The murder of Tuvix, revisited

Thank you, and now on to our final arguments --In his round two rebuttal my opponent focused on the biology of the issue. First of all I would like to point out that Tuvix was indeed an offspring of symbiogenesis as we can establish from the Doctor's research (1). Whether his cells are independently viable is not an issue and indeed we can't reliably assess that - we don't have the information. How exactly did Tuvok and Neelix merge to form Tuvix? Because Tuvix is the size of approximately one adult human male and Tuvok and Neelix are two large males, we can for example establish that about 50% of mass was lost. Now, a human that has lost 50% of his tissues - is he in good health, can he survive independently? I do not know. It would depend on what exactly happened. In brief -- people die in transporter accidents. To reiterate, Tuvok's and Neelix' physiological and brain functions stopped irrevocably at the time of transport. A new procedure had to be developed and they had to be reassembled from another organism. This would never have happened in the lifetime of Tuvix, the recipient of (some) of their matter. They met the criteria for death, accidental and tragic though it may be. Matter does not know an owner, nor does it have rights. Organic matter on Earth, for example, has been part of countless organisms; as time goes on, more and more of them intelligent as humanity has been present in the biomass longer. We do not usually consider this an issue in rights. We all carry the genomes of countless ancestors in us. We do not normally consider them to have rights over our present state, There was also the issue of malice. I would like to reiterate that complete disregard for another's well-being constitutes malice in itself according to, at last, dictionary. law. com. (2)---However, I do not feel that one should need to be a biologist, or a lawyer, to understand ethical issues. What we must concentrate on here is the rights of Tuvix, or the lack thereof. The matter is indeed simple. Tuvix was a living, breathing individual on the starship Voyager. He had made friends, he was lovable, he had his own desires. Neelix and Tuvok, on the other hand, were dead at the time. They were alive in the minds of the crew only, after their vital functions had ceased and their bodies lost in a transport accident. Unless we invoke a supernatural vitalist force we cannot consider them to be physiologically alive even though (some of) the matter they were made of still exists. This transporter-"accident" was in fact a strategy of reproduction for a specific plant, intended to create a new organsm. We may feel the deaths of Neelix and Tuvok were unjust, and bad for Voyager. But like all such deaths, what should have happened is that people move on. What happened on the Voyager, instead, is this. Tuvix' friends, after deliberation, turned on him, and, in a chilling display, stripped him of his position on the Voyager (in the final moments of the episode) and had guards escort him to sickbay to his death, which he, fully understanding the issues, had objected to, only submitting after he could not escape. There they overrode the doctor who would not do it on ethical grounds, and ripped apart his body with a transporter beam to harvest tissues and DNA to reconstitute the dead Neelix and Tuvok. Naturally Neelix and Tuvok were happy - momentarily, at least; we do not see enough of what happens after to see if they feel guilt. But we do see that Janeway does. That should already tell us this is not right even in her mind. My opponent, for round two, has brought up a situation where one person was sacrificed in a situation of no alternatives, as a plane had to land to save the lives of many. This is not what happened here. Tuvix did not have to die. The crew of Voyager wanted him to die to bring back their friends. We can sympathize. But, outside of extreme emergency such as to save lives from future violence, we must not accept murder to bring out a desirable outcome. Recreating Tuvok and Neelix was not such. You may feel tempted to say so, but consider that they were already dead and thus not in a state where it can be considered to do them harm to remain dead. The beneficiaries here were the crew of the Voyager, the murderers. And consider the consequences of justifying this action. If, so casually, outside of an emergency situation, one life can be wilfully destroyed for the benefit of many, what kind of ethics are we left with? Will we accept the situation of sacrificing a child to harvest their organs to extend the life of others? We must emphasize that this was not self-sacrifice on Tuvix' part, where Spock said his maxim, it was death imposed on him to benefit the living. If we so casually disregard the value of life to benefit the many, why not pay for Voyager's return trip with the happiness of Seven of Nine in the episode "Think Tank"? Why not deliberately sacrifice the (somewhat intelligent) aliens to speed up Voyager's journey home in "Equinox", but instead hunt as criminals the ones who knowingly do so? Obviously this is against all Starfleet believes in - except in the case of Tuvix. The case of Tuvix is a remarkable lapse in ethics, but it happened. Will we now say we lament it, or will we "excuse" it, admitting our human right to live can be suspended at times to benefit others? I would not like to tell anyone to think so. As we now close I would like to ask the audience to not get trapped in issues of biology or emotions. What is most important here, what Starfleet has always held most dear, is ethics. I personally believe that while emotions are human, and wishing Tuvok and Neelix back is human, what is noblest in humanity is our capability for profound consideration, and our sense of ethics and justice. We may find many mitigating factors here, but fundamentally we must condemn this deadly breach of ethics on the crew's part for what it was, even though the outcome was consoling and favorable, because it represents a path we do not want to walk down. A path where any of you or I could be condemned to die to benefit others, despite our own wishes and rights, without a trial, and without justice, as Tuvix was. It is not a "slippery slope", it is a matter of the fundamentality and undeniability of human rights. Therefore we must now be crystal clear that we do not allow for even the possibility that such can be justified by circumstances. Thank you. (1) . http://en.memory-alpha.org...(2) . http://dictionary.law.com...