December Talking Meme, 12/7

[pocochina]

So....it looks like this may morph into the December-January Talking Meme, because I'm taking way too many interesting prompts to want to turn any of them down. If yours is late, it hasn't been forgotten

Comments

[pocochina]

I mean, I was going to say that I think torturing and airlocking Leoben in s1 is wrong -- at least, airlocking him is wrong before it's clear to the Colonials that Cylons get resurrected. But I also get that a) the ticking time bomb scenario may not be real, but if it were it would literally destroy the whole human race, and b) there are extremely limited resources to feed and shelter people

See, I guess...this is where I am a consequentialist, or maybe a jus en bello formalist, or whatever. Because I don't so much think that executing Leoben was out of bounds. Faulty machine or immoral person-equivalent entity, the goal of what he was doing was to cost a lot of civilian lives. But I think that death by airlocking was intended to be particularly cruel. I don't mind Starbuck having been meeeeeen at some points during the interrogation, because they really did need to find out about the hypothetical bomb - but torture is significantly less effective than mind games, and so doing it was about being able to exert power rather than prevent damage, and I think that was wrong.

And I don't have any sort of problem making that distinction? I didn't when I watched the miniseries, and I didn't by the time I got to the finale. But rolling it all together, as I think the show falls into often, means that the question becomes how you FEEEEEEEL about Leoben, and not how the president and military are attempting (or not) to be moral actors.

I don't really know that they can make "good choices" anymore than a three-year-old can, because that seems to be the approximate level of their moral development when we first encounter them. Do three year olds' lives have worth because they eventually will be adults capable of making decisions, or because they have consciousness? And obviously, the situation changes when it's 1) not even your species, and 2) the three-year-old has an army and nukes and is super-strong and super-intelligent.

See, this is an interesting framework, and I really don't know how I would weigh those last two points underneath it. I just don't think it ever gets a chance to breathe in the show, at least, not during an episode where a Serious Moral Statement was to be made by some character at some point. Also, you're getting at the comparison with the angels without even knowing the show: as this current arc has developed there's a motif of angels appearing as or conversing with children, and gravitating toward playgrounds as meeting places.