Trek and presumed moral authority
I've been noodling about this since at least my rewatch of S1 of Picard and it has really crystalized with rewatching S1 of Discovery and now Starfleet Academy. The interesting thing about Starfleet Academy is that the presumption that what the characters, especially the students, are doing at any particular moment is supposed to be "empirically correct" has been fully abandoned.
Frequently, what the characters are doing is quite stupid and self defeating - which is a staple of the college dramedy genre but also something I've come to appreciate as I've reframed my expectations away from Starfleet Academy as an institution that selects for excellence and towards an institution that is creating excellence. In doing so, SFA is trying to balance the need to create disciplined officers with the reality of living beings who sometimes struggle with impulsivity, perverse incentives, or just acting on a poor understanding of the situation - ala Genesis in the most recent episode.
This is clearly a shift that not every fan from the linear TV days has been able to make. There's a sort of soft Puritanism, if not outright authoritarianism that assumes that there is a galaxy full of perfect specimens for SFA to select from who will never make foolish mistakes. Which of course ignores that the first time we are ever exposed to Starfleet cadets, its the training crew of the Enterprise in Wrath of Khan (bet you thought I was going to say Nova Squadron! I thought I was too and then I remembered...) many of whom, per Scotty, panicked and ran when the Enterprise took fire and Engineering began to explode around them. Now this wasn't an indictment, its mentioned a few times in the film that they are expecting more out of the cadets than they have any right to.
Nova and Red Squadrons are responsible for numerous fatalities from cadets incapable of realizing their own limits and succumbing to the mix of praise and expectations put upon them as "the best of the best."
At some point, we the audience, need to contend with the idea that we socially constructed the idea that Star Trek was a window into the future as if it were depicting a perfected society, rather than a society that exists to model a different kind of problem solving - but those problems have to exist in the first place to be solved. Sometimes those stories are just about hubris and straying from those values and that deliberative process.
So lets start with the rawest, most blunt examples:
Do we assume that Star Trek is depicting objective, empirically correct morality when....
Kirk arms an Indigenous tribe that is at war with a rival tribe that is also being armed by the Klingons?
Kirk fakes mental illness to take the Enterprise into the Neutral Zone to provoke a Romulan response that will position the Enterprise to capture a cloaking device?
Now you might say "We can't use the same moral reasoning with TOS that we use with TNG+! There was an intentional effort to steer more towards presenting a utopian society and perfected people!"
Okay fair! If we're centering Gene Roddenberry the most significant creative force driving Trek and how we analyze it, then we can't really fully separate out what we're seeing from the active choice to try to present the Federation as a more Liberal - Communist place (and I'm using those words with intentionality, Liberal in the sense that individual rights are hard wired into the law and the law exists to regulate behavior where individual self discipline and social conditioning falls short; and Communist in the Marxist sense where people have had unenlightened self interest and selfishness mostly conditioned out of them and are driven by altruism and practicality.)
This probably more than anything else has driven the tendency to think of Trek as a documentary of the future rather than a setting whose continuity and internal consistency is not irrelevant but is less important than telling an interesting story. Otherwise we wouldn't have quite so many murder - revenge vacations to contend with.
So lets revisit some of these:
Is the audience supposed to assume Worf has moral authority when he kills Duras? Or should we side with Picard when he is fuming over the impossible position he has been put in where his security chief just assassinated a foreign dignitary but because his actions were sanctioned under Klingon law and the new Klingon head of state now owes Worf a favor, Picard has to just kind of put up with it in order to not cause an international incident?
Is the audience supposed to assume Dax is the moral authority when she goes off with Kor, Koloth, and Kang to fight their way through an army of mercenaries and kill the Albino to fulfill an oath of vengeance sworn by a past host?
On one hand, we really should want our Starfleet/Federation characters to not make and break promises lightly.
On the other, how do we feel about very intentionally setting out to kill a violent criminal as a first priority as opposed to capturing him and bringing him to face some kind of trial? Even Kira, who has her own debts to settle from time to time, seems to think that vengeance and murder quests aren't the sort of thing that most people ought to set out on and that Kira herself is not strictly a better person for having these experiences and tendencies.
"But that's Old Trek!"
NuTrek being more comfortable with preemptive violence and dubiously moral deeds in general has become a real meme but the closer I look at it, the more I question whether this relative judgment: that NuTrek IS more comfortable with various -isms and violence as a solution than "Old" Trek is actually true. I'm much less confident too that the stuff that makes us queasy is meant to be taken as the morally correct decision.
Sometimes the answer seems to be yes and its very difficult to argue otherwise such as when Seven shows up to take vengeance on the Free Cloud gangsters. The way the moral dilemma was constructed, its hard to argue other than through Virtue Ethics that this wasn't "the right thing to do." This continues to sit very uneasily with me.
On the other hand, Discovery gets A LOT of unearned crap from people who either seem to didn't watch the show, or only half watched it and didn't really internalize the significance of what we were seeing. The crew spend much of S1 being manipulated by a Mirror Universe doppleganger in the context of a brutal interstellar war the Federation is decisively losing. Additionally, the infamous "Vulcan Hello" which is where I suspect a lot of people started their journey with Discovery and then promptly ended, was revealed to have been a catastrophic mistake and the season ends by reaffirming that Starfleet's prewar values are/were the correct ones.
Accusing newer stuff of lacking moral clarity while selectively remembering older stuff as having "more" or the correct moral clarity is easy but lazy, and we as fans ought to do better. Although to be honest, people who will have read this far are almost certainly the wrong audience and the people who are only participating in the fandom through hate watch YouTubes and reacting to memes aren't going to put their phones down and debate whether what they're seeing is being presented to them with moral authority or if they're meant to engage in conversation with it.
