Here is a suggestion. A tansporter is first used to make a Thomas Riker clone of Tuvix, with the original separated into Tuvok and Neelix.
Three for the price of two.
No one dies
All that does is create a new copy of Tuvix -- Tuvix 2.0 -- while still killing the original Tuvix in the course of creating new copies of Neelix and Tuvok (the originals of whom still remain dead).
Well unless the Tuvix copy is the one that is the one that is split and not the original.
Pardon me; I didn't pause to remember the details of the Riker twin scenario, and so I spoke erroneously.
Splitting Tuvix into two and then splitting one of the Tuvixes into Tuvok and Neelix would not mean killing one copy of Tuvix while preserving the original Tuvix; it would mean killing the original Tuvix, creating two copies of Tuvix -- Tuvix 2 and Tuvix 3 -- and then killing one copy of Tuvix in order to create Tuvok 2 and Neelix 2.
So you'd actually be killing two people, not one, in order to create new copies of people who have already died.
In the TNG episode Thine Own Self, Deanna Troi had to learn that to command a starship, she may have to order a friend, or a member of the crew, to sacrifice themselves for the safety and the well being of the ship she commands.
You've missed the point. A commander can order a fellow officer to do their duty to the crew even if the consequence is death; so Troi can order the chief engineer to repair the warp drive even if it means fatal radiation poisoning. We
cannot order the chief engineer to simply be killed.
My duty to the ship and it's crew comes before personal or moral implications.
Don't be absurd. Morality is more important than anything else; the entire
point of life is to be moral. And besides, Tuvix was as competent an officer as Tuvok; killing him and replacing him with a copy of Tuvok does not actually benefit ship's efficiency.
No. The transporter does not create copies! It's a quantum-state/position and energy transfer(!!).
Sure. When it's functioning normally.
I'm too lazy to go back and check, but is this thread fifty pages of people forgetting that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (or the one) has been a core conceit of Trek philosophy since at least Wrath of Khan?
Did you forget that the very next movie affirmed the opposite: That sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of many?
The key difference, of course, being that they flat-out stated that both halves would die if not recombined.
Tuvok and Neelix were dead without Tuvix being uncombined.
Yes. Exactly. They were already dead. They cannot be saved, only copied.
Ergo, it is immoral to kill an innocent man for the sake of someone who is
already dead.
