All Hail Megatron # 15, Mind the trouser-shards, and watch out for Kup & Percy Options

[Jack Cade]

Humans possess empathy for other beings for very logical reasons. There is not this chasm between logic and being nice to people. It can be perfectly logical to be nice to other people, for no other reason but to be nice to them! IT CAN BE LOGICAL TO BE ALTRUISTIC.

I'm not sure I entirely follow your thinking, but it sounds like you're conflating internal and external logic - or rather species-related logic and individual-related logic. From an individual point of view, altruism is an end to itself. If you're being 'nice' to someone or 'caring' about them in order to further some other ambition or aim, it ain't altruism. So altruism, while not being illogical, is not truly logical. Logic has to relate to means, not ends.

Sure, caring for someone else is logical from a species point of view, where it's part of the equation that leads to survival, but that doesn't mean it's a logical course of action in any given situation.

Put it this way: Prowl isn't exactly going to say: "Well, actually it's OK for Hot Rod, Ratchet and co to be completely reckless because their heart over mind mentality is part of the rich tapestry that helps to ensure our species' survival. So I'll just let it carry on unhindered."

If all you're saying is that logic isn't an evil trait, I'm sure we all agree, but I don't think that's the message in these fictional scenarios you're talking about. The message is more likely: 'logic needs to be tempered with an awareness of the emotional parameters. What are you actually trying to achieve and is it all for nought if your "logical" approach betrays your higher principles'? The 'dumb fictional cliche' just might sometimes be the result of clearer thinking than you're giving the issue!

This post has been edited by Jack Cade: Sep 26 2009, 05:29 PM

[Jack Cade]

How can you not think it's wrong? There's no denying that if it helps people listen to Prowl enough to win the war, then it's correct from a logical standpoint, but it's still wrong in the emotional sense of caring about someone enough to not violate their personality and free will.

It's this 'violate their personality and free will' thing that's hazy for me. Military organisations basically do this on a daily basis to increase the chance of their soldiers' survival. What we call 'training' is, in many contexts, adjusting someone's personality the only way we know how. I don't think that's entirely right, but I'm not sure I think it's entirely wrong. Doing it to one guy whose had a long, long life (not to mention a second shot at life) in order to hopefully save innumerable others strikes me as one of those tough decisions that might just turn out to be justified.

This post has been edited by Jack Cade: Sep 26 2009, 05:37 PM

[Jeysie]

Military organisations basically do this on a daily basis to increase the chance of their soldiers' survival. What we call 'training' is, in many contexts, adjusting someone's personality the only way we know how. I don't think that's entirely right, but I'm not sure I think it's entirely wrong.

That's not against your free will, though. You know from the get-go that when you show up for military training, you're consenting to be trained into a soldier, which might alter your personality. That's entirely different from someone mucking about in your head without your knowing about it because he thinks he knows better than you do how you should act, when you gave no consent to such possible procedures beforehand.

Doing it to one guy whose had a long, long life (not to mention a second shot at life) in order to hopefully save innumerable others strikes me as one of those tough decisions that might just turn out to be justified.

Just because you have to do something ethically wrong to ensure a greater good, doesn't make it not ethically wrong. It just means you have to do it anyway while knowing it's wrong.

This post has been edited by Jeysie: Sep 26 2009, 07:23 PM

[Jack Cade]

You make some good points. But I'm not sure about this 'free choice' that soldiers supposedly have. I think the way military service is sold to people, it's not that apparent that their minds are going to be reshaped the way they can be. And that goes for any organisation that demands a high level of cohesion or expects a certain kind of behaviour from its employee. It can change you in ways you didn't anticipate or sign up for.

As to the ethical side of it, I'm not sure it's so ethically wrong to do something to someone that won't harm them in any way and might even help preserve their life. We confine people to mental hospitals in order to keep them and the public safe from themselves, which is surely worse.

This post has been edited by Jack Cade: Sep 26 2009, 06:10 PM

[MrBlud]

As to the ethical side of it, I'm not sure it's so ethically wrong to do something to someone that won't harm them in any way and might even help preserve their life. We confine people to mental hospitals in order to keep them and the public safe from themselves, which is surely worse.

I don't think being locked up in a mental hospital for an indeterminate length of time would be quite as harmless as you seem to think it would be.

[Col. Jupiter]

In more practical terms, being pleasant to others is logical because maintaining a stable position in society increases the likelihood that you'll be supported should the need arises. People are more likely to help those they like, after all.

[Jeysie]

As to the ethical side of it, I'm not sure it's so ethically wrong to do something to someone that won't harm them in any way and might even help preserve their life.

Altering your way of thinking via a procedure you didn't consent to constitutes "harm" where I come from. And in this case, the question of whether Kup's way of thinking (outside of his radiation addiction) was "dangerous to society" is a subjective matter.

Plus, how do you know that what you think will help won't end up harming instead? Especially when it comes to "fixing" someone who's not necessarily messed up from a general perspective, only from the perspective of the specific individual who orders the treatment. Rosemary Kennedy, for example.

[Dinogrrl]

Not to derail the logic/altruism/personal rights discussion, but I just wanted to comment on Total Biscuit's re-interpretation of the Perceptor story. At first blush, that is a very sneaky way of reading that story, but it gives too much credit to Denton. I believe he is intending to follow Shane's interpretation fairly closely, that being a depiction of the 'effects of war' on people. Shane commented in his interview thread that Perceptor's change was in reaction to the trauma he suffered at the hands/gun of whoever the hell that Decepticon is, can't remember his name. He noted that the old Perceptor had gone on walkabout, and that if you got shot in the chest and head you'd probably not be feeling all happy either.

This points towards an intention of having his change be psychological in nature, which is in keeping with the general emo nature of most of the Autobots in AHM. Denton strongly supports Shane's writing, so I think his intention in AHM 15 was to continue with Shane's notion that psychological trauma in war can dramatically change people and not usually for the prettier.

Yes, that means the story is much simpler than your explanation - Percy's having PTSD or something and making like Rambo as a way of responding.

Also, the more I think about it, the more overly complicated the 'lying' explanation becomes. It's too convoluted, and there are absolutely bugger all hints about it in the story itself. It would also degrade the 'paying back a debt' notion that was being hammered home (seriously, how many times was debt mentioned in that story?), particularly from Drift. I don't think Denton would write anything that would disrespect Drift and therefore Shane in any way. I think the whole "warriors' debt" thing is meant entirely seriously. Denton is down with Shane's ideas for the TF's and that's why we get such a pissweak story. In the shadow of the Roche story, it's tempting to upgrade Denton's so you don't feel like you got only half a comic for the money, but unfortunately, that's exactly what happened.

The two stories read like they were written with absolutely NO interaction between the two authors. There are just too many disconnects between them to be believably linked. And I'm buggered if I'm going to fanwank my way into a knot to fix that.

[Total Biscuit]

I really don't think Tipton would have been writing it that way either, given the enormous continuity gaff and general daftness of most of the dialogue in his piece.

It's more that I hope Roche will change Perceptors reasons in Last Stand, based on how much page space Roche gave to letting us, the reader know Perceptor is in on Prowls plot, and the 'real' reason he's with Kup, and Prowl stating Perceptor is the least warlike, flying in the face of the established Sniperer Perceptor from AHM, and how he's going to have to do unsavoury things to achieve peace in this.

The fact that the Perceptor in Lost and Found doesn't work with the motivations of Sniperer Perceptor as we know them, and that if he turned out to be lying, it would tie into Lost and Found but not actually contradict continuity, just writer intent that never made it to the page, is what got me wondering.

I fully admit it's wishful thinking, but Roche has already shown he can take a total mess, and make things 100% better, by giving us a better perspective to view events from, and give characters better and more interesting motivations without breaking canon, so I really hope something like that occurs.

This post has been edited by Total Biscuit: Sep 27 2009, 03:50 AM

[Jeysie]

It's more that I hope Roche will change Perceptors reasons in Last Stand, based on how much page space Roche gave to letting us, the reader know Perceptor is in on Prowls plot, and the 'real' reason he's with Kup, and Prowl stating Perceptor is the least warlike, flying in the face of the established Sniperer Perceptor from AHM, and how he's going to have to do unsavoury things to achieve peace in this.

I don't think Perceptor being the least warlike necessarily flies in the face of Snipeceptor as a concept. Like I've seen some folks say, it makes sense that if Percy's stuck being around a warrior like Kup, he is forced to be able to defend himself, and being a marksman certainly makes your violence more efficient and "removed" if you have to do it.

The problem is instead that Percy seems to be doing it because he thinks being a scientist is useless in a war, staying in the lab is a waste of time, because he has a debt to pay to Drift, yadda. If he had been written by McCarthy and Tipton as doing it simply as a self-defense measure when a specific situation requires him being in harm's way, while still attending to his science duties the rest of the time, it would make sense just fine and even be kind of cool. (Let's face it, the fact that Percy is an amiable die-hard scientist who nonetheless has a powerful hyper-accurate light cannon sitting on his shoulder is something that rarely gets used in fiction. I wouldn't mind a bit if it got used in a way that was actually in-character.)

[Jack Cade]

I don't think being locked up in a mental hospital for an indeterminate length of time would be quite as harmless as you seem to think it would be.

I didn't say or imply it would be harmless, Mr Blud. I described it as 'worse' than what Prowl did to Kup, the point being that it is nevertheless generally accepted that psychiatric wards perform a positive social function, now that we understand mental illness a little better and have more civilised means of treating it. So it can be the case that keeping someone confined to a hospital for a time - if they have suicidal tendencies, for example - is the best thing you can do for them, even though it's against their will. That's not to say, I hope you appreciate, that they don't royally stuff things up sometimes as well or that we don't still have some disturbingly ignorant and careless attitudes towards the mentally ill.

Altering your way of thinking via a procedure you didn't consent to constitutes "harm" where I come from. And in this case, the question of whether Kup's way of thinking (outside of his radiation addiction) was "dangerous to society" is a subjective matter.

On the former issue: I'd confine 'harm' to something that causes you mental or physical suffering, or means you're more likely to experience mental or physical suffering, or brings you closer to the grave. I think you're using 'harm' in this sense just to mean 'unethical' again. As far as I can see, Prowl's procedure isn't going to hurt Kup or shorten his life, which takes us back to the question: is it unethical merely to manipulate someone against their will?

Transformers being what they are, they are more mechanically malleable than us. So I don't equate what Prowl did with, say, directly poking around in a human's brain any more than I equate what Perceptor did to himself with artificially grafting extra muscles to his arms and gluing a monocle to his eye. I think it's more like all sorts of measures we can think of human beings taking in desperate circumstances that fit into the moral grey area. For example, putting a gun to someone's head to stop someone important being arrested (as in Battlestar Galactica) or lying to someone in order to get them to go along with a vital plan that they would never otherwise agree to. Covert operations squads in the police basically lie to people for a living, in order to infiltrate social circles and tease out information. What Prowl did, to my mind, is similar to these means of manipulation but with a sci-fi twist.

I also maintain that none of us really consent to the way our personalities are altered by dominant forces in our lives, so the question of having a 'will' as to whether or not you want to be changed by other people is slightly moot.

On the second issue: I assumed that the only reason Prowl did what he did is because he thought Kup either reckless or indulgent of recklessness, which - I have to completely agree with Prowl here - is extremely costly and foolish in a real army. What Prowl should be able to do, by rights, is demote Kup and discharge characters like Hot Rod and Springer from service, since he obviously feels they pose a danger to themselves and their men. Unfortunately, in a desperate situation he doesn't have that option.

[Jeysie]

So it can be the case that keeping someone confined to a hospital for a time - if they have suicidal tendencies, for example - is the best thing you can do for them, even though it's against their will.

There's a big difference between forcing someone into treatment whose mental state is actively harming themselves or others, and treating someone just because you don't like the way they act.

While I agree with Prowl that the maverick tendencies of folks like Grimlock and Springer are bad in the long run, said behavior isn't necessarily looked down upon by the rest of Autobot society. I definitely empathize with Prowl that it gets frustrating when you're trying to do things the calm logical way and everyone else is running off half-cocked in some manner (believe me, I empathize), but outright forcing people to do things your way against their will when no one else has a problem with the status quo is a very, very dubious way to handle it.

On the former issue: I'd confine 'harm' to something that causes you mental or physical suffering, or means you're more likely to experience mental or physical suffering, or brings you closer to the grave.

If I found out someone had altered my personality in a way I didn't consent to, that would certainly cause me mental suffering even if the change itself was technically positive.

As far as I can see, Prowl's procedure isn't going to hurt Kup or shorten his life, which takes us back to the question: is it unethical merely to manipulate someone against their will?

IMHO, yes it is.

Sometimes it's necessary, as in some of the scenarios you suggested. But we end up coming back to, "Just because it's necessary doesn't mean it isn't still wrong".

[Jack Cade]

There's a big difference between forcing someone into treatment whose mental state is actively harming themselves or others ...

But that's what Prowl, at least, believes is occurring. He makes it clear that the reckless streak in Autobots, which Kup presumably indulges and acts as a figurehead to, is leading directly to multiple fatalities. The effect is rather like threatening an officer with dishonourable discharge if they don't clean up their act and obey certain protocols, except Prowl is forced to go about it in a clandestine way, presumably because no Autobot would take such a threat seriously. How else do you run an army where discipline can't be maintained by getting rid of the bad apples?

I agree it's dubious, but dubious, for me, is in between good and bad.

"Just because it's necessary doesn't mean it isn't still wrong".

I'm not sure I agree with that. Something necessary may not be 'right', but 'wrong' surely implies that there was a better alternative. If something is necessary, that suggests such a choice doesn't exist. If I had to shoot someone innocent to save many more, I'd agree that that action can't be described as morally right. However, I'd have difficulty with accepting I'd done something morally wrong. I don't think everything has to fit into that dichotomy.

This post has been edited by Jack Cade: Sep 27 2009, 08:12 AM

[Jeysie]

But that's what Prowl, at least, believes is occurring. He makes it clear that the reckless streak in Autobots, which Kup presumably indulges and acts as a figurehead to, is leading directly to multiple fatalities.

In this case Prowl is right, but he may not always be right. And I have far too much experience with situations where people thought they knew best when they really, really didn't. Forcing someone into something "for their own good" is a matter where you have to tread carefully.

If I had to shoot someone innocent to save many more, I'd agree that that action can't be described as morally right. However, I'd have difficulty with accepting I'd done something morally wrong. I don't think everything has to fit into that dichotomy.

Because it says something about you, basically. Even if Prowl was 100% right and justified, it means if anyone else found out, they'd know he's willing to stoop to mucking around controlling them if he doesn't think they match his image of an ideal Autobot properly. It shows you're the kind of person who would do that sort of thing.

[Walky]

Because it says something about you, basically. Even if Prowl was 100% right and justified, it means if anyone else found out, they'd know he's willing to stoop to mucking around controlling them if he doesn't think they match his image of an ideal Autobot properly. It shows you're the kind of person who would do that sort of thing.

It shows that Jack Cade is the kind of person willing to sacrifice one innocent life for several other innocent lives? Wow, he's a monster!

[Jeysie]

It shows that Jack Cade is the kind of person willing to sacrifice one innocent life for several other innocent lives? Wow, he's a monster!

Depends on which innocent life's POV you're looking at it from, don't it now? (Also, that was a general "you", not directed at Jack as the "you".)

This post has been edited by Jeysie: Sep 27 2009, 10:42 AM

[Esser-Z]

It shows that Jack Cade is the kind of person willing to sacrifice one innocent life for several other innocent lives? Wow, he's a monster!

Depends on which innocent life's POV you're looking at it from, don't it now?

From an outside point of view, sacrificing one innocent so that a greater number of innocents can survive is a better choice!

[Database]

You know, its rather nice to once again have a real discussion about a TF comic, rather then various comments of how much its ruined our favorite things...

[Jeysie]

From an outside point of view, sacrificing one innocent so that a greater number of innocents can survive is a better choice!

Once again, I never said it's a choice that shouldn't be made if it's the only way. It just is hardly ideal, and it takes a certain type of person to be willing to get over their morals and do that sort of thing, even if it's justified. On the one hand, you appreciate that someone can make those hard choices, but on the other hand you wonder if maybe next time you or a loved one will be the person who has to get sacrificed.

Plus, I find it very dubious that this instance even falls into that category. It honestly comes off as a little petulant. "Fine, if I can't get anyone to listen to me, I'll make them listen to me." He could accomplish pretty much the same effect by trying to find a way to sell his philosophy to someone with enough charisma to espouse it. He just can't figure out how to do so due to being a tad lacking in the social department, so he throws up his hands and tells Perceptor to force someone into buying his philosophy.

Prowl's intentions might be in the right place, but I find it hard to really think his methodology is 100% justifiable. (And I get the feeling that's the whole point of the story. It wouldn't be nearly as interesting if Prowl didn't do something dubious that created that emotional tension, would it?)

You know, its rather nice to once again have a real discussion about a TF comic, rather then various comments of how much its ruined our favorite things...

It's nice to have a TF comic lately that's got a good enough story to actually discuss rather than be disappointed in. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon-arcee.gif)

[Walky]

From an outside point of view, sacrificing one innocent so that a greater number of innocents can survive is a better choice!

Once again, I never said it's a choice that shouldn't be made if it's the only way. It just is hardly ideal, and it takes a certain type of person to be willing to get over their morals and do that sort of thing, even if it's justified. On the one hand, you appreciate that someone can make those hard choices, but on the other hand you wonder if maybe next time you or a loved one will be the person who has to get sacrificed.

I agree! For example, I am totally steering clear of the kind of people who were on United Airlines flight 93. Sure, they sacrificed the lives of the innocent people on their flight to save the lives of whoever their terrorist hijackers had in mind, which is sort of okay, I guess? If you look at it rationally. But what kind of horrible, secret jackass could pull that sort of heroism off? Me or my family might be next on the chopping block, randomly giving our lives for some other, larger group of people, at the sole whim of these monsters.