The Ethics of Star Trek
Aug. 2nd, 2013 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWhat is the ethical and moral foundation espoused by the various Star Trek series and movies? This book aims to find out.
This reads like an introductory college ethics/philosophy course if all of the examples were Trek episodes. It’s fairly obvious it was written and published in response to The Physics of Star Trek and the trend that book started. But that doesn’t make it a bad book. For one thing, I took ethics and philosophy classes in undergrad and b-school because I find the material interesting. If you don’t want anything particularly in-depth but are interested in a little survey of ethical philosophies, it’s a decent choice.
For another thing, it’s a fairly deep meta-analysis of how different moral philosophies can be embodied by the characters of the first four Star Trek series and various movies (Insurrection is the last one mentioned), which obviously wasn’t intended by the original writers of those episodes, so is therefore a gigantic fanwank. Depending on the topic, I can be a big fan of such things.
I commented earlier that this book (and watching Into Darkness) have made me interested in rewatching TNG and DS9 on Amazon Instant Streaming. There are a few episodes that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go looking for (such as Worf-centric episodes of DS9, which tended to pull me in less) until I was reminded of them here.
Overall: I ended up enjoying this a lot more than I had expected. I feel like I lost interest in Trek for a while (I didn’t even watch the final season of Enterprise), but I’ve been feeling the urge again lately.
This reads like an introductory college ethics/philosophy course if all of the examples were Trek episodes. It’s fairly obvious it was written and published in response to The Physics of Star Trek and the trend that book started. But that doesn’t make it a bad book. For one thing, I took ethics and philosophy classes in undergrad and b-school because I find the material interesting. If you don’t want anything particularly in-depth but are interested in a little survey of ethical philosophies, it’s a decent choice.
For another thing, it’s a fairly deep meta-analysis of how different moral philosophies can be embodied by the characters of the first four Star Trek series and various movies (Insurrection is the last one mentioned), which obviously wasn’t intended by the original writers of those episodes, so is therefore a gigantic fanwank. Depending on the topic, I can be a big fan of such things.
I commented earlier that this book (and watching Into Darkness) have made me interested in rewatching TNG and DS9 on Amazon Instant Streaming. There are a few episodes that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go looking for (such as Worf-centric episodes of DS9, which tended to pull me in less) until I was reminded of them here.
Overall: I ended up enjoying this a lot more than I had expected. I feel like I lost interest in Trek for a while (I didn’t even watch the final season of Enterprise), but I’ve been feeling the urge again lately.
