Day 21: The Sea of Death

We've started a new serial today, known as The Keys of Marinus, and it opens with an interesting moral dilemna that is almost immediately glossed over. It concerns the machine that needs to be fixed in this episode, 'the conscience of Marinus', which was created originally to act as an impartial arbitrator in legal disputes, but evolved into a machine that took away people's sense of right and wrong and replaced it with the machine's sense of right and wrong, and then telepathically prevented crimes from being committed. This is, to be honest, a bit uncomfortable, because it is essentially removing the concept of free will from people, as they are forced to live according to a pre-determined set of rules, whilst not being able to make decisions for themselves. If such a device were introduced today, comparisons to a nanny state, or Big Brother would be made (whilst some people would wander around confused, wondering what reality TV has to do with this). So the moral dilemna is thus, do you prevent all crime from occurring, but in the course of doing so, remove free will from every single person on your planet?