Has the Prime Directive caused more problems than prevented for the Federation

[Sailor.X]

This is a question about that document that gets quoted like it is the Bible in Star Trek. Do you think the Federation sticking to the Prime Directive Dogmatically has caused more problems for the Federation as a whole than prevented them. Should the Federation have taken a more nuanced interpretation of the Prime Directive. A take it on a case by case basis sort of policy. Rather than the blanket ban hammer it is seen as in TNG and later Trek? What are your thoughts on the matter.

My opinion is that Captain Kirk and crew got it right. They did not treat the Prime Directive like it was the Holy Bible. They weighed each situation accordingly and chose to follow it or ignore it. And they saved a ton of worlds doing so.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Imma note here that really, most of the Federation doesn't treat the Prime Directive like the bible. Of the captains we've seen, only Picard did that. Kirk considered it a guideline, Janeway was pretty free about doing whatever and even trading Fed technology away, and Sisko didn't tend to worry excessively about it. Granted Sisko wasn't regularly pushed into the same situations but we saw the DS9 crew interfere with less advanced cultures several times, such as Bashir curing the plague on that one planet where everybody randomly died a horrible death so they had a suicide party to kill yourself when your plague activated, or leaving the Kai on a pre-warp planet to proselytize and spread the Bajoran religion to the immortal gangs that revived everytime they killed each other.

My own headcanon is that Picard was a Prime Directive extremist but the majority of captains wouldn't be as stringent as he was, just as most captains didn't lecture about morality as much as he did.

 

[Sailor.X]

Imma note here that really, most of the Federation doesn't treat the Prime Directive like the bible. Of the captains we've seen, only Picard did that. Kirk considered it a guideline, Janeway was pretty free about doing whatever and even trading Fed technology away, and Sisko didn't tend to worry excessively about it. Granted Sisko wasn't regularly pushed into the same situations but we saw the DS9 crew interfere with less advanced cultures several times, such as Bashir curing the plague on that one planet where everybody randomly died a horrible death so they had a suicide party to kill yourself when your plague activated, or leaving the Kai on a pre-warp planet to proselytize and spread the Bajoran religion to the immortal gangs that revived everytime they killed each other.

My own headcanon is that Picard was a Prime Directive extremist but the majority of captains wouldn't be as stringent as he was, just as most captains didn't lecture about morality as much as he did.

So Picard is the Pope of the Prime Directive then. Oh I will have to answer for that one on Judgement Day.

 

[Bear Ribs]

So Picard is the Pope of the Prime Directive then. Oh I will have to answer for that one on Judgement Day.

Picard is the Federation's brand Ambassador. They put him in the top ship with the legendary name to go forth and look good doing it. When there's a diplomatic incident you can be assured that Picard will solve it in the most moral way possible and his record's as spotless as it gets.

When the Federation has a problem they need shot to death they send Jellico. When they need it shot, punched, burned, and the ashes scattered to the wind they send The Sisko.

 

[Deleted member 88]

Okay the PD gets a lot of criticism, for what I’m going to say are fundamentally emotional reasons.

So let’s discuss why it exists.

Technological disparity between cultures is a gross power imbalance. In our own history-“guns beat spears”. Of course technological disparity and intent are not equivalent, but having the power to impose your will means you are far more willing to do so.

A heavy and healthy respect for organic development. That is development without interference. Species and cultures should be allowed to evolve and grow on their own without external manipulation, violence, or incentives.

Pragmatically-time and resources. The federation can not baby every species and world without warp travel. It has enough humility and respect for infinite diversity to not try and impose its mores on other cultures even when it finds the practices of other cultures abhorrent or irrational. So transform a culture-takes large amounts of time. In the infamous Dear Doctor-T’Pol remarks the Vulcans have been on earth for ninety years.

Ninety years. And she says “we’re still there”. Can you imagine the federation trying to shepherd and teach countless worlds for centuries until they “grow up”? It’s just not practical.

A vague belief in fate and or God: In TNG there is reference obliquely to a “cosmic will” that ought not be interfered with. While the federation is a very secular society overall, and fairly materialist with some vague spiritualism remaining, intervening is going against the movement and course of the cosmos.

You can’t save every species, either from itself or nature. If an asteroid is coming to destroy a Stone Age culture-it would be an interference with the natural course of said culture to move the asteroid, or freeze the Volcano.

This is a profoundly different set of ethics than what we have now. It’s based on an extraordinary respect for and tolerance of the Other and a lack of a need to intervene on or against the Other’s behalf.

 

[Sailor.X]

Okay the PD gets a lot of criticism, for what I’m going to say are fundamentally emotional reasons.

So let’s discuss why it exists.

Technological disparity between cultures is a gross power imbalance. In our own history-“guns beat spears”. Of course technological disparity and intent are not equivalent, but having the power to impose your will means you are far more willing to do so.

A heavy and healthy respect for organic development. That is development without interference. Species and cultures should be allowed to evolve and grow on their own without external manipulation, violence, or incentives.

Pragmatically-time and resources. The federation can not baby every species and world without warp travel. It has enough humility and respect for infinite diversity to not try and impose its mores on other cultures even when it finds the practices of other cultures abhorrent or irrational. So transform a culture-takes large amounts of time. In the infamous Dear Doctor-T’Pol remarks the Vulcans have been on earth for ninety years.

Ninety years. And she says “we’re still there”. Can you imagine the federation trying to shepherd and teach countless worlds for centuries until they “grow up”? It’s just not practical.

A vague belief in fate and or God: In TNG there is reference obliquely to a “cosmic will” that ought not be interfered with. While the federation is a very secular society overall, and fairly materialist with some vague spiritualism remaining, intervening is going against the movement and course of the cosmos.

You can’t save every species, either from itself or nature. If an asteroid is coming to destroy a Stone Age culture-it would be an interference with the natural course of said culture to move the asteroid, or freeze the Volcano.

This is a profoundly different set of ethics than what we have now. It’s based on an extraordinary respect for and tolerance of the Other and a lack of a need to intervene on or against the Other’s behalf.

You make a sound argument for the Prime Directive. There is only one flaw. It is very hypocritical on the Federations part. Specifically the Humans and the Vulcans. It is mentioned quite a few times in TOS if it had not been for the interference of a few races in Earth and Vulcans past. Both races would either be extinct or still stuck in the Stone Age. And while you can't help every race. When a race reaches out to you and begs you to prevent their extinction. And you literally have the cure and not use it (Dear Doctor) You have committed an immoral act. And by doing so colors any actions to any race in the future. This is also not including the times when Archer literally violates what would be the future Prime Directive to save his own crews butt (Stealing from another race to fix his own ship leaving them stranded in space). In practice it ends up being rules for thee and not for me when my butt is on the line so said rule gets ignored.

 

[What's the sitch?]

I'm against the Prime directive when they are against helping people against things that are totally out of their scope to change things on their own, especially when they are literally right there and can do so with minimal effort or risk.

Oh, so your suns gonna go super nova eh and your barely in the rennaisance? Too bad lol. Asteroid coming out of nowhere, its gonna totally wreck the planet and their is a sapient species there, so outta luck dudes. I understand that TIME TRAVELING species that can see the direct result millions/billions of years later might object to helping, because it kicks something they can actually see off, but for a supposedly benevolent culture that still exists in observable time to refuse because "they don't know the consequences" is pure BS.

The conflicts occur when you get people that follow the spirit of the PD vs the legalese of the PD. You can't discover a new culture if the new culture is dead through no fault of its own, from a totally out of context problem, not even a new technology gone wrong, or a disease that wipes out 80% of the population, just gone, everyone's dead. New life ain't gonna "evolve" while you stand on your pedestal of non interference. If it really looks like a race/species whatever locked on a single planet is on their last legs and the circumstances are pretty extenuating, I am not against throwing them a life line.

The PD is supposed to be about "telling people what to do/how to live their lives" , not about taking steps from wiping out all the life in the first place. But the sheltered, utopian, idealists can't tell the difference.

 

[JagerIV]

As a general rule, the Prime Directive makes perfect sense: your default instinct as Federation Personnel should be "do not interfere".

And, for 99% of space fleet officers, if it appears that there might be a reason not to interfere, thinking you should be interfering should be a "this is above my pay grade, calling starfleet" to get an admiral/Diplomat/Senator/whatever level of approval to explain the situation to and for them to make final decision on. Star trek communications seems to be in general fast enough that, in real life, you would be able to call a higher ranking individual to okay a breach of the Prime directive.

Of course, Star Trek is also somewhat inconsistent on exactly how easy it is to communicate with other people. And exploration craft which would be the ones to most commonly have to deal with prime directive questions (assumedly Federation space isn't littered with subwarp species between major developed worlds) might have more complicated communications difficulty.

There, the basic rule should also be "do not interfere", and we also then get into such things as the Enterprise having a, perhaps unrealistically eventful adventure (99.999999999% of planets with intelligent life would not be days away from disaster once discovered, given how they have to be stable for at least several 1,000 years to develop anything like a civilization). And even if the intelligent life is under threat, say a bad Ice age, most aren't "everyone is going to die in a week" but, well, maybe everyone will die in a year, or a 100 years, in which case there's plenty of time to call starfleet and let them send a team to study the situation for a couple of months, submit their minimal least interference plan to the Federation Senate, get it signed by the president, and implement the plan some 10 months after the problem was discovered.

Realistically, there should be 2-3 events where a captain needs to make the decision to break the Prime directive on the spot in the Entire history of starfleet.

So, its a perfectly sensible law for starfleet in a reasonable world where exceptions to the rule would be such absolutely rare occurrences that the advanced captain level text book would list in painstaking detail all 3 times an acceptable breaches of the Prime directive occurred, and probably then list a 100+ examples of times it was breached improperly, and why. Probably people breaking it for reasons that weren't time sensitive (yes, the plague was killing 1,000s a day, but even assuming the rate didn't slow we had 10 years to make a decision before extinction was a real risk) or wasn't actually a threat to the species survival (yes, the nuclear exchange would have killed a billion people if you didn't stop it, but there were 5 billion people on the planet and there was a near zero chance of imminent species extinction: that situation required setting up a listening post to track the progress of the war, not immediate interference).

Of course, In star Trek that one in a billion occurrence happened every year it seems, in which case less stringent rules seem sensible.

 

[Sailor.X]

As a general rule, the Prime Directive makes perfect sense: your default instinct as Federation Personnel should be "do not interfere".

And, for 99% of space fleet officers, if it appears that there might be a reason not to interfere, thinking you should be interfering should be a "this is above my pay grade, calling starfleet" to get an admiral/Diplomat/Senator/whatever level of approval to explain the situation to and for them to make final decision on. Star trek communications seems to be in general fast enough that, in real life, you would be able to call a higher ranking individual to okay a breach of the Prime directive.

Of course, Star Trek is also somewhat inconsistent on exactly how easy it is to communicate with other people. And exploration craft which would be the ones to most commonly have to deal with prime directive questions (assumedly Federation space isn't littered with subwarp species between major developed worlds) might have more complicated communications difficulty.

There, the basic rule should also be "do not interfere", and we also then get into such things as the Enterprise having a, perhaps unrealistically eventful adventure (99.999999999% of planets with intelligent life would not be days away from disaster once discovered, given how they have to be stable for at least several 1,000 years to develop anything like a civilization). And even if the intelligent life is under threat, say a bad Ice age, most aren't "everyone is going to die in a week" but, well, maybe everyone will die in a year, or a 100 years, in which case there's plenty of time to call starfleet and let them send a team to study the situation for a couple of months, submit their minimal least interference plan to the Federation Senate, get it signed by the president, and implement the plan some 10 months after the problem was discovered.

Realistically, there should be 2-3 events where a captain needs to make the decision to break the Prime directive on the spot in the Entire history of starfleet.

So, its a perfectly sensible law for starfleet in a reasonable world where exceptions to the rule would be such absolutely rare occurrences that the advanced captain level text book would list in painstaking detail all 3 times an acceptable breaches of the Prime directive occurred, and probably then list a 100+ examples of times it was breached improperly, and why. Probably people breaking it for reasons that weren't time sensitive (yes, the plague was killing 1,000s a day, but even assuming the rate didn't slow we had 10 years to make a decision before extinction was a real risk) or wasn't actually a threat to the species survival (yes, the nuclear exchange would have killed a billion people if you didn't stop it, but there were 5 billion people on the planet and there was a near zero chance of imminent species extinction: that situation required setting up a listening post to track the progress of the war, not immediate interference).

Of course, In star Trek that one in a billion occurrence happened every year it seems, in which case less stringent rules seem sensible.

Just one problem.

She is the Admiral that answers all of your hails to command!!!

You already know she is gonna say no. No matter how dire the situation is. Because she is a royal bitch and likes being a royal bitch. Now Captain in far flung space. Do you call Starfleet command. Or do you keep your actions off the books. We know how many Captains including Picard eventually kept their actions off the books because of her.

 

[Doomsought]

A heavy and healthy respect for organic development. That is development without interference. Species and cultures should be allowed to evolve and grow on their own without external manipulation, violence, or incentives.

This is a fallacy, as seen in the microcosm of our own history on earth. There are entire continents that stagnated at late neolithic development for millennia, and many other cases of stagnation and self destruction that were only ended do to outside factors.

This also places the value of the group above the value of the individual.

The lives of individual people would be improved by contact, even if many aspects of primitive culture would give way under rapid growth.

 

[Terthna]

In my opinion, the last word that needs to be said about the Prime Directive was said by SFDebris, in this video:


"An individual who's only response to the pleas of multitudes dying is pointing at a piece of paper, is not the hero in your story."

 

[Arlos]

The Prime directive should most certainly be a Federation regulation, but it should neither be prime, nor a directive, the final decision on whether it should be followed or not should be left to officers on site.
Seriously, what’s the point of taking supposedly extremely intelligent, competent, and morally upstanding people as your officers and crew if you don’t give them independent decision making ability when it matters?
If they mess up, spank them, but have some faith, just send robots otherwise. :/

 

[Doomsought]

Seriously, what’s the point of taking supposedly extremely intelligent, competent, and morally upstanding people as your officers and crew if you don’t give them independent decision making ability when it matters?

Vulcans. It wasn't originally a federation directive, the prime directive was a vulcan thing, and they pushed it on the federation during the founding.

 

[Navarro]

Vulcans. It wasn't originally a federation directive, the prime directive was a vulcan thing, and they pushed it on the federation during the founding.

It didn't exist in ENT days though. My bet is that Phlox had something to do with it.

 

[Terthna]

It didn't exist in ENT days though. My bet is that Phlox had something to do with it.

You know what? Forget Crell Moset; Phlox was the real monster.

 

[Sailor.X]

You know what? Forget Crell Moset; Phlox was the real monster.

The Terran Empire did nothing wrong with Phlox's race.

 

[Doomsought]

It didn't exist in ENT days though. My bet is that Phlox had something to do with it.

Actually it did, just it was only a Vulcan law and not a human law. That is why the Vulcans only contacted humans when they did.

 

[Darth Robbhi]

Kirk’s crew had as many examples of interfence being bad as good. John Gill on Ekos, Sigma Iota II, Ron Tracy, Merrick, etc. A technologically advanced civilization interfering in the development of a less-advanced one is frought with risk.

As a default course, it is absolutely a good idea. But it’s not an absolute. Making it one causes as many problems as it solves.

 

[Sixgun McGurk]

Kirk’s crew had as many examples of interfence being bad as good. John Gill on Ekos, Sigma Iota II, Ron Tracy, Merrick, etc. A technologically advanced civilization interfering in the development of a less-advanced one is frought with risk.

As a default course, it is absolutely a good idea. But it’s not an absolute. Making it one causes as many problems as it solves.

TOS had a 1960's tech Roman Empire that knows about the Federation, captured a phase pistol and would conquer Earth the instant it went soft. Then there was Gangsterworld. There would be all kinds of Human starships running around a-viking and they will do whatever they want.

 

[Darth Robbhi]

TOS had a 1960's tech Roman Empire that knows about the Federation, captured a phase pistol and would conquer Earth the instant it went soft. Then there was Gangsterworld. There would be all kinds of Human starships running around a-viking and they will do whatever they want.

Yup. Even with the Prime Directive, you still did, like Ron Tracy and John Gill.

Which may well explain why Picard and others were stickier about it.