The Prime Directive - Would You Break It?

[Molyfar]

Picard treated it as absolute. Kirk treated it as a suggestion. Where do you fall?
For me, it comes down to this: The Directive is supposed to prevent harm, not allow it by doing nothing.
My breaking point:
A pre-warp planet, no radio yet, nothing. I detect a solar flare is about to wipe out their power grid equivalent and kill millions. My engineer says we can put up a magnetic shield for 10 minutes - they'd see it as aurora, no tech left, no contact made.
Starfleet would say: Let nature take its course. Don't interfere.
I say: If we have the power to stop an extinction and we don't, we're not being principled, we're being cruel.
We already break it when it's convenient - see Pen Pals, Homeward, Dear Doctor. It's always messy afterwards.
So what's your scenario where you'd look the other way and hit the button anyway?

1. Natural disaster they can't see coming?
2. A curable plague?
3. Or do you hold the line no matter what?

 

[Haunt Rod]

Fuck Picard. Give me Kirk.

The Prime Directive is a safeguard against cultural contamination and playing God, not a moral commandment to stand around with our thumbs up our asses while innocent people die. Kirk treated the Directive as a principle that required judgment and repeatedly refused to hide behind noninterference when a situation demanded action. Picard’s rigid adherence is maddening. Look at Homeward or Pen Pals. He was perfectly willing to let entire civilizations go extinct rather than intervene, only changing his mind in the one case because one person happened to ask for help. If millions are going to die, I shouldn’t need a distress call to tell me that sitting on my hands is wrong.

Now, I will say that if an intervention carries real consequences, like harming another species, negatively altering their society, or making them dependent on us, then sure, it is a serious ethical dilemma, and the Prime Directive should make us cautious. But if the choice is literally letting millions burn to death when we have the ability to secretly prevent the catastrophe with zero negative fallout? I am pushing the fucking button.

I am not going to turn into a spectator at an extinction event just so I can congratulate myself for being sufficiently principled. If I can save a civilization without them ever knowing we were there, fuck the Prime Directive. Save them, and I’ll deal with Starfleet’s paperwork afterward.

 

[Citiprime]

TNG's "Homeward" is usually the touchstone for people who think that interpretation of the Prime Directive is immoral.

However, we have a version of the Prime Directive right here right now.

North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal has a primitive tribe of humans who fiercely reject contact with the outside world. The Indian government quarantines the area for the safety of both the tribe (e.g., the spread of disease they have no immunity for) and anyone who would violate the exclusion zone (the islanders have killed missionaries who've attempted to make contact with the tribe).

If a typhoon or tsunami was headed directly for the island, would people support the Indian government sending in troops to forcibly move the tribe members to safety against their will?

You would save them, but it would conceivably destroy everything about their culture in saving their lives and exposing them to the modern world and attempting to explain the hows and whys. And you would be doing it without their consent.

 

[Starflight]

TNG's version is outright evil, but doesn't seem to really exist outside TNG itself (and even then, a few episodes).

The version that seems to apply throughout most of TOS, early TNG, Voyager, and SNW is the one to go with, which is basically a longwinded way of saying "don't fire the ship's phasers at a local government building."

 

[Ricky Spanish]

You would save them, but it would conceivably destroy everything about their culture in saving their lives and exposing them to the modern world and attempting to explain the hows and whys. And you would be doing it without their consent.

Those folks are a subculture of a greater civilization. So I’d say that is a different ballgame entirely.

 

[Starflight]

TNG's "Homeward" is usually the touchstone for people who think that interpretation of the Prime Directive is immoral.

However, we have a version of the Prime Directive right here right now.

North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal has a primitive tribe of humans who fiercely reject contact with the outside world. The Indian government quarantines the area for the safety of both the tribe (e.g., the spread of disease they have no immunity for) and anyone who would violate the exclusion zone (the islanders have killed missionaries who've attempted to make contact with the tribe).

If a typhoon or tsunami was headed directly for the island, would people support the Indian government sending in troops to forcibly move the tribe members to safety against their will?

You would save them, but it would conceivably destroy everything about their culture in saving their lives and exposing them to the modern world and attempting to explain the hows and whys. And you would be doing it without their consent.

Putting aside the obvious stuff about "culture" as a ideal free-floating sacred ideal separate from actual people or the notion that cultures can be innately "destroyed" just by new knowledge:

The TNG version of the Prime Directive is more like this:
1. A tsunami is moving toward the island.
2. The Indian government possess a piece of technology that stops tsunamis, which could be deployed away from the island itself.
3. Modi refuses to act, stating that it is the will of fate/god/the cosmos that the tsunami hits.
4. The islanders are wiped out. Modi nods sagely.

 

[Haunt Rod]

I just picture Picard smugly sipping his tea, congratulating himself on his moral superiority while an entire civilization dies because he chose to do nothing. I love Star Trek, and I loved TNG, but by God, they could be self-righteous at times during that Roddenberry era, when humanity was portrayed as having evolved beyond all those messy, lesser emotions and moral shortcomings.

 

[Mage]

I just picture Picard smugly sipping his tea, congratulating himself on his moral superiority while an entire civilization dies because he chose to do nothing. I love Star Trek, and I loved TNG, but by God, they could be self-righteous at times during that Roddenberry era, when humanity was portrayed as having evolved beyond all those messy, lesser emotions and moral shortcomings.
View attachment 55419

Indeed. As you stated, the Prime Directive was created to stop Starfleet officers from acting as Gods. Stopping an asteroid from killing an entire civilization is fine. Pretending to be a God and making them do your bidding, not so much.
There are ofcourse shades of grey there. But that one episode, Pen Pals, where Picard basically says let them die because we're not allowed to save sentient life because they can't go to warp..... Bullshit.

There was this one novel in the Mission Gamma series, where Elias Vaughn encountered a species that had NOT developed warp. But DID develop subspace communication and were aware of sentient life in the universe. If the novels ever did a 'fuck you' to the Prime Directive, that was it. Because he basically said 'meh, they know of other worlds, let's go'.

 

[DarthTimon]

Picard treated it as absolute. Kirk treated it as a suggestion. Where do you fall?
For me, it comes down to this: The Directive is supposed to prevent harm, not allow it by doing nothing.
My breaking point:
A pre-warp planet, no radio yet, nothing. I detect a solar flare is about to wipe out their power grid equivalent and kill millions. My engineer says we can put up a magnetic shield for 10 minutes - they'd see it as aurora, no tech left, no contact made.
Starfleet would say: Let nature take its course. Don't interfere.
I say: If we have the power to stop an extinction and we don't, we're not being principled, we're being cruel.
We already break it when it's convenient - see Pen Pals, Homeward, Dear Doctor. It's always messy afterwards.
So what's your scenario where you'd look the other way and hit the button anyway?

1. Natural disaster they can't see coming?
2. A curable plague?
3. Or do you hold the line no matter what?

I'm reminded of that famous Uncle Ben quote, 'with great power comes great responsibility'. Letting a civilisation perish when it's within one's means to save it, with zero consequences to said civilisation, seems cold, and decidedly against our instincts. Even Spock was prepared to go along with Kirk's efforts to save a pre-warp world in Into Darkness, which sort of shows how even the most logical of beings isn't going to let a species go extinct for the sake of a rule.

Now, directly intervening in say, a war on an alien world? Pretending to be gods in order to achieve the 'right' outcome to social or political turmoil? I'd be more hesitant. It's hard to be sure of the consequence,s which could end up being terrible in the long run.

 

[JWPlatt]

When it came to selfish concerns, Picard did not let Wesley die in Justice. But Kirk was generally better, not letting Yonada perish, though the threat to Dara V in For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky was mitigated by being a Federation world and in its interest. Picard's Federation would let Sarjenka’s world be destroyed in Pen Pals. Picard's excuse threw Data under the bus, then justified it by erasing her memory, still saving the planet. The world would be gone had Data not violated the rules. Kirk and Spock fixed the obelisk in The Paradise Syndrome with no apparent conflict mentioned, and Kirk was reversibly brain damaged anyway. Independent of all that, The Enterprise attempted to defect the asteroid, so it wasn't only Kirk's decision.

 

[Haunt Rod]

One of the biggest differences between Kirk and Picard, to me, is that Kirk was willing to look at a situation and make a moral judgment for himself. He didn't view the Prime Directive as an excuse to stand back and say, “Well, that's their culture, so there's nothing we can do.” If he saw people being subjugated, exploited, or needlessly slaughtered, he was willing to intervene if he believed he could make things better.

The Apple is a great example. Kirk essentially decides that the society they're dealing with is fundamentally broken and that he isn't going to preserve it simply because it happens to be their culture. A Taste of Armageddon is another. He refuses to accept a system where people are being systematically sacrificed simply because the civilization has normalized it. He makes a judgment that the practice is wrong and acts accordingly.

That's what I find so interesting about Kirk's approach to the Prime Directive. He trusted his own moral judgment more than he trusted the absolute application of a rule. That doesn't mean he ignored the consequences of interference or that every decision he made was necessarily correct. It means he was willing to take responsibility for making the judgment himself. Sometimes, in Kirk's view, “it's their culture” simply wasn't a good enough reason to stand by and watch people suffer.

 

[UssGlenn]

Kirk and Spock fixed the obelisk in The Paradise Syndrome with no apparent conflict mentioned, and Kirk was reversibly brain damaged anyway. Independent of all that, The Enterprise attempted to defect the asteroid, so it wasn't only Kirk's decision.

This wasn't a Prime Directive situation because the people weren't native to the planet. They existed because of previous alien intervention several hundred years previously.

We really needed some stories of early pre-prime directive interventions that went horribly wrong after the best of intentions. The Orville did a version of that. I've always said Dear Doctor should have been a story like that. Archer helps with a cure and both races end up dead in the end.

 

[Steve Roby]

Q shows up at the end of "The Inner Light." He zaps the Enterprise to Kamin's world before the catastrophe. It's a pre-warp civilization. What would Picard do?

 

[Ricky Spanish]

The Apple is a great example. Kirk essentially decides that the society they're dealing with is fundamentally broken and that he isn't going to preserve it simply because it happens to be their culture. A Taste of Armageddon is another. He refuses to accept a system where people are being systematically sacrificed simply because the civilization has normalized it. He makes a judgment that the practice is wrong and acts accordingly.

In both instances, the interference was a byproduct of the Enterprise being put in danger. If the danger isn’t there, Kirk wouldn’t have interfered in either instance.

 

[Haunt Rod]

In both instances, the interference was a byproduct of the Enterprise being put in danger. If the danger isn’t there, Kirk wouldn’t have interfered in either instance.

The Enterprise being at risk was certainly the catalyst in both cases. But we also don't really know what Kirk would have done if that threat hadn't existed. Given his personality and his willingness to make moral judgments about the societies he encountered, I suspect he would have interfered anyway if he saw people being needlessly exploited or slaughtered.

 

[FredH]

I just picture Picard smugly sipping his tea, congratulating himself on his moral superiority while an entire civilization dies because he chose to do nothing. I love Star Trek, and I loved TNG, but by God, they could be self-righteous at times during that Roddenberry era, when humanity was portrayed as having evolved beyond all those messy, lesser emotions and moral shortcomings.
View attachment 55419

To be fair, it was mostly just Picard himself.

 

[UssGlenn]

In both instances, the interference was a byproduct of the Enterprise being put in danger. If the danger isn’t there, Kirk wouldn’t have interfered in either instance.

Exactly, in both cases the planets attacked a Federation vessel, effectively declaring war in the Federation and thus voluntarily forfeiting Prime Directive protections.

Oh, I just had an idea for a "The Mouse That Roared" situation with Starfleet.

 

[Ricky Spanish]

The Enterprise being at risk was certainly the catalyst in both cases. But we also don't really know what Kirk would have done if that threat hadn't existed. Given his personality and his willingness to make moral judgments about the societies he encountered, I suspect he would have interfered anyway if he saw people being needlessly exploited or slaughtered.

I don’t think we ever saw him break the Prime Directive without there being some additional cause for his actions.

 

[Starflight]

The mechanics don't make a great deal of sense throughout TOS (especially because of the line in "The Omega Glory" about how the correct legal response would be to just let yourself get killed rather than break the PD), but I think the real success comes from the fact that TOS treats it as a narrative device rather than a philosophical platform.

Basically Spock says "I must remind you of the Prime Directive" now and then to reassure the viewer that oversight is in place and that the Federation doesn't allow exploitation of other worlds, but as soon as that line has been said, we can then go ahead with the story.. That's how the Prime Directive should exist IMO, a vague off-screen suggestion that doesn't get in the way of the plot and exists mostly as background texture.

 

[Starflight]

I don’t think we ever saw him break the Prime Directive without there being some additional cause for his actions.

This is true, though the causes range from:
- Enterprise in danger (Landru, Vaal, etc)
- Local people in danger ("For the World is Hollow")
- Kirk's already been dragged into something and reckons he can end it by reforming the society (A Piece of the Action, Triskelion, Omega Glory)

I get the impression from TOS that, if they were to come across a world based around some kind of atrocity, he probably would manufacture some reason to get stuck in (though obviously Kirk's personality varies a bit between episodes).

It's worth looking at examples of people who explicitly broke the PD in TOS - "turn the planet into Nazi Germany for no reason", "install self as a slave-owning psychopath in Ancient Rome World", and "go absolutely fucking nuts like Ron Tracy" are the examples of people disobeying the PD, so anything short of that probably has a fair bit of leeway, which is why Kirk is relatively quick to intervene as soon as a catalyst occurs.