Time's Orphan:

[Kobayshi Maru]

I am a bit troubled by the logic applied in this episode. O'Brien, because of a glitch in the time portal, pulls his daughter from the past, ten years too late. So she's in fact a young adult with the mind of a little child. She's obviously suffered from solitude for a decade, she's stunted and condemned to live the life of a misfit, who'll be regarded as bizarre by the rest of society. YET, O'Brien along with Keiko, decide NOT to attempt to get a her at an earlier stage, because it would "erase" ten years of her life!! Are you kidding me? O'Brien especially should have been more sensitive! He had twenty years of incarceration put in his mind and that nearly drove him to suicide! How can't he see that this is a similar situation.
It's takes another technical glitch to put things back the way they should have been and I find it troubling. That O'Brien never realized that that is what he should have tried from the start, IE give Molly her childhood back.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

From a humanist perspective, teenage Molly was a person who had a right to exist. Taking her life without giving her the choice would be murder, and placing greater value on one version of Molly than another version of Molly just because the other version is better adapted to society is anti-egalitarian.

 

[Melakon]

It's one of my least favorite episodes because it seems contrived. It's sort of a precursor to the moral ethics argument that shows up in Voyager with "Tuvix".

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

From a humanist perspective, teenage Molly was a person who had a right to exist. Taking her life without giving her the choice would be murder, and placing greater value on one version of Molly than another version of Molly just because the other version is better adapted to society is anti-egalitarian.

I disagree, when O'Brien had twenty years of incarceration ingrained in his brain. The first thing they tried is to remove them, which would have taken away twenty years of his existence (Virtual or real makes no difference). The same logic should apply to ten years of miserable existence for Molly, at least O'Brien had a friend to talk to during this time, Molly did not.

There's nothing egalitarian about applying two standards of treatment to two situations essentially similar.

This situation is even more similar than that. Imagine, if they had the power to remove O'Brien from Agratha (using time travel) before he was implanted with these memories, I bet they would have done it without hesitation.

You're still not seeing why these two cases are essentially the same?

 

[dub]

It's one of my least favorite episodes because it seems contrived. It's sort of a precursor to the moral ethics argument that shows up in Voyager with "Tuvix".

oh wow...I loved this episode. Made me shed tears.

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

Besides, there is something absurd about the ending. Both O'Brien and Keiko seemed happy and relieved that young Molly had returned. Not one second did they seem to regret that they had essentially killed old Molly. So what happened to all these scruples that made them go through all this in the first place? Not even one sentence of regrets about the Molly they tried to preserve.

No humanism there.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

They're similar, only O'Brien would have been given the choice whether to have the memories erased. Molly would not have been capable of understanding that choice, at least not for a while. At the end she made the choice to erase those years, and that was her decision.

Let me turn your comparison back at you, suppose they found a way to remove the memories of O'Brien's simulated incarceration, and he refused. Should they force the procedure on him?

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

...They're similar, only Let me turn your comparison back at you, suppose they found a way to remove the memories of O'Brien's simulated incarceration, and he refused. Should they force the procedure on him?

The point is that he didn't refuse, he even took medication (as was said) to dim the memory. I guess if he could have dimmed it to nothing, he would have, without hesitation at that. If Molly could have understood in the state that she was, the life she was missing, likely forever, because of her terrible ordeal, no doubt she would have wanted out of it.

If a rape victim was offered the possibility to be in the exact state she was before the rape, do you think, she would say NO? I've met someone victim of terrorism, she was near an explosion in the subway. Fortunately, she was far enough to not suffer permanent physical injuries, but she suffered PTSD for years after that. I have no doubt that if she could just have the memory of the traumatic event erased from her mind, she would accept without hesitations.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

You're dodging the question. Yes, O'Brien if given the choice would have agreed to go back to his state of mind previous to the experience. But it doesn't change the fact that it would have been his informed choice.

It's not the place of the O'Briens to make the choice on behalf of Molly just because she's not currently capable of making an informed choice.

It's the same thing with terrorism victims. Yes, many would choose to reverse the timeline where they were terrorized, but it's still nobody's choice but theirs.

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

You're dodging the question. Yes, O'Brien if given the choice would have agreed to go back to his state of mind previous to the experience. But it doesn't change the fact that it would have been his informed choice.

It's not the place of the O'Briens to make the choice on behalf of Molly just because she's not currently capable of making an informed choice.

It's the same thing with terrorism victims. Yes, many would choose to reverse the timeline where they were terrorized, but it's still nobody's choice but theirs.

But if you do nothing and let her in the state she's in, YOU DO MAKE a choice, you choose that life for her. Doing nothing is not neutral. It's no more neutral than let a victim of accident die instead of calling an ambulance.

The point is that Molly doesn't know enough to make an informed decision and that therefore someone else has to make the decision for her and if that someone bases his judgment on precedents, e.g. rape victims, terrorist victims... He'll decide to remove these years and let her live the good life she was destined to before the accident.

 

[DS9forever]

It's one of my least favorite episodes because it seems contrived. It's sort of a precursor to the moral ethics argument that shows up in Voyager with "Tuvix".

Even though "Tuvix" was made years earlier?

 

[Melakon]

I didn't check the airdates. But it still seems like a recycle, regardless which show did it first.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

But if you do nothing and let her in the state she's in, YOU DO MAKE a choice, you choose that life for her. Doing nothing is not neutral. It's no more neutral than let a victim of accident die instead of calling an ambulance.

It's more like murdering somebody you don't like in order to give a heart transplant to somebody you like better.

The point is that Molly doesn't know enough to make an informed decision and that therefore someone else has to make the decision for her and if that someone bases his judgment on precedents, e.g. rape victims, terrorist victims... He'll decide to remove these years and let her live the good life she was destined to before the accident.

She was an intelligent person, after a couple months of education she could understand the choice. Hell, she DID understand what she was doing when she sent her previous self back.

Making the decision for her is playing God. Choosing one life's right to exist over another because you place greater value on that life.

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

...

It's more like murdering somebody you don't like in order to give a heart transplant to somebody you like better.

With that kind of logic we would never treat schizophrenia because it would be "killing" the schizophrenic personality.

We would never treat people with multiple personality disorder because it would be tantamount to "murder" said personality. We would let Norman Bates think that he's himself and his mother at the same time.

Welcome to the world of doing nothing and letting people suffer indefinitely!

She was an intelligent person, after a couple months of education she could understand the choice. Hell, she DID understand what she was doing when she sent her previous self back.

Making the decision for her is playing God. Choosing one life's right to exist over another because you place greater value on that life.

Yeah, and when she had finally understood what was going on, she decided to end her life, or more precisely, to erase ten years of misery that turned her into a misfit.

Too bad an innocent man got stabbed in the meantime and her parents avoided big trouble by a hair.

Your kind of "humanism" seems to occasion more harm than good, don't you think?

What if she was taken away and kept in a mental institution for the rest of her life, which could have been more than a hundred years given their advanced medicine. She would never ever even have the possibility to change anything. That would have been the most probable result of your "humanism" and O'Brien and Keiko's who didn't want to take the necessary step of fishing out the younger Molly when they had the chance.

What if they had got a very old Molly, almost decrepit? Would it have been OK then to try a second time? Or should they let that Old decrepit, animal like Molly live her last years as a monstrous curiosity, a medical case?

What if they had got a skeleton, a Molly dead for years? If we follow your logic they should just bury that skeleton and forget about it because trying a second time would erase the life of that skeleton (prior to her death)... Can you see the wrongness of your reasoning?