Repeated Dilemmas

On TV there's a reasonably common scenario in which a decision has to be made about trading off risk to an individual vs a group (in fact if you leave on the Syfy channel you'll probably see this multiple times a day). Often there will be two characters who disagree, the one who takes up the "greater good" argument is typically a scientist or other logic driven character and the one who pushes "leave no man behind" or "this is the morally correct way to go" or "how could we live with ourselves" is typically a member of the military or some other hero type character. The scientist argument can sometimes be a mask for "do whatever is least risky for me" which is typically the jerk scientist, but I'll ignore this side of the argument for this post.

I imagine that just about everyone sides with the character who supports saving the individual and so do I (I always side with Helo and almost never side with Baltar).

First I'd like to defend the scientist a little. While I overall disagree, I will say that often "leave no man behind" will pose significant risk to the entire group, and if TV shows didn't care about keeping main characters or audiences then we'd probably see a more balanced set of outcomes which may call the hero choice into question. I think that more movies like The Watchmen would do a lot of good for all other stories since the audience would believe something bad could actually happen (of course that thought is part of the justification for Wash's death so maybe I'll take that back).

However, I would claim that simplistic logic leads to the "greater good" argument and that the scientist character should be far too smart for it. The major downfall of the greater good argument is that on these shows it is almost never a one time event that is being dealt with. But rather something that happens about once a week (ok in the course of the show it may be less often, but is still a repeating occurrence). So they are not in a single game, but a repeated game. (If you're getting bored, just think prisoner's dilemma vs repeated prisoner's dilemma and you've basically got my point).

Yes, in a truly isolated incident maybe it does make sense to loosen your morals for a moment and let one guy die to save the group. However, if this decision is going to be faced repeatedly there are several consequences. For one thing the person out doing something dangerous is probably the person who would do other dangerous things in the future. If an important marine/viper pilot/away team member dies every time there is a threat to the group they're going to have a shortage of these important people. In addition after this happens once or twice that could do some serious damage to moral and reduce the risks team members are willing to take on. Both of these concerns are especially significant if they are a group on say one or more space ships and have no connection with other humans or there are no other humans. Also in situations involving the military it is always going to be a repeated dilemma since at some point the military will face another dangerous situation and its policies and reputation from past decisions will matter.

I think that this logic is somewhat built into human emotions and societal norms/morality. This is why the hero type will know the right answer from a gut feel or moral standpoint. However, writers seem to think that the scientist is applying logic to only the single situation. Seems like they think the scientist showed up for the psychology or economics lecture where the prisoners dilemma was covered, but skipped the next week when the repeated version was discussed.

I think I just took down Spock using logic! Which makes me wonder if Spock and Kurk had the opposite positions would the situation also be reversed in all the scifi shows since then.