Star Trek and Morals (say what?)

The Q Who and Emergence episodes from Star Trek: Next Generation explore the value of a sentient life. In Emergence, the Enterprise begins to form a “self-determining intelligence”. At first the Enterprise officers attempt to get rid of this intelligence, whose creation is threatening the crew mates. After this approach doesn’t work, they try to understanding it. The officers realize that inhibiting this new-found life-form from being born would essentially kill a sentient being, which runs contrary to the Enterprise mission of learning to understand different life forms even if that inconveniences you. The officers decide to help the Enterprise achieve the birth of the sentience.

Q Who shows a scarier type of life form: the Borg. The Borg look like thousands of biological bodies with an artificial intelligence and some artificial upgrades. However, they function more like the parts in a human body than individual beings; they are able to communicate instantly, work together seamlessly and adapt from the experience of the whole. The Borg make up one sentience. And the only thing the Borg really do is adapt technology from alien civilizations and destroy the civilizations.

On one hand, the Enterprise is supposed to make contact with and learn about new life forms in a peaceful way. On the other hand, the Borg are insanely dangerous to get anywhere near to, especially if the collective feels threatened, and they killed some Enterprise crew mates. Whatever should Picard do?

In my opinion... try to destroy the Borg. Though quantifying the value of a life at all is sketchy, the rule that the life of each sentient (self-aware) being is equal seems fair to me. By that rule, the Borg collective is one sentient being. Considering that they have the potential to kill all humans, it is justifiable from a moral and evolutionary perspective to kill one sentient life to prevent that from happening.

Bloodchild by Octavia Butler

In class we read Bloodchild by Octavia Butler - not the cheeriest of stories.  To start with, we have children, probably teenagers, being fed drug-like eggs by an alien. Then we have our protagonist lying against (hanging out with) a massive slug-like alien. The alien, T’Gatoi, has a motherly attitude towards the brothers and sisters (who I’m assuming are teenagers) and authority over them. Then we have a man being sliced open and worms being pulled out of him - they’re the babies of the big slugs. That’s fun. We learn that humans are kept around on this alien planet to “host” the babes of the T’lic, meaning having slugs grow in their body (and risking the slugs eating the host if the extraction doesn’t happen soon enough). T’Gatoi has been raising our protagonist, Gan, to host her babies, and though there is some sort of love between the two, this is not a healthy relationship.

Bloodchild, in my opinion, explores the idea of the velvet cage. These humans came to the world of the T’lic under desperate circumstances. Gan and his family live in comfort provided by the T’lic (I don’t know if they have to work). Humans in the Preserve are treated well, as second-class citizens but appreciated nonetheless. On the other hand, some humans like Gan have to be implanted and host the eggs of the T’lic. They don’t have control over their own bodies. Even getting past the grossness of it all, this is by our standards a violation of human rights. They can’t even escape from the Preserve, and the outside world of the T’lic is even harsher to humans.

Furthermore, the relationship between T’Gatoi and Gan is insidious. T’Gatoi raised Gan for a purpose, and her love for Gan is under the stipulation that Gan will fulfill that purpose. Gan becomes alienated from T’Gatoi once she sees the extraction gone wrong, realizing that the babies of the T’lic will always be first priority over humans.