A Problem with the Prime Directive

The trouble, though, is that even allowing for a level of human development that would prevent the most egregious human error (like relief workers introducing cholera into earthquake-striken Haiti) it's not always evident how to intervene, or whether one should. If there's an asteroid about to strike the planet, sure, that's pretty obvious and easy (and even in the show itself, that kind of situation wasn't an actual moral quandary -- if you can easily intervene without showing yourself to the locals, then the Prime Directive's not stopping you from doing so).

But mostly it'd be a choice between the best of potentially bad options. It's not really a lack of money or military might that makes situations like Syria so hard to resolve internationally. Even if your intervening civilization has a higher level of enlightenment than we do, I'm not sure what they could do to "fix" Egypt or North Korea or the Native American genocide (at least without severe side effects -- look how well it worked out with Iraq and Saddam Hussein).

And you're also going to have unintended consequences of seemingly innocuous acts, like: you'd think the smallpox vaccine would have been a pure unmitigated good, and it was mostly good, but it also led directly to a skyrocketing incidence of syphilis-related dementia and other late-stage syphilis symptoms. Turned out the high fevers of smallpox burned syphilis out of the body, so without that mechanism to keep it in check, it ran rampant in the later part of the 19th century.

Do you give people the antibiotics and explain about the germ theory of disease, and risk upsetting their entire traditional medicine and belief system? Do you give them guns to protect themselves from the giant rampaging predators on their planet, and come back in 50 years to find they're making war on each other instead? Or do you protect them from the predators yourself, and risk having them become dependent on you, not to mention the moral repugnance of treating them like children incapable of making their own decisions ...

Even if you are able to give them your medical or other beneficial technology without having any immediate repercussions, it will certainly change their direction as a people. Is that morally right?

Basically I can see why a far-future society might have plausibly come to the point where "you're going to have to work out your problems on your own" seemed like a more sensible option than a policy of unchecked interventionism.

I see your point, but I suspect that any species insufficiently socially developed to contact less advanced worlds safely, isn't going to be developed enough to know they shouldn't...

and yeah, given that humans are starting to develop warp drive, if I was president of some hypothetical galactic federation I'd be thinking of a minimum 50 light year evacuation and quarantine zone around our system.

Not doable. If we get out of our system before Arcturus goes nova, humans are guaranteed to find evidence of civilized, intelligent life.

Hmm, I wonder how hard it would be to trigger a star going nova if it's already heading that way.

I heard about a fascinating discussion in that respect. Some Indian women and South African women met to discuss political change, and one of the discussion points brought up was that, when political change occurs through violence, it sets a stage that "when you don't get what you want, you fight."

Obviously, that's a huge oversimplification of the situation. But it made me think deeply about a lot of things, most especially when is it right to fight? There was certainly a great deal of oppression and injustice in South Africa - was that "enough" reason to fight? Was it "better" or "worse" than what happened in India? Neither of these questions have objective answers. There are answers that are strongly appealing to various people, but no objective answers.

If I had the power to stop people from fighting, I'm not sure I'd have anywhere near the wisdom to use it. Especially - well, I heard one quote that I heartily approve of, "Peace is not the absence of fighting, but the presence of justice."

(Where "justice" is the notion that people should be treated fairly - I was stunned to learn that, and that, at a surprisingly high age. I'd mislearned it from context and never thought about it much.)

Well, I don't want to argue the point much, but I'd say the "presence of justice" could easily include "methods by which inevitable conflicts are non-abusively resolved". Hm. Oh. And, I'm thinking of "justice" as a living thing, a concept revered, rather than as an instantaneous "there is justice now, for as long as it lasts."