TNG - Homeward

[Riedquat]

A world where your enlightenment has told you to let people die to forces beyond their control when you have the ability to save them is no utopia. It's a dystopia with a utopian coating.

This is of course why utopias are functionally impossible. A utopia is reliant on the ''Emperors New Clothes'' philosophy. It only is as long as everyone agrees it is. That is why the suppression of ''undesirables'' who do not toe the party line is so important.
That is kind of what it comes down to really. The PD is all-knowing and perfect because paradise has deemed it to be.

Another problem with a utopia is that there are aspects of it that would fundamentally contradict themselves, even for for one individual. For example, there would be no crime in a utopia. But I see no way of creating a society that I'd actually want to live in that had no crime (even if you can somehow ignore the "removing undesirables" part). Or - I don't want to get hurt. But how would you have to shape the world so that I can't get hurt? In no way that I can see where I wouldn't prefer the risk of getting hurt.

[Frustration]

Yes, but in this case the native culture won't survive either way so that doesn't really matter. The question then becomes one of saving individuals or not.

It would be trivial for the Enterprise to beam up sick people, beam down a plausible corpse, and save their lives. Why doesn't the crew do that? Why doesn't the Federation in general do that?

[TGLS]

Yes, but in this case the native culture won't survive either way so that doesn't really matter. The question then becomes one of saving individuals or not.

It would be trivial for the Enterprise to beam up sick people, beam down a plausible corpse, and save their lives. Why doesn't the crew do that? Why doesn't the Federation in general do that?

OK, let's present two philosophies:
1) Protecting a Culture -> Protecting Individuals -> Protecting Picard's Freetime
2) Protecting Individuals -> Protecting a Culture -> Protecting Picard's Freetime
3) Protecting a Culture -> Protecting Picard's Freetime
4) Protecting Individuals -> Protecting Picard's Freetime
5) Protecting Picard's Freetime
6) Non-Interference Absolutism

Case A (Based on Pen Pals): A planet is breaking down and soon everyone on it will die, destroying the culture there. However, it's possible to reverse this breakdown. By philosophies 1 & 3, interfere to stop the planet from breaking down. By philosophies 2 & 4, interfere to stop the planet from breaking down and move people still under threat to a different area of the planet, along with possibly more activities. By philosophies 5 & 6, do absolutely nothing.

Case B (Based on Homeward): A planet is breaking down and soon everyone on it will die, destroying the culture there. It's impossible to reverse the breakdown. By philosophy 1, as protecting the culture is no longer viable (as it will be destroyed either way), instead attempt to save as many people as possible. By philosophy 2 & 4, attempt to save as people as possible. By philosophy 3, 5 & 6, do absolutely nothing. Philosophies 1 & 3 may follow a path that argues an altered culture is still better than a completely destroyed culture, and save people while limiting interference.

Case C (Based on your scenario): Some people are dying of diseases that are treatable with advanced technology, but it is impossible to bring this technology to them without cultural contamination. By philosophies 1, 3, 5 & 6, don't do it because that will harm a healthy culture. By philosophies 2 & 4, cure the disease regardless of the cultural contamination.

[Frustration]

The role of the Black Death in shifting power from the Norman conquerors to the Anglo-Saxon peasant classes in Britain have been long known. See The History of English podcast, Ep. 121. That site has a transcript for each episode, if you're not willing to listen to the audio.

It's a specific example (well, a series of specific examples) of a more-general phenomenon: disease and warfare are an essential part of social and political change. If hypothetical aliens had shown up, snapped their fingers, and made the Black Death not wipe out a third of Europe in various historical plagues, even if no contact were made between themselves and the humans, that would have profoundly altered our history. We wouldn't be speaking and writing English, and we probably wouldn't be living in democracies. By the standards of most people alive today, the world would be worse off.

Similar arguments can be made about WWI and WWII - they were terrible, but if they had somehow been prevented, social attitudes about the desirability of war and ethnic minorities are unlikely to have developed as they did. There might have been later, worse wars; at the very least, Israel wouldn't exist. (I'm sure the Palestinians would see that as an improvement, granted.)

[Fianna]

That's getting into butterfly effect territory, though. If I so much as hold my breath for a few seconds, the resulting change to air currents can snowball into causing weather patterns to form differently, resulting in hurricanes and tornadoes hitting different locations, causing major changes to people's lives that further snowball out into major changes to society. Saying you shouldn't do something because you can't predict the long-term ramifications ... that's true of any action you might take, including the action of taking no action.

If Starfleet wanted to avoid even that sort of impact on a civilization, the only conceivable way to do so would be to never enter their solar system in the first place. Simply having a starship in the same system will mean everything else in the system is ever so subtly affected by its gravitational pull, which could result in changed trajectories for meteors and asteroids. A giant hunk of rock that might have been due to hit the planet in six hundred years might just barely miss it now. And if they do what we often see the Enterprise doing, parking themselves in orbit around the planet, blocking a certain amount of solar radiation and cosmic debris from reaching the atmosphere ...

Also, when people argue that the enforcement of the Prime Directive is wrong, I think we need to distinguish between two separate arguments. Some argue that the Federation has a responsibility to help and protect these people, but others argue that, whether or not the Federation itself has any responsibility to help, they shouldn't actively prevent people from helping, either. Like, it's one thing to not personally do charity work or give money to the poor; it's a whole 'nother thing to making charitable work and donations illegal.

[pilight]

Yes, but in this case the native culture won't survive either way so that doesn't really matter. The question then becomes one of saving individuals or not.

It would be trivial for the Enterprise to beam up sick people, beam down a plausible corpse, and save their lives. Why doesn't the crew do that? Why doesn't the Federation in general do that?

I doubt the Enterprise keeps a ready supply of disposable corpses around. We know from the TNG episode Ethics that replicating complex body parts is beyond their capability, let alone an entire plausible corpse.

[Frustration]

On the contrary, replicating living body parts is beyond their capability, but attempting to replicate a living being produces a corpse - one which advanced technology immediately reveals to be replicated, but which a primitive society couldn't distinguish from the real thing.

[TGLS]

It's a specific example (well, a series of specific examples) of a more-general phenomenon: disease and warfare are an essential part of social and political change. If hypothetical aliens had shown up, snapped their fingers, and made the Black Death not wipe out a third of Europe in various historical plagues, even if no contact were made between themselves and the humans, that would have profoundly altered our history.

Fair enough; but two things:
1) Determining whether the effects of interfering are going to be positive or negative cannot be determined a priori. If hypothetical aliens arrived at the onset of a Bubonic plague epidemic that threatens 25%-60% of the population of Europe, they have no way of knowing whether this is just going to cause a great deal of misery like the Plague of Justinian or if it may actually cause a major shift in culture like the Black Death.
2) If we're working off of a particularly hard Philosophy 1 (Culture->Lives->Resources), it'll probably end up agreeing with you with regard to "should we do something about the Bubonic Plague". The only time it will want to act is if it's looking at a global catastrophic risk, not something trifling like a plague that threatens half the population.

[Frustration]

If you're committed to a philosophy of non-intervention, you don't have to know whether any potential intervention would result in benefit or harm, by any standard, on any timescale.

One of the implausible aspects of Star Trek is that humanity was seemingly left alone, despite there being technologically advanced civilizations a relatively short distance away that are much older. Vulcan is practically down the street; Andor is a next-door-neighbor, and in earlier Trek canon the Andorians were our First Contact. And yet we weren't visited and weren't contacted, until we were relatively advanced.

[Al-1701]

Well, there are the people who sent Gary 7 and other supervisors to manipulate the cultural development of Humanity at least since we became nuclear.

You're demanding our supposed heroes take the path of cowardice. And I think anything is preferable to extinction.