Given that they all generally seem to get away with it, I wonder if it's actually more of a frequently bent or broken guideline than a strictly enforced law. Do we know if non-protagonist federation starship captains act and get away with similar?
This feels like a “what happens in the Gamma quadrant, stays in the Gamma quadrant” sort of thing.
Gamma, Delta. Potato, patato.
And that is why Captain Ransom had to ultimately die. He could have snitched on her when they both returned home.
No one immediately comes to mind. Has someone been court martialed and/or stripped of rank? As far as melon scratchers go, that's a honey-doodle.
Edit:
Already an admiral, but it should count.
But he has lots of friends!
Daily Prime Directives:
- Kill Tuvix
- Extract coffee from
corpseanywhere and everywhere it can be found - Make new Tuvix, kill again
- Repeat tomorrow
That's a nice live action adaptation. Where'd last frame come from?
Found it. It is from Lost.
It's the same for her with the Temporal Prime Suggestions
Sending out fully armed and battle ready "science vessels" makes me think the Federation's Prime Directive should be Si vis pacem, para bellum. /s
Vegetius would likely want to cross into the mirror universe.
Instructions unclear; dick stuck in, well, everything.
Infinite Improbability
DriveDick.
The Prime Directive is immoral.
Ehhh not really, it's a good policy to have for most cases, but it IS way too restrictive and there absolutely should be more flexibility.
For example, if a pre-warp civilization about to go extinct because of a giant ass asteroid. Not a whole lot of good protecting their culture is going to do when they're extinct.
But just giving a random pre-warp civilization replicator tech for funsies would be devastating. Just think, what would happen if aliens came and gave replicator tech to our current governments? They'd fucking replicator weapons or some shit.
Does the asteroid even count as interference? If the civilization is sufficiently primitive, you can save them from an asteroid without them noticing.
This thought experiment is pretty easy:
if you could alleviate a large amout of suffering and death for a sentient species at little to no cost to yourself, would you?
If you can do that so trivially that it has no negative impact on you, and you do not do it, are you acting ethically?
The answers will be yes and no for most people. To me that makes it clear that neither the Prime Directive nor any kind of all-powerful deity can be moral, at least not humanly moral.
ENT s1e13 "Dear Doctor" does a great job exploring the arguments that would result in its formation.
It's been a long ... time .. since I saw ENT, and I couldn't recall that episode, so I went and read a plot summary and still had a hard time recalling it.
The plot summary makes it seem, to me at least, like a very specific and constructed scenario to try to justify it ex-post-facto in canon.
My major issue with the directive is how general and unnuanced it is. Of course there are cases where you would not want to intervene because of some unique issue. To avoid helping for fear of potential futures is cowardly and unjustified, however.
Amoral, maybe. I know it's dealt with in the lore, but I'd like to think someone at Starfleet read Roadside Picnic and thought, "well, we don't want that."
Interesting. So District 9, but more bleak.
Was colonialism moral? One of the way european empires justified it was that they were uplifting Africa.
I'm not confident I'm remembering correctly, but didn't she have a line to the effect of "They can courtmarshall me if we make back"
