In philosophy there is a tradition according to which there are three precepts of justice (preacepta juris): live in a morally right way, do no harm to others, and render to each what is her or his own.1 One of the more vexing and interesting questions that remains quite unsettled in twenty-first-century philosophy concerns the duties (if any) that are owed between parents and children. We believe that the 2009 film Star Trek (directed by J. J. Abrams and written by Roberta Orci and Alex Kurtzman) speaks to the question of what is owed in a loving, heroic parent-child relationship, and in so doing it speaks to questions about living morally and not harming others. The film does not just speak to the heroic; it can suggest something important to those of us who have more humdrum parent-child relationships, but this will be a matter we will only suggest at the end of our chapter. To get things started, we offer a brief overview of the philosophy of parent-child relationships and then move to Star Trek. An important qualification: while we will be using the film to make philosophical observations about the parent-child relationship, we are not claiming that Abrams himself or the writers were intentionally crafting a philosophy. Rather, we are proposing that the film may be used to extract an important lesson about parent-child relations, especially as this bears on heroic, loving sacrifice and its inversion.
Philosophers have taken different positions on the relationship between parents and children. In Greco-Roman times parents (especially the father) had absolute power over children, and abortion and infanticide were not uncommon (approved of by both Plato and Aristotle in cases of severe infant deformity). But even among the ancients, a parent killing a child was often considered horrific (Hercules’s killing of his children and wife made him cursed, Medea’s killing of her children was, quite literally, considered tragic), and there is a powerful, intimate tenderness displayed between parents and children in the oldest poem in the west, the Iliad (Hector’s loving care for his son).2 As we come to the modern era, many philosophers (most notably John Locke in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) defended the idea that children were not owned by parents and that they were to be treated as proper individuals with rights and duties of their own. But precisely what those rights and duties are has not been fully settled by philosophers as we begin the twenty-first century. This has been especially vexing as philosophers in more recent times have sought to develop a secular account of the parent-child relationship.
There is not total disagreement today on the parent-child relationship. Most philosophers today and in the modern era think that if someone gives birth to a child, then they have some responsibility for the welfare of the child, if only to ensure that the child is raised in a healthy way. Philosophers may diverge on the comparative ethical significance of a genetic connection between parent and child, the importance of gestation (is a “surrogate” mother a true or real mother?), the ethics of adoption, and so on, but what might be called motherly or fatherly love has a fairly clear meaning when it comes to identifying the responsible care that we (today) expect of parental care for children. But what of children themselves and their duties, if any? Of course, as an infant, a child lacks the kind of self-control that can form the basis for morally responsible action, but once he or she has some powers of agency, is it the duty of a child to love his or her parents? Could love ever be a duty? Love seems to be an emotion, and emotions do not seem to be immediately under our self-control. If we do have a duty to love our parents, what would its basis be? In healthy settings, presumably the child has received a great gift (life itself and a good upbringing), but the child never asked for this gift. If a child ought to love or honor her or his parent, this seems to be something that has been involuntarily thrust on the child, and not something the child must ethically take ownership of. In many, if not most, religious traditions the parent-child relationship is considered a sacred bond to be treated with honor. In a secular context and without such recourse to sacred honor, how is one to articulate the bond and entitlements of these distinguishable individuals, especially from the standpoint of a child on the road to an autonomous, independent life?3
Abrams’s Star Trek offers an illuminating alternative framework to address questions of parent-child duty. Questions of duty are relevant, but at the heart of the film is a portrait of how loving sacrifice and devotion can summon one into the honor of being an adult. At times we will refer to this as owning one’s adulthood. Here we follow the use of the term “to own” employed by modern philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and others, in which to own something is to accept and acknowledge responsibility for something. At crucial points in the film, there is a summoning for one to take ownership of one’s character. Matters of duty come after this summoning.
The film begins with a father saving the life of his wife and child. The U.S.S. Kelvin, a Federation starship, is lured into a trap by Romulans. The Romulan Nero compels the Kelvin’s captain onto his ship, the Narada, where the captain is summarily killed (after being asked for the whereabouts of Ambassador Spock and the year). This leaves George Kirk in command of the Kelvin. George orders the evacuation from the Kelvin of all the crew, and we soon learn that the evacuees include his pregnant wife, Winona, who is in labor. George intends to follow his wife and crew, but then he learns that the automatic pilot is off-line and the ship needs to be steered and the weapons fired manually so that the others (which we later learn number eight hundred) can escape. George sees that if he abandons the ship, there would be little chance of escaping the deadly intentions of Nero. Piloting a collision course with the Romulan vessel, George has his last conversation with his wife (now flying away in an escape pod) while their son is born. Together they choose a name for their son, James Tiberius Kirk, after his paternal and maternal grandfathers. The mother and crew escape under direct orders from George.
GEORGE KIRK: Do exactly as I say, shuttle 37.
WINONA: George, it’s coming, our baby.
GEORGE: . . . , Captain to shuttle 37, is my wife on board?
SHUTTLE 37: Yes sir, she is.
GEORGE: I need you to go now, do you hear me?
SHUTTLE 37: We’re waiting on you, sir.
GEORGE: No, just go, take off immediately.
WINONA: Sweetheart can you hear me?
GEORGE: I can hear . . .
The escape is under George’s command, and the husband and wife have their last words. He: “I love you so much.” She: “I love you!”
James T. Kirk, who is born only minutes before his father dies, lives in the shadow of his father’s enormous, heroic self-sacrifice. He struggles with adolescence, perhaps due to the ordinariness of life with his rather mirthless and perhaps cruel stepfather or guardian and his absent mother, who is not shown again on-screen. We are not told whether the man who functions as a kind of dysfunctional guardian is actually the boy’s stepfather or another relative. In any case, the man seems exactly the opposite of the missing father-hero. When the boy James takes a car for a joyride, the stepfather figure says, “You think you can get away with this just because your mother’s off planet. You get your ass back home now! You live in my house, buddy. You live in my house, and that’s my car. You get one scratch on that car and I’m gonna whip your ass.” Here the stepfather figure is concerned about his own personal ownership, rather than the welfare of the boy or the well-being of the boy’s mother. It is his house and car, not his and the boy’s mother’s (“off planet” might even suggest she has died or at least that she is no longer living with the boy and his so-called guardian). There is an almost absurd contrast between the father, George, who willfully sacrificed a starship to save lives and the stepfather/guardian who threatens physical violence for a mere scratch on his vehicle!
James does not at first take ownership of himself or his role as the son of his father. After a rather pointless bar fight, he comes face to face with Captain Christopher Pike. It is clear from the start that Pike is a surrogate father or at least fatherly. Pike’s first words to James are, “You all right, son?” And when James asks (incredulously) whether Pike knows who he is, the answer is thoroughly parental.
JAMES: Who am I, Captain Pike?
PIKE: Your father’s son.
James is then summoned to take ownership of his life in following the path of his father. To some, George’s sacrifice was a complete loss. This is not how Pike sees it.
PIKE: Something I admired about your dad, he didn’t believe in no-win scenarios.
JAMES: Sure learned his lesson.
PIKE: Well, that depends on how you define winning. . . . If you’re half the man your father was, Jim, Starfleet could use you. You know, your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including yours and your mother’s. I dare you to do better.
Notice that Pike does not resort here to the language of duty but speaks of daring. Pike calls on James to live up to the precepts of justice, but this is a heroic summons or call, not an ordinary one (a subject we will return to).
The heroic father’s sacrifice plays a role in James’s (supposedly) cheating in his training, in his warning Captain Pike of the imminent danger of falling into the same trap his father and crew fell into aboard the Kelvin, and in his rescuing Captain Pike. The latter is a kind of reversal of the loss that we see at the outset of the film. While James cannot rescue his father, he can rescue a man who has been acting as his father. In all this we see James slowly coming to act as his father might, but as his own person and at his own pace. He must live through modest humiliation in romance (Spock, not James, “gets the girl”), he must sneak on board the Enterprise through comic subterfuge with the help of Bones (the ship doctor, who must go into space due to financial ruin in a divorce), Scotty, and the older Spock. But in all this movement toward taking ownership of his character, James winds up filling out the meaning of his father’s self-sacrifice and perhaps even (in part) the meaning of the love of his parents. If James had turned down Pike’s dare and settled for the life epitomized by the stepfather/guardian figure, it would mean that his father had saved the life of someone who was living a petty, loveless life of self-preoccupation and meanness. In this way, there may be some support for the Aristotelian view that part of the value of childhood and growing up lies in the end achieved. This is sometimes called the prospective view of childhood, the idea that the value of childhood rests in how it shapes the adult. Michael Slote offers this lively analogy in describing the prospective view: “Just as dreams are discounted except as they affect (the waking portions of) our lives, what happens in childhood principally affects our view of total lives through the effects that childhood success or failure are supposed to have on mature individuals.”4 We would only add that there is a sense in which George’s sacrifice (while good in itself) would be seen in a somewhat different light if James, his mother, and all eight hundred crew members went on to live horrendous, cruel lives. Fortunately, the father’s sacrifice is further vindicated by the son’s own heroic deeds and character.
There is an extraordinary inversion in the story of James and the story of the tyrant Nero. We point this out following a focus on Spock and the summons he must heed in owning his character.
In contrast to James Kirk, Spock’s father is not (at least at first) a paradigm of the loving hero. In the first scene in which Spock appears, he is in school being picked on by other Vulcan children because of his mixed heritage, with a Vulcan father and an earthling mother. In Spock one sees someone who, through much of the film, struggles to be loyal to both parents. Finally the bullies push him too hard, and Spock relinquishes his Vulcan control for human passion as he starts hitting one of the bullies. Later his father, Sarek, lectures him about controlling himself—the father tries to make Spock identify less with his human half. Spock eventually asks Sarek why he married a human, since Vulcans tend to look down on them. Sarek responds in an emotionally detached manner, saying that “marrying [Spock’s] mother was logical.” Later in the film we meet Spock’s mother, Amanda. Unlike Sarek, whom Spock seemed unable to please, Amanda expresses completely unconditional love for her son. She makes it clear that no matter what Spock chooses in his life, she will always be proud of him. It is perhaps partly the love of his mother that finally moves Spock to yield to passion in an altercation on the Enterprise, allowing James Kirk to take command. And it is by yielding to his human side that Spock is able to give himself over to a romance with Uhura and, finally, to a friendship with James. Sarek eventually valorizes this love when he withdraws his earlier account of the marriage to Spock’s mother: “You asked me once why I married your mother. I married her because I loved her.”
Spock has to come to terms with an especially personal form of loving sacrifice in coming to own his character in the context of the parent-child relationship: he must sacrifice the desire for strict self-control and being invulnerable to deep pain and grief. Perhaps it is his mother’s love for him, followed by his father’s confession of love after her death, that helped Spock to adult ownership. It is the older Spock who knows that the growth from childhood to adulthood has to be a learned process that involves a kind of interior education and cannot be reduced to following rules or sharing information. This is why the older Spock did not intervene more directly in bringing his younger self into the full picture of the drama that was unfolding.
YOUNGER SPOCK: Then why did you send Kirk aboard when you alone could have explained the truth?
OLDER SPOCK: I could not deprive you of the revelation of all that you could accomplish together. Of a friendship that would define you both. In ways you cannot yet realize.
James’s response to the death of his father and Spock’s to the death of his mother are a complete inversion of Nero’s response to the death of his family.
While the death of a father and mother play a role in James and Spock becoming heroic adults and lead them to seek to save lives, the death of family has the exact opposite impact on Nero. Late in the film we learn more of what is driving Nero on his mission of mass murder (his destruction of the Vulcan planet alone amounted to killing six billion people). Nero describes himself as a person who, at the outset, chose “a life of honest labor. To provide for myself and the wife who was expecting my child.” There is a slight hint at egocentrism in the use of the expression “my child” as opposed to “our child” that he and “the wife” were having, but we can take his word that he was honest and (at least) not criminal at one point. Nero’s planet was in trouble and (leaving out the details) the Federation designed a plan to save the planet, which Spock would execute. Through no fault of the Federation or Spock personally, the rescue did not succeed and the planet was lost. By Nero’s lights, Spock and the Federation “allowed my people to burn while their planet broke in half.” The death of his family and his people set Nero on a path of ruthless killing. Nero states his position in stark terms: “And when I lost her [“the wife”], I promised myself retribution. And for twenty-five years I planned my revenge against the Federation.”
Nero (and eventually Spock) time-travel back to before Romulus was destroyed. At the outset of the film, Nero’s plan is now to destroy the Federation and all its planets, thus (he believes) saving his planet. But notice that while the stated goal is to save his planet, uppermost in Nero’s mind seems to be the infliction of pain. He wants members of the Federation to know what he felt when he had to come to terms with the death of his family and planet. In this fashion, Nero winds up cementing the pain into his character, even though if he succeeds in rescuing his planet then (paradoxically) there would be no pain for him to feel, because his family and people would live. He also does not give any notice of another possibility: time travel could allow both he and Spock to work with the Federation and those Romulans alive before the destruction to save the planet. Here is an exchange between Nero and Captain Christopher Pike, when Pike is in captivity: “And for twenty-five years I planned my revenge against the Federation. And forgot what it was like to live a normal life. I did not forget the pain. It’s a pain that every surviving Vulcan now shares. My purpose, Christopher, is to not simply avoid the destruction of the home that I love . . . but to create a Romulus that exists, free of the Federation. . . . That is why I will destroy all the remaining Federation planets. Starting with yours. Then we have nothing left to discuss.” We wonder how much this “love” of his home is truly love when taking into account Nero’s death.
When it becomes clear that Nero has failed in his goal of destroying Earth and he is vulnerable to the Enterprise’s lethal weapons, Captain James Kirk offers him a chance to surrender. He explains to his crew, “Showing them compassion may be the only way to earn peace with Romulus.” If Nero had surrendered, he would still be free to love his lost family and planet, albeit this love would involve great grief. On the other hand, as we just noted, he might also stand a chance of averting the destruction of his planet in the future. But instead of making such choices, he chooses death for himself and his crew. His last words are, “I would rather suffer the end of Romulus a thousand times. I would rather die in agony than accept assistance from you.” Really? Even if that assistance could be extended to save his family and planet, not just once but a thousand times?
Nero has let the loss of his family and planet lead him to choose death rather than life. While George gave his life, and might have given his life a thousand times, to save his wife and child, Nero seems to be willing to die a thousand times rather than accept assistance that might save his wife and child, and perhaps his whole planet. There is a sense in which Nero may be operating with the more ancient view of childhood: he, as the father, has power and ownership over his child and thus can elect not to save the child. (Perhaps a hint of Nero adopting this ancient Greco-Roman practice lies in his bearing the name of one of the most notoriously abusive Roman emperors.) While James and George give themselves over to heroic love, Nero abandons himself to bold, ruthless hatred. George’s last words are words of love, and in the final sequence in which we see James, the friendship between him and Spock seems securely launched, and yet in the case of Nero his last words involve hatred and the desire for the annihilation of himself and the crew. James, on the other hand, comes to learn to own his adulthood and its new responsibilities. In the closing scene in the academy, it is James’s heroism that enables him to be fully accepted by the upright.
So what do children owe parents? Abrams’s film leads us to think that this question is dependent upon an antecedent question: How have parents acted toward and with their children? If the parent is like James’s stepfather/guardian figure, the answer might well be “not much.” But if parents are like James’s father and mother, given the father’s sacrifice and the testimony of love between them, then the child is naturally summoned to take ownership of his or her life and honor. Similarly, if even one of the parents is like Spock’s mother or perhaps, too, like the father who finally confesses his true love, there is a summons to love others in adulthood. It is this satisfying loving cycle that enables James and Spock to achieve the kind of fraternal, respectful, dynamic friendship that is so key to the film and virtually all the variations of the world(s) of Star Trek.
What should we do if we are not like the parents of James or Spock? Undoubtedly, at least one reader of this chapter is not the captain of a starship yet still has occasions for heroic self-sacrifice. The film does not give a direct answer to this, but we suspect a good reply to any parent reading this is that you should try to be such parents as the parents of James and the mother of Spock. There is an important point about virtue that is worth noting. Two persons may be equally virtuous, and thus equally praiseworthy and beautiful, and yet only one of the persons is given the opportunity to act and display that virtue in the movie. So you might never be in command of a starship and you may never have the occasion to show the depth of your love for your child, but you can still be the sort of parent who would do this if the occasion arose. And that is (in our view) beautiful and praiseworthy.
No one said that any of this—actual self-sacrifice or being disposed to act in loving heroism—would be easy, and we are reminded of this in one of the last sequences in the film. When Captain Kirk has had his final battle with Nero, he issues this command: “Sulu, let’s go home.” Sulu replies, “Yes, sir.” But they are not at warp speed; they must escape a massive vacuum that threatens to undo them and their ship. With heroic effort, they escape and make their way home. Perhaps the point is that getting to the right home and the most fulfilling living out of the three precepts of justice requires a great love that summons us not just to “inspirational valor and supreme dedication to your comrades” (in the words of the assembly when awarding Kirk a high commendation) but such valor and dedication to your children and parents.
1. A good introduction to some basic topics in ethics and political philosophy is John Arthur and Steven Scalet, eds., Morality and Moral Controversies: Readings in Moral, Social, and Political Philosophy (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2008).
2. See Anne Millard, Family Life in Ancient Greece (London: Hodder Wayland, 2001).
3. For an overview of relevant philosophical issues, see the excellent guide The Philosophy of Childhood, by Gareth Matthews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Matthews is the author of the entry “The Philosophy of Childhood” in the free, online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which we highly recommend. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/childhood/.
4. Michael Slote, Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 14.