Morality


Recently, I have been really enjoying the Stargate seasons on DVD. When the show initially came out, I was in love with it because I loved the movie and all things “sci-fi” always tickle my fancy. Star Trek for example has been my all time favourite TV show, whether it was TNG, DS9 or Enterprise (although Voyager really tanked on my list of ST shows because, well, the acting was terrible, especially from their captain, and no it’s not because she was a female! And TOS? well, it was great, but nothing compares to TNG!). So now that we established that I love Star Trek, getting back to Stargate (SG-1), I have really been enjoying watching seasons after seasons, a great concept, you get to learn a lot about mythology because the writers of SG-1 did a great job of looking up the mythical legends from human history scattered throughout the world, regardless of the culture and putting them in their show, but every now and then, I can’t understand the issue of “morality” that comes up in the show. What is it about humans to judge everybody from their own moral standards? I admit, this is all fictious, but the question stands very much in our current world as well, why do we always judge people from our moral standards?

Let me give you an example based out of SG-1. So the episode in season 3, titled “Learning Curve” where SG-1 visits a planet where knowledge is harvested through its children. The way they do things is simple, they put sg1nannites into the brains of some chosen children and these children have increadibly superiour learning capabilities because of these nannites. At a certain age (the consensus seemed to be around 11-12), these nannites are “harvested” from these children in a ceremony called the Ovarium and these kids themselves feel honored to be part of this ceremony in order to help their civilization grow. Then the people on their planet receive one of these nannites and hence, whatever the kid learned becomes part of everybody receiving these nannites. Once the nannites are removed, these children are back to their normal self, of course not knowing everything that they learned while the nannites were in there and they are well taken care of by their society. So, SG-1 comes in, raises the moral issues about how this is not how humans deal with their children and we don’t do anything to harm them at all. The people on this planet insist that they don’t harm their children at all and this is how their society grows. As a matter of fact, the spokesperson from this planet had his own son go through “Ovarium” during the episode and said he was proud of his son. Point being, why did we have to judge what they do internally based on how we do things? Yes, I agree it’s fiction, there is no planet like this, there is no inter-planetary travel and there is no judging any other race…. ah wait a second! There is judging of “other races”, right here, on our little blue ball of marvel, yes, the planet Earth that is. But why? What makes us think we are morally superior than any other race? What makes any race say that? On what scale, level, balance are these things being judged and by whose authority? And then again, who says this authority is a valid authority?

Tell you what, I have no answers for this. Just my mind bumbling through some thoughts.


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