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Post by nucleusofswarm on Dec 15, 2017 18:51:30 GMT
What would your answer be to 4's famous dilemma in Genesis, and why?
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Post by Timelord007 on Dec 16, 2017 9:37:34 GMT
I'd do it, i think the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 16, 2017 21:22:48 GMT
I wouldn't do it!
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Post by themeddlingmonk on Dec 16, 2017 21:24:16 GMT
I’d probably do it
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Post by tardybox on Dec 16, 2017 21:52:40 GMT
In my head - I'd probably justify that destroying Davros' abhorrent experiments and preventing the existence of an alien force that will kill billions over the millennia of its existence was a moral act. I could see how right and logical it would sound, especially if it saved the lives of the innocent.
In action - I doubt I could do it. I don't know that I could bring myself to *actually* kill another sentient being, especially not en masse.
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Post by jasonward on Dec 16, 2017 22:09:44 GMT
I could do it, wouldn't bother me at all given that I know they are Daleks, even if it meant the complete genocide of them.
As to do I have the right? Nope, no such right exists, and nobody has the right, I just have my moral judgement.
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Post by charlesuirdhein on Dec 16, 2017 23:42:10 GMT
I wouldn't, but the War Charlesuirdhein would
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Post by elkawho on Dec 17, 2017 0:31:47 GMT
I'd do it. In a heartbeat. (heartsbeat?) And I don't think I would think twice. I think about the horror he caused creating those terrible creatures, and the horror to come. I would definitely do it.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 17, 2017 0:56:35 GMT
I guess the point The Doctor makes though is that he knows what good also comes. What alliances are forged. What races don't fight each other because they have to fight together against the Daleks. Context for a time-traveller isn't as easy as it is for us, or Sarah who acts as our stand-in in that scene.
Could I do it...yes. Though I'd hope to have the courage to think twice. It's easy after the show and BF have given us a billion and one blown up Daleks to struggle to remember that, yes, it truly would be genocide. The Eccleston Doctor couldn't do it either. "Coward every time" he said. I'd hope to have the bravery to be a coward. And the consience to live with either decision.
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Post by Star Platinum on Dec 17, 2017 3:59:58 GMT
I would hope that I'd have the courage not to do it, but if it came down to a choice of myself or the Doctor do it.
I'd do it for the Doctor, I would want to keep his hands clean, I'd make that sacrifice.
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Post by mrperson on Dec 17, 2017 17:44:16 GMT
I suspect I would probably do it.
I suspect I'd very likely do it.
It's been a while since I watched Genesis, but doesn't even the Doctor change his mind later and try to return to do it? (And then, fittingly enough, a Dalek ends up doing it anyway).
Though now that I say that, it wouldn't have actually destroyed the Daleks if he had set off the explosives the first time around, would it? Doesn't the speech come in the last or second to last serial or something - and there are already plenty of Daleks about the place by that point?
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Post by Deleted on Dec 17, 2017 17:46:02 GMT
I'd do it. But would undoubtedly find the consequences hard to live with.
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Post by relativetime on Dec 17, 2017 18:57:21 GMT
I'm sure if I'd just witnessed the deaths of the people I loved and cared about personally, I'd do it in a heartbeat as an act of vengeance. But I think somewhere down the road in the future, I'd feel a bit disgusted with myself. Good brought at the cost of going against my own morals. The ends justifying the means. What would that say about what I believe in and what I think is good and right? Diplomacy over violence?
However, in the situation the Doctor was in, where the last deaths of his companions to the Daleks took place a few regenerations ago, I think I would have been able to think more rationally about the situation. It's still a difficult one, and there's still the deaths of the countless innocents weighing on my shoulders, but it's a little less personal in this instance, I think. Plus, in real life, I haven't lost anyone I deeply care about to the Daleks, so assuming I'm exactly as I am now - with the understanding that I either joined a time traveller or time travelled myself at the behest of the Time Lords - I wouldn't have that much of a history with the Daleks themselves. So, maybe that conflict of morals would be more present and maybe I'd think of all the good that also came from peoples being brought together to defend themselves from the Daleks and the peace that wouldn't have emerged on their worlds if their determination to never become like the Daleks hadn't been there.
Even assuming I did have a personal history with the Daleks like the Doctor, I still have to think from the perspective of someone who'd time travelled back to the point of the Daleks' creation and what my decision would do. It'd definitely create a paradox, which the Time Lords were most certainly aware of and willing to accept, but the consequences that could have on me and everyone I knew might be severe. I doubt the Time Lords would have cared much what happened to the Doctor and his friends afterward, so I doubt they'd care much about me. Would the Doctor take Sarah home to find out that everything has changed? Maybe UNIT doesn't exist in this timeline because the aliens displaced by the Daleks' influence never invaded. Maybe Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright never stayed with the Doctor because there were no Daleks to face.
And maybe the Doctor himself is different. We know from Into the Dalek that the Daleks had a profound effect on the Doctor that helped make him the Time Lord he is today. So, what if he never encountered them? Would some of what we consider to be the Doctor today be lost? And what if the absence of the Daleks leads to something worse threatening the Universe? The Eminence is just one example, but how about the Doctor himself? What if the Doctor from Full Fathom Five is a Doctor who never discovered who he was or what he stood for because he never met the Daleks? And then we have to also consider the Time Lords as a whole. They've just erased what would become arguably their only major threat. What is there to stop them now?
I think the Daleks place in the Doctor Who universe is entirely equal to that of the Nazis in real life. They committed horrible acts of evil and ruined the lives of millions. It's entirely understandable and even reasonable to want to wipe them from history. But a lot of their evil also helped define what we consider good today. I think without the Nazis, Germany might not be as it is today and neither would so many other countries that refused to allow their versions of the Nazis come to power because of what the actual Nazis had done. I think there's reason to criticize our relationship to the Nazis nowadays and perhaps say their impact has been weakened by their overbearing presence in mainstream media as the bad guys of movies, comic books, and more; but in the grand historical scheme of things, we're still a lot more cautious and alert to ever even approaching the level of evil the Nazis embraced.
I'm really overthinking this, probably, and I think this was all a roundabout - and rambling - way to say, "too tough to be for certain."
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Post by elkawho on Dec 18, 2017 5:33:24 GMT
I've been reading so many of the posts in this thread and have wondered why I don't have as hard a time with the moral question as some. I'm a good person, I don't believe in murder, so why am I so certain that I would do it without any remorse? Then I think about my personal history, or at least my parents'. I am first generation American. The child of a Holocaust survivor, my mother. And while my father left Poland before it, his ENTIRE TOWN was "cleansed" of Jews. The second most highly populated Jewish city in Poland, and every single one of them was murdered, including all of my father's family that had stayed. Would I kill Mengele? Would I kill Hitler? Absolutely, and history be damned. (Although then my mother wouldn't have left Germany and met my father, so I never would have been born to kill Hitler. Ah, the paradox!)
In the Doctor Who universe, the Daleks are so much worse. Again, I would do it in a heartbeat.
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shutupbanks
Castellan
There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.
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Post by shutupbanks on Dec 18, 2017 5:43:14 GMT
I've been reading so many of the posts in this thread and have wondered why I don't have as hard a time with the moral question as some. I'm a good person, I don't believe in murder, so why am I so certain that I would do it without any remorse? Then I think about my personal history, or at least my parents'. I am first generation American. The child of a Holocaust survivor, my mother. And while my father left Poland before it, his ENTIRE TOWN was "cleansed" of Jews. The second most highly populated Jewish city in Poland, and every single one of them was murdered, including all of my father's family that had stayed. Would I kill Mengele? Would I kill Hitler? Absolutely, and history be damned. (Although then my mother wouldn't have left Germany and met my father, so I never would have been born to kill Hitler. Ah, the paradox!) In the Doctor Who universe, the Daleks are so much worse. Again, I would do it in a heartbeat. Yeah, this falls under the, "But criminals will always find a way to get guns," response to gun control for me, in that yes, some people will probably still die, but not as many and not as often and not as horribly. You had the right, Doctor.
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Post by acousticwolf on Dec 18, 2017 9:07:36 GMT
Not being as morally brave as the Doctor (or just amoral possibly), and knowing all the pain, death and destruction that would be caused by the Daleks ... I think to myself "how could I not do it"?
Cheers
Tony
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Post by jasonward on Dec 18, 2017 9:28:03 GMT
I've been reading so many of the posts in this thread and have wondered why I don't have as hard a time with the moral question as some. I'm a good person, I don't believe in murder, so why am I so certain that I would do it without any remorse? Then I think about my personal history, or at least my parents'. I am first generation American. The child of a Holocaust survivor, my mother. And while my father left Poland before it, his ENTIRE TOWN was "cleansed" of Jews. The second most highly populated Jewish city in Poland, and every single one of them was murdered, including all of my father's family that had stayed. Would I kill Mengele? Would I kill Hitler? Absolutely, and history be damned. (Although then my mother wouldn't have left Germany and met my father, so I never would have been born to kill Hitler. Ah, the paradox!) In the Doctor Who universe, the Daleks are so much worse. Again, I would do it in a heartbeat. I've wondered the same thing, for the same reasons, but I don't have the background you do, I'm not aware of any part of my family being persecuted and murdered, so why am I so clear that I could and would kill the Daleks? I think it comes down to a decision I made a long time ago, which is that if I felt my life was about to be taken then my fight back would be all or nothing (I kill you, or you kill me). I know the Daleks would kill me as soon as look at me, as such I grant them the same.
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Post by theotherjosh on Dec 18, 2017 14:36:28 GMT
There have been a lot of good points raised here already.
Should it be done? Yeah, I think it should. Could I personally overcome my failings to do it? I don't know. There’s quite a gap between having the intellectual understanding that something needs to be done and actually going through with the deed.
One of my favorite television shows of all time is Avatar: The Last Airbender and near the end of the run the main character is trying to work through the fact that he’s probably going to have to kill someone to stop a war. He seeks the advice of previous Avatars and one of them tells him: “Here is my wisdom for you: selfless duty calls for you to sacrifice your own spiritual needs, and do whatever it takes to protect the world.”
I think the same principle applies here. It’s not often that committing genocide is the moral choice, but the decision is framed in such a way that NOT committing genocide is effectively the immoral choice. There is no questioning that genocide is a monstrous crime. There is a reason that Article Seven permits no exceptions. But if I had the absolute certainty of a time traveler and I knew as absolute fact that the Daleks would be irredeemable mass murderers on a universal scale, well…you just have to do it and live with a stain on your soul.
It’s worth noting that the Doctor got over his compunctions about genocide later in life. Insert your own Vervoid joke here, but the Fourth Doctor also killed the last Osirian and the last Kastrian.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 18, 2017 23:50:17 GMT
There have been a lot of good points raised here already. Should it be done? Yeah, I think it should. But what if the Daleks by being mass murders kept others from becoming mass murderers? So by stopping Daleks in their tracks and annihilating them completely you've then allowed other genocidal maniacs to develop and have a free hand? Committing genocide to stop genocide doesn't make any sense logically, as if races committing genocide are evil, then committing genocide to stop them is equally evil. Although I'd imagine Daleks don't actually consider themselves as being evil, they just think they are doing what needs to be done. Seek, locate, exterminate...
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Post by jasonward on Dec 19, 2017 0:07:26 GMT
There have been a lot of good points raised here already. Should it be done? Yeah, I think it should. But what if the Daleks by being mass murders kept others from becoming mass murderers? So by stopping Daleks in their tracks and annihilating them completely you've then allowed other genocidal maniacs to develop and have a free hand? Committing genocide to stop genocide doesn't make any sense logically, as if races committing genocide are evil, then committing genocide to stop them is equally evil. Although I'd imagine Daleks don't actually consider themselves as being evil, they just think they are doing what needs to be done. Seek, locate, exterminate... So many points here. First of all, evil the way you have it here is an absolute, which means evil isn't a moral judgement at all, it's just a thing that exists out there in the universe somewhere, but that's not what evil is, evil is a moral judgement, you, I and everyone get to choose what is evil, that choice means there is no logical paradox as you state it. Secondly, even if you choose to say it's all evil, you still get to say if one evil is more evil than the other, again, a moral judgement, you can still make the lesser of two evils your choice. Thirdly, what if, what if, what if, you cannot know, you are ALWAYS going to have to make a decision without the full facts, you can never know the full facts, even The Doctor with the Tardis and perhaps the ability to go back and redo previous choices, will NEVER have the full facts, so again a judgement call.
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