Philosophy & Star Trek

SOPHIA Roanoke is happening again, this time with a Philosophy & Star Trek series:

I’m late to get the fliers printed, and I’m too worn out from this week and blissed out from my massage to really do much other than send texts. I miss Kinko’s.

Seminar: The Prime Directive and Consequence

If you see a society suffering and you have the means to help it, do you have a moral obligation to intervene?

This is the intersection of Utility and the Prime Directive, and it gets to the heart of the idea of eudaimonia, the ancient Greek notion of happiness. Eudaimonia is the underpinning for all Aristotelian ethics, but what does it mean to flourish? What moral mandates do we have to interve when someone is not flourishing? When a system is failing? When a society is acting in ways that we percieve as impeding the florishing of its citizens?

What is the Prime Directive, and what is its relationship --if any -- to eudaimonia? To ethics?  To Utility?

Seminar: Survival

"They would choose freedom, no matter how fleeting.  . . .  Survival is insufficient."