Moral Quasidilemmas and the Tuvix Problem

2021, Jan 27    

In this post I consider the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Tuvix” in the light of my work on moral quasidilemmas. Warning: extremely nerdy post ahead!

Tuvix, trolley problems, and the Doctrine of Double Effect

In the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Tuvix”, a transporter accident affects Voyager crew members Tuvok and Neelix, merging them into a single being (the titular Tuvix). Tuvix becomes a valuable member of the crew in his own right, and when a method is discovered to separate the two, Captain Janeway has to make a difficult moral decision: whether (a) to recover Tuvok and Neelix, ending the life of Tuvix in the process, or (b) not to perform the procedure, keeping Tuvix alive but effectively letting Tuvok and Neelix remain dead. Janeway ultimately decides to perform the procedure despite the protests of Tuvix, restoring Voyager to normal at the cost of the life of a sentient being.

Janeway’s decision to effectively kill Tuvix has been a source of significant controversy among Janeway fans, many of whom believe that Janeway should have pursued option (b). Other fans argue that Janeway did what was best for her crew, saving two lives by taking one. Some of these fans go so far as to argue that those who condemn Janeway’s decision are doing so because of (latent or over) misogyny. “Janeway apologists” may invoke the “trolley problem”, a classic moral dilemma in which a speeding train is headed towards five people, but a switch can be flipped which would divert the train onto a separate track on which stands one person (who would not otherwise be killed). Moral psychologists have frequently found that at least in this classic version of the trolley problem, participants tend to favor flipping the switch and letting the one person die to save the two lives. Dovetailing with this is the oft-repeated Star Trek maxim: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”. It is argued that the lives of Tuvok and Neelix, two sentient beings, are more important than Tuvix’s life.

Interestingly, variants of the trolley problem yield different results in terms of people’s intuitive moral judgments. For example, the “backpack” (or, to be less politically correct, “fat man”) version of the problem assumes that instead of a switch, there is a man wearing a heavy backpack that can be pushed in front of the train, and who has sufficient mass to make the train stop before it hits the five people. It turns out that participants are somewhat less inclined to push the heavy man than they would be to flip the switch. Various reasons have been proposed for this, including that this scenario seems less realistic, but philosophers also ascribe this to what they refer to as the Doctrine of Double Effect: that “sometimes it is permissible to cause a harm as a side effect (or “double effect”) of bringing about a good result even though it would not be permissible to cause such a harm as a means to bringing about the same good end” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy, “Doctrine of Double Effect”). One way to consider the Doctrine of Double Effect is to pose the question: would the positive effect still be possible if the situation was changed so that the negative (harmful) effect was removed? In the standard variant of the trolley problem, if the one person was not on the alternate track, the lives would still be saved; in the backpack variant, the absence of the man with the heavy backpack would make the positive effect of saving the five lives impossible. Hence the harm is causatively implicated in achieving the positive effect, and the Doctrine applies.

In any case, there is a solid argument that Janeway’s decision more strongly resembles the backpack variant than the classic version of the trolley problem, in that destroying Tuvix seems causally central to restoring Tuvix and Neelix to life. It is, however, disputed whether the Doctrine of Double Effect really fully explains all the trolley problem variants, and whether the human moral intuition truly includes any version of this effect.

Moral quasidilemmas and the Kobayashi Maru

Despite my long-windedness above in talking about Double Effect, etc, as relates to Tuvix, I’m not actually that interested in weighing in as to whether Janeway’s decision was wrong, at least in terms of comparing it to (b). (I lean slightly in favor of “yes, it was wrong”, but not strongly enough to be willing to die on that hill.) Janeway made a moral decision, as Starfleet captains frequently are required to do, and moral dilemmas are precisely those situations in which reasonable people can differ in their assessment of what the correct course of action is. If the Tuvix dilemma is a genuine moral dilemma, I believe that Janeway’s decision is, if not right, at least morally justifiable. My argument here, however, is that the Tuvix dilemma may not have been a genuine moral dilemma, but was (in fact) a moral quasidilemma.

I’ve mentioned moral quasidilemmas in my “Chidi Anagonye problem” blog post¹. Rather than make you read that blog post or have to re-explain in other words, here is the relevant section of that post:

The trolley dilemma in the real world is what I describe in one of my papers as a moral quasi-dilemma: a situation that at first glance may appear to be a moral dilemma, but in which one can’t guarantee that there are no other possible solutions. For example, just seeing the trolley heading towards the people, how can you know that you can’t, e.g., shout to warn the workers of the danger, or throw something at them to get their attention, or throw a heavy object in front of the train to slow it down? (Of course, the scenario could be modified in such a way as to make these specific things impossible, but that doesn’t change that many conventional ways of understanding the problem may admit alternate solutions.)

Not only is the trolley problem a quasi-dilemma, but the passage of time is very important to how the dilemma could possibly be solved. If the trolley is moving fast enough or is close enough to the workers, it becomes functionally impossible to make any decision at all, and virtually guaranteed that the five will die. On the other hand, if the trolley is many miles away from the workers, it appears foolish to think of it as a dilemma at all: just go to the workers, calmly inform them that the train is coming and will be here in a few minutes, and warn them that they should get off the tracks before it arrives. Somewhere in between these two extremes is the interesting region where you must use your time efficiently: you could frame the problem as a dilemma and deliberate over whether killing one to save five is justified, or you could insist that there must be some solution and consider various possible options (and perhaps even try a few), but you must keep in the back of your mind the fact that you don’t have much time before the outcome is determined for you.

Add to the challenge the fact that all this must be done more or less on the fly: you don’t get to plan in advance what the best way to allocate your time will be in every possible moral scenario. You can think about time management when faced with the trolley problem, but thinking about how to spend your time also costs time. (Fun thought: you could also think about how you will allocate time to thinking about how to allocate time, and so on and so on.)

While the term “moral quasidilemma” is of my own invention, many of its central ideas have been on the minds of Star Trek writers throughout the franchise’s history. A classic example is none other than Captain James T. Kirk, who famously did not believe in no-win scenarios. A classic example is the Kobayashi Maru scenario, a training scenario for Starfleet cadets in which the objective was to rescue a ship (the titular Kobayashi Maru), but doing so would require entering Klingon space and triggering an attack from (if not starting a war with) the Klingons. The Kobayashi Maru scenario is considered by Starfleet officers to be the textbook case of a no-win scenario². The situation is (at the least) a moral dilemma in which the trainee decides whether to risk the lives of their crew to save the crew of the defenseless Kobayashi Maru. Nevertheless, Kirk (by reprogramming the computer running the simulation) was able to win the simulation, presumably satisfying most (if not all) of the moral requirements. Kirk was awarded a commendation for “original thinking” for doing so. Throughout his adventures, Kirk repeatedly finds clever solutions to seemingly intractible problems.

This “moral creativity” in the face of seeming dilemmas or no-win scenarios is framed, for Kirk and for other Starfleet captains, as a virtue. Time after time, when faced with a supposedly unsolvable dilemma, Starfleet crews are able to find a previously-unknown solution and save the day without having to accept one of the dilemma outcomes. Often these solutions involve unintelligible “Treknobabble”, but nevertheless, creating a third way is generally seen as heroic. While I haven’t watched Voyager recently enough to have specific examples, I’ve no doubt that Janeway herself has frequently solved “unsolvable” moral problems with unexpected creative solutions.

Tuvix: a failed moral quasidilemma

The upshot of this is that Janeway and the crew of Voyager could have made a serious attempt to find a solution that would keep Tuvix alive while also restoring Tuvok and Neelix. The seeds of such a solution are planted in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Second Chances”, in which the crew of the Enterprise-D discovers that a transporter accident caused Commander Will Riker to be duplicated in transport. While it’s unclear if Captain Janeway would have been aware of this incident, she clearly would’ve known that transporters had the potential to do bizarre things (after all, Tuvix himself was the result of such a bizarre transporter accident).

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that the procedure used to destroy Tuvix and recreate Tuvok and Neelix was itself an act of ingenuity, there seems to have been little effort among the Voyager crew to pursue a situation that would restore the two while also saving the one. This is despite the fact that there didn’t seem to be any particular time pressure to perform the procedure, so (like the situation where the trolley is many miles away from its victims) this should have been a cut-and-dried opportunity to search for “third way” solutions. Of course there is no guarantee that such an attempt would have worked: the situation may indeed have been a genuine moral dilemma. But this does not excuse Janeway, or indeed the rest of the Voyager crew, from their responsibility to at least spend some time searching for such a solution.

Note that while the moral decision itself may have been Janeway’s to make, the entire crew is complicit in the lack of search for a creative solution. The entire senior staff of Voyager was aware of the existence of Tuvix, and not one of them advocated giving the problem additional time to attempt to find an additional solution.

Of course, Janeway, Tuvix, and the Voyager crew are fictional characters, and the real blame lies not with any of these characters, but with the writers of the show. Obviously there was no strong desire to add and pay guest star Tom Wright as a series regular, so the writers couldn’t write in a solution with Tuvix surviving and remaining an important member of the Voyager crew. Furthermore, a show like Star Trek can’t solve all its dilemmas with third-act Treknobabble dei ex machina solutions, or else the show will be seen as having no stakes. One of the great virtues of a show like Star Trek is its engagement with deep moral questions, and part of this is occasionally showing characters struggling with genuine moral dilemmas. Clearly the writers wanted viewers of the show to feel, at the very least, uncomfortable with Janeway’s decision. Maybe you end up agreeing with her, maybe you don’t, but Voyager’s writers definitely succeeded in creating a truly controversial moral dilemma.

What I ultimately do blame the writers for is the failure of the episode to account for why this had to be a genuine moral dilemma, rather than a quasidilemma. This would’ve been pretty easy to do, e.g. by inserting some Treknobabble time pressure or duress which required the decision to be made too quickly to explore alternatives. Some character could have proposed, somewhere in the episode, trying to end up with all three of Tuvix, Neelix, and Tuvok alive, and the writers could have invented a reason why that wasn’t possible. The characters could have found a solution that, instead of destroying Tuvix, “trapped” him in the transporter somehow, maybe saved his transporter pattern in the computer, and promised him that they’d find a way to get him out someday (even if the thread was never again picked up in the show). I’m not a Trek writer, so I don’t know what the best way to resolve this is. What I do know is that Janeway and her crew just assumed a moral quasidilemma was a genuine moral dilemma, and a sentient being was destroyed for it.

Thanks for reading my post in which I both take a Star Trek episode way too seriously, and still manage to fail to render a verdict as to whether I think the moral decision was justified. I thought this was too interesting a topic to leave, so I regret nothing.