Last night, I watched the Star Trek Voyager episode Critical Care. In it, the Doctor is abducted into a hospital that is undersupplied & understaffed. He immediately gets to work helping the sick and lambasting the inequity of the hospital's coverage. The rich and powerful get top quality care; the poor get beds to die on. It turns out the hospital's resources are allocated by a computer (the Allocator), which calculates scores for each patient based on a consequentialist rubric. If you're the CEO of a fertilizer factory whose death would result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, you get a high score. If you work in the mines, game over.

The analogue is ambiguous. Is the Allocator like private healthcare - humane treatment for those who can afford it? Or is the Allocator like a planned economy - oppressively reductive in its metrification of human worth? Whatever the case, the hospital's administrator, Chellick, argues that the Allocator is necessary: prior to its instalment, health outcomes for his society were worse. His role in the system is to own the fact that public health ethics requires ugly sacrifices.

The Doctor resists the logic of his captors, eventually infecting Chellick with a fatal-if-not-treated disease and altering his bio-signature so that the Allocator will place him into the no-coverage tier of society. It's a bold move for a digital embodiment of the prime directive x hippocratic oath, but the gambit works, and Chellick promises to reform the system.^🐊 The Doctor is then rescued, but his conscience won't let him off so easily - on what basis were his own unethical actions justified?

I think the episode worked decently well. I'm definitely thinking about it more than most Trek I watch, but in part that's because I don't think it does a very good job at resolving the problems at its heart: what is the right mix of deontology to consequentialism? If it's at least some of the former, is it right to intervene in the affairs of societies you don't belong to?

The Doctor's position is that it is, and that the system is not deontological enough. High value members of society are getting prophylactic life-extending treatments with medicine that could otherwise save the lives of sick children. This is wrong.

But is it wrong because the Allocator is malfunctioning, or because its version of consequentialism is actually just a POSIWID caste system?

1. If extending this engineer's life won't actually save more lives than the medicine otherwise could, then the Allocator is being stupid, and the Doctor could just make the consequentialist appeal to fix it.
2. If the Allocator is working correctly and it was convincingly demonstrated that more people will die because of the Doctor's interventions^🔮, would we still think of him as the episode's hero?

Ultimately, we don't see if things improve or worsen for the colony — perhaps because doing so would implicitly legitimize the consequentialist framing, perhaps because they ran out of time (as these episodes often do.)

It's a shame, because I think doing so would have sharpened the discussion around the episode in other reviews I've read. People could have debated whether or not the Doctor was wrong in deciding for others, or without sufficient evidence; or what the right virtue ethics is. Instead, most comments focus on the socialism vs capitalism Rorschach blot and whether or not Canadians are dying because the waitlists for treatment are too long.

Nevertheless, "deontologist fights for deontology by violating deontology due to consequentialist justification" is a pretty hook. I just wish they'd hung on it a little more.

This movie should have been called Hisstopia because of how bad and about snakes it is.

I remember liking the first one as an effective buddy cop conspiracy with a lot of worldbuilding. This one's a complete rehash, but the main character's emotional progress has been inexplicably reset^🐇 which makes it feel somehow both painful and pointless to see her treat her best friend like shit for another entire movie (the main violation is that she consistently disregards his opinions and ignores his requests)

i saw superman yesterday. the plot is that lex luthor is up to no good.

(there will be uncensored spoilers throughout the rest of this thing.)

the film has a lot of funny movie logic, but basically does what it needs to do. i liked how perfunctorily the monsters of the week were treated, the excessive number of times superman stops what he's doing to stop something from falling on someone¹, and lex luthor's technique of beating superman by micromanaging bizarro from a mission control center with a walkie talkie.

the movie's g-rated and almost completely bloodless.² every time superman bodies someone, there's an obligatory chaser shot of the goon writhing around alively. the themes and characterization are accordingly light.³

afterwards, i was like "well, that was kind of bad but i also enjoyed myself"

but whence "that was kind of bad" ? were my expecations that this movie was going to be anything other than what it was? if i enjoyed myself, what's the actual problem?

i think it's that i actually have a secret fascination with the idea of superman, and am really curious about how other people run the thought experiment of "what would happen if one person had the ultimate monopoly on violence?" james gunn chose to write a dramatic story, not a polsci wargame, and so i was a little disappointed.

the superman movie i want to see is utilitarian superman hellbent on creating the conditions for global liberal democracy utopia.

some things he would do:

• throw all the nukes into the sun
• drop the worst guys into a volcano on live TV
• abduct all the world leaders and take them to an private island resort for 6 months where they have to microdose LSD and do team building exercises⁴
• launch a global journalism fund that creates multinational newsrooms around the world with a rigourous commitment to truth-finding, calling out corruption, and fostering a cooperative consensus of reality
• instruct all governments to implement a plan that will end all factory farming in 2 years
• create united nations v2, staffed by the recently reprogrammed world leaders, mandated to create a constitution that sets the rules for how superman can be democratically controlled from there on

and i think there are a tonne of ways you could complexify the plot for dramatic tension, if watching a rube goldberg machine isn't your thing:

• the slippery slope from superman smashing the killer drone factory in ukraine to intervening in light border skirmishes between india and pakistan to zipping around the philippine sea to search every fishing ship for weapons.
• the supermedia organization criticizing superman the most vocally, testing his commitment to the ideal of free speech
• arguments from citizens that authoritarianism is bad, no matter how benevolent it is (though this is a cliché found in every gritty comic book)
• moral leadership not filtering down into each country's institutions i.e. the CIA rejecting its proselyte president, and each tier of the state needing its own session at Camp PLUR
• phycisists and economists insisting he simply becomes a transitional power source

if you wanted to be extra cynical⁵, you could have the movie show superman's transformation from ambitious idealist to the very veidt-style existential threat that humanity unites to defeat, but i think i'd prefer the version where, despite some bumps and unintended consequences along the way, things mostly work out, and the world reaches a stable form of peace and prosperity.

i think that's the more subversive choice: taking superman's incorruptibility seriously and exploring what world peace might actually look like. to ask what if the real conflict isn't "will superman become evil" but "can humanity be forced to be free?"

that would be the real punk rock thing to do.⁶