Yeah it’s basically just a Trolley Problem scenario. Two people were laying on the track and would have been killed if she refused to pull the lever. She pulled the lever and killed one, to save the two.
Sure, the philosophy people could argue that she was murdering the one by acting. But if she has the opportunity to act and refuses to do so, many more would argue that she was complicit in murdering the two. She made a choice and knew she’d have to live with it.
Neither side is more “right” than the other. That’s kind of the whole point of the trolley problem.
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Exactly, had they not reversed the malfunction Janeway could be considered to have killed two of her crew. That somehow never gets brought up in the philosophy discussions surrounding the episode. Refusal to act when a solution exists makes her complicit in dual homicide.
Plus! After that one episode in TNG where they de-age replacement Crusher, we have no reason to believe transporters can’t solve literally all of these issues including death. For those not in the know, since the transporter has the last time someone energized stored in their memory banks it can simply reconstruct them as they were. A literal backup snapshot of the person.
Once that episode airs, all bets are completely off. I mean seriously, you could fix someone getting their head blown off by just transporting them but altering the image to correct for their last time leaving the ship. Death? Fixed. Wounds? Fixed. You can literally pull their backups and reconstruct at any time you want.
It’s foolish to think this is even a conundrum given that slip up, just duplicate and separate, keep all three. If transporters are really making matter out of energy it shouldn’t matter if there’s three people’s worth of matter, just use more energy.