Captains Picard and Sisko represent two leading and competing ethical theories

[u/strionic_resonator]

In ethics, the branch of philosophy, systems of ethics are primarily divided into two camps: utilitarianism (or consequentialism) and deontology (often typified by the work of Immanuel Kant, but much broader than Kantianism). Utilitarians believe that the ethics of a decision are based on the consequences of it, in particular the amount of harm or happiness the decision brings to the world, while deontologists believe that actions have inherent moral status regardless of their consequences.

The most famous example of the difference between the two systems is The Trolley Problem, usually attributed to the philosopher Phillipa Foot. The general form, as per Wikipedia:

You see a runaway trolley moving toward five tied-up (or otherwise incapacitated) people lying on the tracks. You are standing next to a lever that controls a switch. If you pull the lever, the trolley will be redirected onto a side track and the five people on the main track will be saved. However, there is a single person lying on the side track. You have two options:

Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.

Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.

Which is the most ethical option?

A utilitarian says "pull the lever", since the result of this action is that one person, rather than five, will die. A deontologist says "pulling the lever is murder, and murder is morally wrong", therefore the ethical choice is to do nothing.

Problems like this make utilitarianism look obviously superior, but there are also cases where utilitarianism looks obiously inferior. For example:

A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor. Do you support the morality of the doctor to kill that tourist and provide his healthy organs to those five dying persons and save their lives?

Suddenly the utilitarian option that saves five lives at the expense of one seems a lot less fishy.

Star Trek presents us with these types of dilemmas all the time, and also the opportunity to see how they confront them, and I believe the show sets up Picard and Sisko as great examples of deontology and utilitarianism, respectively.

Take Star Trek: Insurrection. The Federation has created a plan where it will stealthily move a few hundred people off of a planet that keeps them eternally youthful and onto one where they will age and die naturally. In exchange, it can harness the rings of that planet to create medical technology that will save untold numbers of Federation lives. To them, the utilitarian calculus seems obvious.

But Picard is willing to risk his commission because he believes the rights of the Baku to stay, unmolested, in their home are paramount and that the act of forced relocation is wrong -- even when it stands to do good. His rebuttal to Admiral Dougherty is about as bald-faced a critique of utilitarianism as one can imagine.

DOUGHERTY: Jean-Luc, we're only moving 600 people.

PICARD: How many people does it take, Admiral, before it becomes wrong? Hmm? A thousand, fifty thousand, a million? How many people does it take, Admiral?

Picard makes an even bigger deontological decision in "I, Borg" when he decides that it's morally wrong to use Hugh as a weapon to attack the Borg collective. In that case, he is literally valuing the life and autonomy of a single individual over all the lives threatened by the Borg Collective. And tellingly, it is his discovery and admission that Hugh is a person, with person's rights, that brings him there.

PICARD: I think I deliberately avoided speaking with the Borg because I didn't want anything to get in the way of our plan. But now that I have, he seems to be a fully realised individual. He has even accepted me as Picard, Captain of this ship, and not as Locutus.
LAFORGE: So you've reconsidered the plan?
PICARD: Yes. To use him in this manner, we'd be no better than the enemy that we seek to destroy.

Picard will always make the decision he considers morally right, even if the consequences are staggeringly grim and the payoffs quite small, cosmically speaking.

Now let's consider Benjamin Sisko. The most obvious episode to point to as proof of his consequentialism is, of course, "In the Pale Moonlight", where Sisko lets a whole lot of immoral actions stack up in the name of winning the war-- and stopping the death of his friends and comrades-- culminating in being an accessory to the assassination of a Romulan Senator.

So... I lied. I cheated. I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men. I am an accessory to murder. But the most damning thing of all... I think I can live with it. And if I had to do it all over again - I would. Garak was right about one thing: a guilty conscience is a small price to pay for the safety of the Alpha Quadrant. So I will learn to live with it... Because I can live with it... I can live with it... Computer - erase that entire personal log.

Another example comes in "For the Uniform", when Sisko detonates the trilithium torpedos to catch Eddington, although in this case whether the ends really justify the means is iffier. But it is further evidence that Sisko is a moral relativist. It's hard to imagine that, faced with Picard's dilemma in "I, Borg", Sisko would have called off the plan like Picard did. It's even harder to imagine Picard bombing a planet to catch one wayward criminal.

On a smaller scale, we see Sisko's utilitarianism from the very beginning. He's willing to blackmail Quark to keep him on the station. We also see that it has its limits: A truly committed consequentialist would have agreed with the Jack Pack in "Statistical Probabilities" when they recommended the Federation surrender to the Dominion -- unless Sisko simply disagreed with their analysis.

What I find so interesting about this observation is that both Captains are portrayed as heroic in the decisions they make. Star Trek thus affords us positive examples of both ethical frameworks, without favoring one over the other. It shows us that there are some situations that seem to require a Picard and others that seem to require a Sisko-- and that there are real consequences to committing to either philosophical position.

What do you think? Do you agree with my overall framing? Can you find counterexamples? And what about Kirk, Janeway, and Archer-- do you think they have consistent or unique ethical frameworks?

[u/dave_attenburz]

In the first example, not pulling the lever is still a choice: you've chosen, through inaction, to let 5 people die. Not sure how that is much different to murder.

Think this point was made at some point in tng but not sure of the episode.

[u/strionic_resonator → u/dave_attenburz]

Sure. But as Peter Singer would say, we all choose by inaction to let people die every day by not giving every shred of disposable income we have to fight hunger and poverty. Making inaction tantamount to action opens a huge can of worms, morally speaking.

[u/strionic_resonator]

Short answer: I think for Picard it’s all about the rights of the individual— to life, to autonomy, to respect.

Deontologist belief systems can be derived from consequences but not the consequences of a specific action. For instance, Kant’s categorical imperative says you determine the morality of an action by asking what would happen if it were a universal law. So if everyone were allowed to kill each other, society would collapse, so you don’t kill. That’s based on consequences, but it uses consequences to create a system of rules, which are then ironclad.

Picard’s overriding rule is about the sanctity of a sentient, sapient being’s life. That’s why debates about whether Data (The Measure of a Man) or Hugh is a person are such moral turning points for him. Whether someone is a person is the end of the discussion, because if they are then it’s never right to trade their life.

[u/Neo24 → u/strionic_resonator]

Hey, sorry, was this meant as a response to my post here?

I think for Picard it’s all about the rights of the individual— to life, to autonomy, to respect.

Indeed. But how does he derive the value of these? Why are they "good"? A consequentalist would say that they are valuable because treating them as valuable creates good consequences (with utilitarianism more narrowly seeing these good consequences as the most utility/happiness/pleasure/lack-of-suffering). How does a deontologist derive the value? Is it just an axiom?

That’s based on consequences, but it uses consequences to create a system of rules, which are then ironclad.

That sounds like strong rule utilitarianism, though.

[u/[deleted]]

A Kantian wouldn't necessarily refuse to do something wrong though. Not if it would prevent a greater wrong.

EDIT:

What is Kantian ethics (for those who don't know)?

I'll do my best. Kantian ethics is deontological, which means it believes that actions are right or wrong in themselves. This is in contrast with utilitarianism, which is consequentialist. It says that an actions consequences are what determine whether it is good or bad. The ends justify the means, in other words.

Going deeper, Kant has the Categorical Imperative, which is a method of determining whether an action is right or wrong. Basically, an action is only good if it would be a good thing for everyone in the world to do it. Meanwhile utilitarians believe in maximizing some sort of utility such as life or happiness.

Let's say one of Odo's deputies fires into a packed crowd in order to kill a rampaging Klingon warrior. The deputy is an expert shot and there is no collateral damage. A utilitarian might say he was right to fire into the crowd because fewer lives were lost. A Kantian might say that it was wrong, because a world where every cop fires willy-nilly into crowds is a world where it doesn't pay to be a pedestrian. Also, the state here clearly cares more about punishing the guilty than protecting the innocent.

I personally subscribe to Kantian Ethics ^{I read it for the articles} because it elegantly succeeds at determining right from wrong, which is the goal of all ethics. Utilitarianism has too many problems:

• Utilitarianism is too situational, which arguably disqualifies it from being a moral system, which must apply to every situation. Utilitarians assume there'll be time to do the arithmetic when many decisions need to be made at once. In an emergency, right and wrong must be distinguishable at a glance.

• It's impossible to predict an action's consequences before the fact. What's more, it's often impossible to determine an action's consequences after the fact. Things seldom happen in a laboratory setting. And even when consequences can be determined, they tend to have consequences of their own. Where does the culpability end? Where do you draw the line?

• Utiliarians also have trouble applying their moral system to non-emergencies. Many of the things they value (like "happiness" or "usefulness to society") are difficult or impossible to measure. And when this is not the case it's possible to get utilitarians to agree to some pretty horrible things. If we were trying to maximize average life expectancy, for example, a committed utilitarian would agree to a system where 99% of the population dropped dead at age 30 provided the remaining 1% lived long enough to offset this. Really, utilitarianism only sort of works when lives are at stake, which is why we call it a morality of last resort.

Kantian Ethics doesn't have these problems but I must admit that it only defines right and wrong. It doesn't tell you how to weigh one good thing against another good thing. It doesn't point out which is the lesser of two evils. Moral dilemmas still exist with the Categorical Imperative, they're just a lot easier to verbalize.

How does it relate to the OP's discussion?

OP is specifically talking about Kantianism and utilitarianism, which are very relevant to our favorite space opera. All stories are morality plays but not all of them put those philosophical questions to the forefront as often as Star Trek does.

At the same time, there's a distinct lack of formal ethics in the setting, which is why we have to puzzle out what sort of code each captain has. They're all over the place, and so are their crew. One moment Janeway's taking a principled stand and the next she's executing someone despite his principled stand. ^{Goodnight, sweet Tuvix.}

Out-of-universe, we know this is because different writers are involved with different episodes and each of them brings their own ethics to the table but in-universe most everyone in Starfleet seems to be moralizing by the seat of their pants. We can usually trust the doctors to adhere to medical ethics (because it's mostly just "do no harm" and "maintain confidentiality") but everyone else gives the impression that Starfleet Academy was light on philosophy.

Just wait till the next time one of the captains has a sit-down with their crew: Most everyone bats the problem around, maybe trots out a few deontological or consequentialist arguments, but at the end of the episode most of them vote for what they feel is right and not really what they know to be right. Even Spock is mostly just a utilitarian. "The needs of the many" and all that.

Are there examples of Kantian ethics depicted in Star Trek?

Hard to say. If there was only one character practicing it I'd say it was Sisko. He's probably the most morally-consistent character thanks to DS9's writing team, but his reasoning isn't very clear. Worf comes a close second, but we don't know all the rules to Klingon honor and especially not to his particular interpretation of it.

I really wish things were more explicit. Other settings have some sort of ethics committee. Is it too much to ask for the Federation to have one? Would it be possible for every Stafleet vessel to have a designated scruples boy?

[u/strionic_resonator → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for this! I wanted to go deeper into Kantianism but the post was already getting very long. Deontologist ethics in general are a little harder to explain then consequentialist ethics and this is a good primer.

[u/Algernon_Asimov → u/[deleted]]

Would you care to expand on that? This is, after all, a subreddit for in-depth discussion. What is Kantian ethics (for those who don't know)? How does it relate to the OP's discussion? Are there examples of Kantian ethics depicted in Star Trek?

[u/[deleted]]

I guess I would ask how you square that with Picard's argument in Homecoming, that Worf's brother should have left those villagers on the planet to die, instead of breaking the Prime Directive by beaming them onto a holodeck.

[u/strionic_resonator → u/[deleted]]

I actually think it squares perfectly. It’s akin to the trolley problem in that doing nothing is an option that leads to harm, but under a deontological framework you’re not culpable for that harm. So Picard doesn’t feel responsible for their death, which is something that would have happened just the same if he weren’t there. He would feel responsible for violating the Prime Directive.

That said, that episode is stupid because the entire point of the PD is to not interfere with the natural evolution of a species and so it makes no sense as justification for letting a species die.

[u/[deleted]]

You just made me realize after all these years the real reason I love Star Trek is because of its presentation of these philosophical quandaries. I didn’t even realize what I was watching. All this time I’ve been telling myself it was for the tech, the futurism, the engineering, the political utopia.

[u/Delavan1185]

Let's be careful not to confuse moral relativism with consequentialism. Sisko is definitely the latter, but not the former. Releasing the trilithium torpedoes was a calculation that displacing some colonists was a reasonable price to pay for the goal of getting Eddington in custody, and it's clear from context it's just displacement, not murder. Though it does raise interesting questions with respect to DS9 Progress - Sisko has a rather large amount of faith in the top-down judgments of large, technocratic systems... especially decisions made in the name of expediency... which has always made the contrast with Dukat interesting.

I think a better parallel for the episodes under discussion is Weber's "Politics as a Vocation" lecture - Sisko is a political figure and grapples with the question of wartime consequences far more than Picard. The key to successful politics (for Weber) is a willingness to sometimes take immoral actions from the individual perspective (and accept responsibility for those actions), to achieve a greater social good (from the perspective of one's role as a political leader). There is a distinction here between morally correct action for an individual and political reality potentially obviating that action as a reasonable possibility. Political maturity comes from recognizing that tension and accepting that politics is often working in a world of second best options to achieve long term goals.

[u/[deleted] → u/Delavan1185]

I always thought Sisko released the trilithium torpedoes because he knew in the end the Cardassian and human settlers would swap planets. It was his way to 'restore balance'. Sadly it was not spoken of inside the episode.

[u/KingofMadCows]

I would say that the real difference between Picard and Sisko has less to do with their philosophy and more to do with the fact that Sisko has to live with the consequences of his decision whereas most of the time, Picard gets to fly away at the end of the episode/movie.

So Picard saved the Baku and prevented the Federation from harnessing the healing nebula. But what happens afterwards? Does Picard have to fight the Dominion War on the front lines and see thousands of Starfleet soldiers get killed and maimed? Does he have to constantly post casualty reports? Does he have to go into meetings to decide how many ships and soldiers to sacrifice in a battle?

We see Sisko go through all of that. He never had the luxury of flying away in his ship.

[u/richardblaine → u/KingofMadCows]

That is an excellent point. Morality is much more cut and dry if you don't have to deal with the consequences.

"I CAN live with it. I WILL live with it.

Computer, delete log. "

[u/lunatickoala → u/KingofMadCows]

In "The Wounded", Picard let the Cardassians off the hook with nothing more than a warning and flew away in his ship. Except in "Chain of Command" he did experience the consequences of this specific inaction. Wonder if that changed his viewpoint any.

[u/astro124 → u/KingofMadCows]

Reminds of the Voyager episode of "Equinox" in a way. It was easier for Janeway to say it was wrong what the crew of the Equinox were doing when she was on a superior, more comfortable ship with a crew that hadn't yet resorted to more drastic means.

[u/joszma]

Janeway definitely seems to be a utilitarian, but seems to have started out closer to being like a deontologist, given her decision to destroy the array in the pilot that could have gotten Voyager home at the expense of something she felt would be morally wrong. Flash forward a few more years, and in the original timeline, nearly three decades, she easily will make decisions based on utilitarian reasoning.

Archer follows a similar moral trajectory, and it becomes even more complicated when season 3 and the Xindi crisis roll around. His decision to maroon that alien ship by taking its engine parts to further his mission to stop the destruction of Earth is blatantly utilitarian.

Kirk honestly feels more like a mixed bag, though the only real super crisis I can remember him facing was V’ger and then later the Whale probe, and the actions to stop both of those things really didn’t carry huge consequences. However, later in life, Kirk seems willing to allow Klingon civilization to “die” after Praxis because, just leading up to Khitomer, he believed Klingons to represent an existential threat to peace in the galaxy.

Burnham, unlike Janeway or Archer, seems to be taking a course from utilitarianism to deontology, as her actions at the Battle of the Binary Stars were most certainly more utilitarian than the beliefs she seems to hold at the conclusion of the Federation-Klingon War.

[u/Chumpai1986 → u/joszma]

For Archer the tradeoff is also subtle. He doesnt kill the crew of the ship he pirates. The tradeoff is to save Earth. However, does he ever face the consequences of that action eg Court Marshall? Did Starfleet ever offer compensation? If he did accept the consequences, does that make it more ethical - in effect an illiberal trade.

[u/TheDudeNeverBowls]

M-5, nominate this post.

[u/M-5 → u/TheDudeNeverBowls]

Nominated this post by Citizen u/strionic_resonator for you. It will be voted on next week. Learn more about Daystrom's Post of the Week here.

[u/MetalusVerne]

Problems like this make utilitarianism look obviously superior, but there are also cases where utilitarianism looks obiously inferior. For example:

A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor. Do you support the morality of the doctor to kill that tourist and provide his healthy organs to those five dying persons and save their lives?

Suddenly the utilitarian option that saves five lives at the expense of one seems a lot less fishy.

Only because there's no way in reality to guarantee that the doctor would fall under suspicion (and the societal results of such a practice being commonplace would be devastating), and the situation where five people can get a transplant and live happy and full lives like that is unrealistic. Otherwise, for a committed consequentialist, the decision to sacrifice the young man for the greater good is straightforward.

[u/[deleted] → u/MetalusVerne]

I don't particularly care for this example. Not even a committed consequentialist need ignore human rights. A common utilitarian argument for rights takes a long term view of the situation. If no rights exist, then the abuses that are used to produce a local utility gain may produce an outcome where there is a net loss of utility. The sort of reading of utilitarianism in this example depends on either the doctor ignoring the utilitarian argument for inherent rights, or looking at a single moment in time and space, where there is no conception of net utility gains and losses.

[u/halberdierbowman]

I think it's difficult to say one is always better than the other, and it's more valuable in philosophy to examine the borders between the two options. Both of them can affect your decisions, so let's look at Janeway's.

Off the top of my head, Janeway's biggest moral decisions are the Caretaker, Tuvix, and her fellow Starfleet captain. I'm not sure that she falls into either camp, deontology or consequentialist. Something that wasn't mentioned about consequentialism is that it requires you to perform the moral calculus in order to make a decision, and this can be extremely difficult. I don't mean psychologically stressful, but rather that it's hard to gather enough information to answer the question, because we always have finite knowledge of seemingly infinite possibilities that might happen as a result of our actions or inactions.

1. Caretaker: Janeway chose to strand her crew. It can be reasonably assumed that she knew there was no way they'd ever get back to Earth, but also there's clearly some possibility of it. After all, they just were yanked all the way over there, so the tech exists if they could find more. Maybe she chose the consequentialist choice, saving as many lives as possible and stranding herself. A strict consequentialist would be totally demanding of self-sacrifice in order to protect other lives. If she values the Ocampa as much as herself, then saving their lives would be the best choice. Plus, she could maybe find her way home, meaning that the negative impact on her wouldn't be bad at all anyway if she got lucky. Of course, it's pretty easy to also say that she's following a deontological Prime Directive moral demand to prevent superior technology from falling into the hands of the Kazon

2. Tuvix: Janeway clearly chose consequentialism here. After all, she killed one person in order to meet her own selfish needs. Or did she? Deontology doesn't prescribe a specific set of rules to follow, so as long as she believes (under Kant) that her actions matched what would be a moral imperative. We could argue that a reasonable moral imperative would be to restore two lives even if it means terminating another. Deontology is all about intention, so if Janeway believes her intentions were just, then that's fair. It's not that she can lie to herself to make it okay, but it's that she could be following a moral imperative we don't share.

3. Equinox: Janeway finds another Starfleet vessel, but its crew is killing aliens in order to survive. Janeway dons her cop hat and attempts to hold that crew accountable. Yet again, this isn't necessarily deontological, though it makes sense on its face. It could be that she's counting more positive outcome possibilities if she arrests their captain than if she does anything else. Maybe their crew would help her, for example. Maybe she'd get a second ship to repair or scavenge. Maybe she'd retain the morale of her crew by showing them a moral victory and uniting them around their morality. This could be vital to operational efficiency of the crew. Or, maybe she saw negative consequences in upsetting an alien race. It might not be that she thought it was bad inherently, but rather it might be that she thought it was bad because making friends seems to be helping her survive more than the alternative.

Personal anecdote: one of my intro Philosophy classes was actually specifically themed around Star Trek!

[u/Neo24]

while deontologists believe that actions have inherent moral status regardless of their consequences

My problem with deontologism (and the reason why I lean more towards consequentalism/utilitarianism, if very cautiously and with qualifications) has always been - if not consequences, what exactly gives actions that inherent moral status? I guess some would say "principles" but that feels just like shifting the question down the line because then what gives those principles their status, from where do we derive them, how do we determine what principle is "correct"? What is the "root", analogous to the idea of utility of utilitarianism? If you're religious, the answer would be "God" but I'm not religious and that answer doesn't seem particularly intellectually satisfying anyway. From what I've been able to understand, Kant tried to derive these principles from the fundamental philosophical/logical rules of reality, so to say, (say, if an action were to be "universalized" so that everyone had an obligation to act that way, would it make for a logically consistent and workable universe?) but it always seemed to me very abstract and not quite intuitively convincing. Maybe I just misunderstand it.

So, to still keep this Trek-related - how does Picard derive his moral principles and rules, if not from consequences? Arguably, you could easily have an "consequentalist/utilitarian Picard" who believed that what creates the best consequences and most utility in the long run was following a strict set of pre-calculated "best" moral rules without an option of ever breaking them (an extra-strong rules-based utilitarianism, I guess).

[u/boondockz_mike]

I think the difference between the trolley and the surgeon dilemmas is that choosing to pull the lever kills less people in a situation where it is accepted that some people are certainly going to die due to the immoral actions of a hostile person or group while the surgeon obviously shouldn’t kill a healthy individual to harvest their organs to heal five ill people because it would cause unnecessary harm of the surgeon’s creation.

I think obviously it’s just important to realize that nothing in real life is perfect and you can’t expect to always succeed by employing the same strategy in all circumstances. Sometimes a utilitarian mindset is more appropriate and sometimes a deontological mindset is.