Is Star Wars's treatment of droids and their agency/sentience defensible? How do you think it compares to Star Trek?
Is Star Wars's treatment of droids and their agency/sentience defensible? How do you think it compares to Star Trek?
question in title
No, but a lot of what Lucas wrote in the Star Wars universe isn't defensible.
I would say no. I mean, the treatment fits the universe (lots of people enslaving other people), but there isn't even a subtle condemnation of this. In many ways, despite it tending to be a story about rebellion, Star Wars mostly tells a story with the status quo; especially in the original trilogy, there's never really an "are we the good guys" moment. (I could be wrong - been ages since I watched anything Star Wars.)
Meanwhile, Star Trek is constantly examining itself, with Starfleet officers often "stop[ping] to debate the rights of a robot" or whether the self-respect of one Starfleet officer is worth the safety of the Alpha Quadrant. Even when they treat synths like crap, it's usually depicted as being morally wrong.
This is a bit of a tangent, but this question makes me think about the evolution of Ood depictions in Doctor Who. Their first appearance was a bit weird about their enslavement, but they rectified that in later episodes.
P.S: I think this question is more suited for c/startrek than Daystrom Institute, as it's more about comparing the themes of two franchises than any in-universe explanation.
In Star Wars the droids seem pretty ok with their situation as servants. I suppose you could describe Zora in Discovery similarly, but I'm struggling to think of other examples in Trek.
The easy way to defend it would be to suggest that they aren't actually sapient. The way they are treated in the original trilogy, and the way they are discussed in episode 2 in contrast to the clones would be consistent with the way we would view something like chatgpt. Sure, it can mimic a person, but anyone who is antheopomorphising it and trying to treat it like a real person is making a mistake.
Unfortunately, this isn't consistent throughout the franchise. Hell, even episode 2 explicitly stating druids can't think comes just one movie after we had a ceremony to present R2 a medal for saving the ship. And it certainly seems like more recent Star Wars stuff prefers to lean towards humanizing the droids.
The way it appears to work, broadly over all the content, is that the longer a droid is left to operate the more sentient it becomes. The empire is shown to wipe their droids regularly to inhibit this phenomenon.
The problem seems to be that because of this, you have characters that treat them as individuals and characters that treat them as tools.
There's also a lot of content that seems to blame the separatists for a lot of the animosity towards droids.
Keep in mind each droid is not the same. This was eluded to in episode 1. The battle droids were cheap so they had a centralized controller.
TCW tv show first episode calls this out where the battle droids explicitly said “we are independent thinkers”
Which directly contradicts the statement in episode 2:
Obi-Wan: "Well if droids could think, there'd be none of us here, would there?"
If we accept Obi-Wan's characterization, then those droids may be able to operate independently, but they aren't actually thinking.
Again, I think a lot of Star Wars media has leaned towards making droids people and not just walking computers with a friendly ui. It's convenient for storytelling because it's easier to write and allows for droid characters to play larger roles and be more relatable to the audience.
But from a world building perspective it creates a lot of unfortunate implications and just makes less sense. The existence of truly intelligent robots should fundamentally alter the world but it never does.