38
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
38 points (89.6% liked)
Daystrom Institute
5 readers
4 users here now
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.
Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I mean let's be clear for most of Ferengi history women were not allowed to own property of any kind - including clothing and some of their business endeavors include poaching endangered animals and literally being slave traders. I mean - I don't think there's any indication that Ferengi society was anything more than hyper-capitalist dystopia as a juxtaposition of the Federation socialist utopia. That Rom and Quark are goofy and lovable I think speaks more to how bad every other Ferengi is operating outside of a Federation station.
From the Federation's perspective the Ferengi are harmless and in this way they may be ethical enough to not warrant confrontation, but at the same time - the Federation does seem to stop them when they're doing something like slave trading so I think we can imagine that for some people in the sphere of Ferengi influence they're not so ethical.
On this note, part of me wonders if some of the Ferengi encountered by the Federation early on weren't already outlaws looking to make profit outside the constraints of Ferengi ethics, such as they are.
This is a question worth asking. As others have pointed out there sort of seems to be clear that the rules are the rules and business rules trump all other rules. The Rules of Acquisition tend to be the Ferengi Alliance's highest law. It's both a religious law and a practical one and I think therein is where the problem lies. You can't make profit outside of the constrains of normal ethics because whatever makes profit is what is ethical to do.
This is why so many contradictory Rules exist in this system. War is good for business and peace is good for business, and neither of these are statements on what is "bad" for business. There's nothing here that says not to do anything and I think in this way Ferengi ethics largely comes down to there's no precept that says I shouldn't do this and I was able to exchange doing it for profit so ultimately it serves a higher purpose.
And since it seems like there is a fair amount of legalize extortion that happens in Ferengi while it might be technically illegal to do slavery, it might be more profitable to do it and therefore on the whole you can come out with an ethical conclusion that is "good" especially if you're some mid-level Ferengi in charge of making sure that slavery doesn't happen and you're able to take a little bit of a kickback.
De facto slavery exists for women in Ferengi society, but the fact that no other apparent slave caste exists along with how quickly Ferenginar's patriarchy was restructured, if not quite dismantled, I think one possible barrier to an effective slave industry (certainly chattel slavery) is that there would be no concept of a person or group of people who should not be trying to earn profit, and the power structures that exist would not punish an enslaved person who was able to skim profits from any labor or administrative work they performed, nor would it necessarily reinforce their status as a slave if they were able to buy themselves out of their position.
I think Ferengi probably thinks that a person or business can own another person, but I don't think they can conceive of a person who can't/ or shouldn't own anything. This is like how it's not illegal to attempt to escape prison in some countries - There's a recognition of the desire to be free.
Now, that's all a huge problem when Ferengi develop interstellar travel and encounter full-blown slavers like the Orion Syndicate and other criminal elements, because 1) they'll not only participate in the slave trade for all the reasons you said, but they'll be really good at it, and 2) they won't fully understand the power structures beyond wealth which makes enslavement so egregious.
I wonder: Quark's weapon trading may not have bothered his conscience because of him adopting human ethics, as he feared, but because he was parsing his own ethics with a fuller understanding of the implications of what he was participating in as he was learning more about alien cultures.