Starfleet’s no-win scenario training exercise tests ethical decision-making and leadership. Part of that ethical leadership is recognizing the limits of your powers, and deciding what to do in the face of those limits.
The Kobayashi Maru is a training simulation in which Starfleet cadets encounter a civilian ship in distress. To save the civilians, the cadet would need to enter the Neutral Zone, violating treaty; honoring the treaty means leaving the disabled freighter and its occupants in the Neutral Zone, at the mercy of the Klingons. As the simulation is set up, entering the Neutral Zone to save the civilians also results in Klingons attacking and boarding the ship which the cadet is commanding.
In its construction, the Kobayashi Maru is a no-win scenario. As we learn in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, James T. Kirk was the only cadet in Starfleet history to ever beat the Kobayashi Maru — by reprogramming the simulation so that it was possible to win. Is the Kobayashi Maru a good test of leadership, and of the ethical decision-making that’s a part of it? And what should we make of the fact that Kirk seems to have “beat” the test by cheating?
There’s a way in which the Kobayashi Maru echoes the framing of ethical training as a matter of grappling with ethical dilemmas — with situations where your task is to choose the least bad of two bad options. This framing is what spawns trolley problems, which seem not to do much to help develop the ethical toolbox that gets us through the routine ethical decision-making essential to captaining a starship or living a good humanoid life. Not every ethical decision requires grappling with a dilemma. Indeed, most of the time good ethical decision-making before there’s a crisis can bring good consequences all around, heading off a moment downstream where you have to choose which stakeholder gets stuck with a dramatically bad outcome.
Of course, constructing a training scenario where you’re thinking that far downstream might not translate well to an hour-long captain’s chair simulation for a cadet (or for a gripping opening to the best major motion picture in the Star Trek franchise). But such big-picture thinking about the effects of one’s decisions downstream is a habit essential to good ethical decision-making.
As a cadet taking the Kobayashi Maru, James T. Kirk seems also to have rejected the premise that leadership involves grappling with dilemmas. Kirk famously said that he didn’t believe in no-win scenarios. He didn’t accept the premise of the test that, outside the artificial conditions of the simulation, there would be no way to save the people on the freighter without also drawing the attention of the Klingons, losing your starship to them, and quite possibly provoking a war. Kirk’s impulse was to look for conditions where it was possible for those on the starship and on the disabled civilian ship to survive.
As it happens, Kirk created those conditions by surreptitiously reprogramming the simulation. (There is controversy among Trekkies over whether this counts as cheating. Kirk’s commendation for “original thinking” on the Kobayashi Maru suggests that Starfleet Academy’s view that it was not.)
It’s good to question whether features of a situation that we take for granted really are fixed, rather than changeable. When faced with two bad choices, it’s good to try to find a third, or fourth, or fifth possible choice that is less obvious but that might be better all around. I think the optimism embodied in Kirk’s rejection of no-win scenarios is the sort of thing that can motivate creative thinking about how to do a better job sharing a universe (which, really, is what ethics is about).
But I don’t think that’s what the Kobayashi Maru was intended to test.
A crucial feature of good ethical decision-making in the real world is understanding the limits of your powers. You try to make choices that bring lots of good consequences and minimal bad ones, that fulfill your obligations to everyone to whom you have obligations (including yourself) — but you’re doing it in a complicated world where you must make your choices on the basis of imperfect information, and where other people are doing things that may impose constraints on your options. Ethics cannot require us to be omniscient or omnipotent. This means that sometimes even the most creative and optimistic ethical decision-maker has to face a situation where none of the available choices or outcomes are very good.
Of his reprogramming of the Kobayashi Maru, Kirk said, “I don’t like to lose.” Hardly anyone likes to lose. But, if we’re measuring wins and losses on the basis of the outcomes we produce, the impacts we have on others, measured against some hypothetical better outcomes that we don’t have the knowledge or the power to produce, we are bound to lose at least some of the time. And we need to figure out a way to go forward when we do.
In circumstances where the stakes are very high — life and death — and we’re faced with an array of possible ways to lose, sometimes the best we can do is to choose the option that we most endorse. Maybe that option is the one that we judge will produce better consequences (avoiding war, but at the cost of the civilian lives on the disabled freighter). Maybe we choose trying to fulfill our obligations to the vulnerable parties whose immediate needs are most urgent, even in circumstances where our efforts are not likely to be successful.
It’s not clear that one of these ways to lose is “the right answer”.
Young James T. Kirk reprogrammed the Kobayashi Maru because he didn’t grasp the point of the simulation. Kirk thought it was a test of whether in the circumstances you could succeed in saving everyone. On that basis, he thought the circumstances were unfair (since there was no way to save everyone), so he changed them.
In fact, the Kobayashi Maru was meant to find out how the cadet responds when it becomes clear that you can’t save everyone — and that your best efforts may have created a situation where you can’t save anyone. It’s a test of character, and one that wouldn’t work if the cadet knew ahead of time that this was the point of the test.
The real test of the Kobayashi Maru is not how you respond in the simulator, but how you go on from there. Do you recognize that the universe may present you with situations your knowledge and powers are inadequate to address? That logic and ethical formulae can only get you so far? That sometimes the least-bad is the best you can do? Does this realization put you off the ethical responsibilities that come with leadership, or do you use it to adjust your expectations of how being a leader might feel in extreme situations?
Of the Kobayashi Maru, Admiral Kirk said its point was that how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life. I’d add that it’s important to be able to deal with trying to live up to our ethical obligations while knowing full well that circumstances and our own limitation cannot guarantee we’ll succeed.
We don’t like to lose. Sometimes we need to exercise original thinking to figure out which of the bad options available to us is most like winning.
Want to read more on the science of Star Trek? Learn all about geology and silicon-based life here. Find out whether transporters could work in real life here. Or check out the engineering of transparent aluminum here. Also, did you know that Picard did math in his spare time?
