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What Measure Is a Non-Human?/Live-Action TV/Star Trek: Difference between revisions
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** Carried even further, the right to vote was mentioned inside the episode. The Federation quite sensibly has no desire to extend suffrage to an easily-replicated computer program that can be given whatever personality, desires and values the programmer wants it to have (not to mention have its Ethics directory deleted with a push of a button). For what it's worth, the final decision is a bit of a subversion of the usual outcome: the court decides that the Doctor is ''not'' legally a "person". However, in a [[Pound of Flesh Twist]] twist, although the court declines to rule on whether he qualifies as a "person", he ''does'' qualify as an "artist", and therefore is granted ownership rights to his holonovel anyway. There have been instances of respecting non-Doctor holograms, though, such as Janeway putting the ship at risk to save the holographic town of Fair Haven. Except that the town's achievement of self-awareness was treated as a malfunction to be fixed--a malfunction specifically caused by running too long, the usual cause of sentient holograms.
*** Who says all holograms are created equal? The Doctor is obviously very powerful and sophisticated, but a combat practice hologram could be little more "intelligent" than an AI bot in a video game--a completely unliving set of routines with no consciousness or sensations.
*** Entire story arcs are dedicated to analyzing the status of holograms... and never really reach a satisfactory conclusion. Janeway actually breaks the [[Alien Non-Interference Clause|Prime Directive]] and buys off a [[Planet of Hats|entire race]] of [[Egomaniac Hunter|Egomaniac Hunters]] with hologram technology; they refine and develop the technology so the holograms feel pain, fear and rage. This makes [[AI Is a Crapshoot|AI a crapshoot with loaded dice]]; they [[Robot War|rebel and start killing every one of them they can find]]. The Doctor sympathizes with them, but a [[Moral Dissonance|truly disturbing conversation]] ensues where the "flesh and blood" characters blithely discuss modifying their programs in ways that could only be performed on organics via brain surgery. The Doctor defects, and it looks like a [[Wham! Episode]] awaits... then they [[Debate and Switch|render the whole plot moot]] by showing that the rebel holograms have gone [[Colonel Kilgore]]; they kill organics to "rescue" holograms no more intelligent than tricorders, then strand the hunters on a toxic moon to hunt them down themselves. They're rescued, the Doctor is forced to eat crow, and one of the "nice" hunters decides to pretend he's dead and "fix" the holograms.
* In a [http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/In_a_Mirror%2C_Darkly Mirror Universe] episode of ''[[Enterprise]]'', this trope is played with to an almost sadistic degree. The viewers get to see the crew torture an insect-like Tholian by lowering the temperature in its prison cell to uncomfortable depths. (Tholians naturally exist at extreme levels of heat and pressure.) To really drive it in, we get a close-up view as the creature explodes. What makes it worse is that the Tholians are fighting against the Federation and [[Humans Are Bastards|their cruelty towards non-humanoids]] in this Universe (for the record, there's ''no'' closeup as a helpless humanoid Gorn gets shot half a dozen times). Given the lurid special effects during the torture scene, this became a deeply [[Family-Unfriendly Aesop]] for many.
** It's the [[Mirror Universe]]. It's ''supposed'' to have the [[Family-Unfriendly Aesop]] regarding aliens.
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