipline, Vulcans are a rather vicious people, at least as much as humans, and Spock had trouble with imposing that discipline even in the best of times.
I'd defy the saints to put aside vengeance when they just watched their entire world literally crumble beneath them.
Would it have been a rather effective change to have Spock's be the voice making the plea for mercy? Maybe. Was it heretical, or even ineffective, for Spock to simply fume and accede to Kirk's at-the-time more ethical behavior? I think not.
And for what it's worth, I could probably pick out half a dozen episodes of TOS where the Enterprise crew made no special effort to rescue the villain after somewhat blandly offering assistance, particularly when it would have involved great risk for the ship.
In fact, they often laughed about it.
I'll go one better and offer seven villains killed without any extraordinary measures taken whatsoever to ensure their continued existence:
NOMAD. Very likely to have been sapient. Executed through logical paradox. Kirk laughed about it.
Norman. Definitely sapient. Executed through logical paradox. Kirk probably laughed at his painful demise, but I forget.
Khan and comapny (second time). Left to die at ground zero of the Genesis Device. Kirk probably would've laughed if Spock hadn't died.
The male Romulan commander. Not beamed out of his disintegrating bird of prey. Kirk probably wanted the cloaking device more than to help him. No laughing this time.
Gary Mitchell. Hunted down and killed because he was different. And a murderer. And rapidly attaining godlike abilities. Okay, it was a good call. Spock, incidentally, suggested just killing his esper ass way sooner than most people would find comfortable. Although it was pretty logical and he was proven mostly right. Laughter had not yet come to the Enterprise at this early date.
The salt vampire. Why not negotiate with her? Couldn't they have just given her salt and taken her into custody? We have plenty.
No laughing.Redjac. Crippled and spaced. No one cared about his feelings. Many lolz were had following his neutralization. Excepting the badly-timed jokes, this is the clearest case of necessity trumping mercy, since Redjac was possibly capable of even more havoc than Gary Mitchell--but no one seemed particularly interested in his rehabilitation. Nero killed about 10^8 more people than Redjac. Of course, Redjac was about quality, not quantity.
These episodes are of course strikingly contrasted by the truer classics, like Devil in the Dark or to a lesser degree Arena. In Devil, no one was evil, everyone was misunderstood, and thoughtful characters actually gave a shit, and an understanding was reached. That's why this is probably the Trekkiest episode of them all. In Arena Kirk displays the advanced trait of mercy, but this is colored by Kirk's demonstrated unwillingness to do what ascended space gods tell him to, so when they said "fight the Gorn to the death," it may be less that he genuinely felt it was wrong to kill the Gorn than he wanted to give a proper "screw you" to the condescending Metrons. Of course, Spock probably would have figured out the arena planet's geological secrets and been back on the Enterprise wearing crocodile-skin boots by the end of the second act...
I personally don't find Spock's reactions in Abrams' Star Trek out of line with the nebulous "spirit of Trek" at all. I think we can all agree it's a pleasant change of pace that Kirk and Bones didn't have a good laugh talking to Spock about the destruction a plurality of the Vulcan species along more or less the same lines of Dr. Strangelove and Buck Turgidson's curiously enthusiastic discussion of how the human race would be rebuilt in radiation-proof caves. That's probably how an episode of TOS with the same plot would have ended.
Spock is also part human and just saw his mother murdered right before his eyes. Along with everyone and everything he's ever known. Would Roddenberry's Spock do the same thing? Probably not. Then again, Roddenberry's Spock walked around with his brain removed and liked to hang with Space Hippies. I like this contemporary Spock more. He's got balls to go along with his brains.
As for Kirk:
Someone mentioned he may have been under orders to destroy the Narada at all costs. So he may even have bent the rules by offering help at all.
He raelizes those guys are ready to die, so he follows orders. Taking him prisoner would have done the trick to convince his superiors it was the right course of action. Now he can't take any chances.
The black hole is the KEY here imo. It's not certain they will not escape, maybe even further back and screw things up.
Those villain guys were stupid. They didn't think a second about getting things right. They just wanted to crap in everyone's cornflakes Their hatred of Spock was ridiculous and they would have just continued to do their shit if they had gotten the chance.
Those clowns were a threat and had to die or be imprisoned
As for Spock:
Spock seems much more unstable in NuTrek, making him more like Worf. That's why he's not made a captain like Kirk was, he's not considered fit for the job yet, although he's considered a great officer. Also Data comes to mind.
He could still need further Training on Vulcan [edit
ops] to become more the Spock "we know".
Those magical Vulcan mind training programmes can do anything. He's the first or one of the first hybrid guys as well. He may need different Training than others and be much more like the Spock "we knew" by the next movie.
Or they could show us that process, that struggle and make it more interesting even.
Someone mentioned he may have been under orders to destroy the Narada at all costs. So he may even have bent the rules by offering help at all.
He raelizes those guys are ready to die, so he follows orders. Taking him prisoner would have done the trick to convince his superiors it was the right course of action. Now he can't take any chances.
The black hole is the KEY here imo. It's not certain they will not escape, maybe even further back and screw things up.
Those villain guys were stupid. They didn't think a second about getting things right. They just wanted to crap in everyone's cornflakes Their hatred of Spock was ridiculous and they would have just continued to do their shit if they had gotten the chance.
Those clowns were a threat and had to die or be imprisoned
As for Spock:
Spock seems much more unstable in NuTrek, making him more like Worf. That's why he's not made a captain like Kirk was, he's not considered fit for the job yet, although he's considered a great officer. Also Data comes to mind.
He could still need further Training on Vulcan [edit
ops] to become more the Spock "we know". Those magical Vulcan mind training programmes can do anything. He's the first or one of the first hybrid guys as well. He may need different Training than others and be much more like the Spock "we knew" by the next movie.
Or they could show us that process, that struggle and make it more interesting even.
I don't know if this has been posted, but the writers addressed this.
"Why did Kirk feel the need to fire all weapons at a doomed ship? After all, Nero’s vessel was mere seconds away from being crushed inside the black hole. Not true, said the Trek scribes – Nero’s ship was built to travel through black holes, so if Kirk hadn’t done anything, the bad guys would have slipped away and emerged god knows where (and when) ready to do more evil."
"Why did Kirk feel the need to fire all weapons at a doomed ship? After all, Nero’s vessel was mere seconds away from being crushed inside the black hole. Not true, said the Trek scribes – Nero’s ship was built to travel through black holes, so if Kirk hadn’t done anything, the bad guys would have slipped away and emerged god knows where (and when) ready to do more evil."
Last time that ship and those people were sucked into a black hole they ended up a 150 years in the past and dramatically altered history, Destroying the kelvin, killing Kirks father and destroying Vulcan and 6 billion of it's inhabitants, not to mention the billions of others that should have lived but now will never be born.
With that in mind, i I think the safe bet for Kirk and crew was to making sure that the Narada and these people were indeed killed by finishing them off themselves rather than letting the black hole take them to who knows what end.
Maybe part of the problem here is determining whether or not Nero was still a threat. I didn't think he was. His ship was being destroyed. A lot of the other beings Kirk killed, mentioned in Myasischev's post above, were either still dangerous or truly an immanent threat to the safety of the Enteprise or the mission (like when Khan starts the Genesis device). That, of course, changes everything.
Interesting that Nomad is brought up. Despite all it did, didn't Spock regret having to destroy it?
Interesting that Nomad is brought up. Despite all it did, didn't Spock regret having to destroy it?
Maybe they should have given Kirk a line like "Gentlemen, while your ship will probably be ripped apart, we can't risk it traveling through the singularity.
The question is will you be aboard when we blow it up or are you ready to surrender?".
BTW rescuing such a villain would be a cool thing, but then again better save it for next time, when there is an interesting baddie to rescue and maybe bring back later.
The question is will you be aboard when we blow it up or are you ready to surrender?".
BTW rescuing such a villain would be a cool thing, but then again better save it for next time, when there is an interesting baddie to rescue and maybe bring back later.
You're missing the added fact others have pointed out - the ship wouldn't necessarily be destroyed, it was capable of traveling through the disturbance intact. Hence the "he might escape down another tunnel" part of my analogy.
It does sometimes suck to do the right thing. But there is a difference between risking your own neck, and risking the necks of all your crew, or risking the possibility that your civilization might be wiped out if this nutball pops up someplace else.
