thereallieutenantcommanderdata:
One thing I love about this episode is how they cut all the legal and philosophical arguments being deployed initially down to a level of fundamental morality.
What mattered wasn’t whether or not Data has achieved some vague condition of “sapience” or “consciousness”, concepts vaguely defined and ultimately unprovable (as Picard put it “prove that I’m conscious”), but rather, the moral matter. Do we want a future where slavery is revived, or do we want a future of continued equality?
Measure of A Man is the best STNG episode.