Oh I love this explanation, thank you for writing this all up!
With regard to their relative level of machiavellianism, I think being able to see clearly all the consequences of all their decisions makes it both a given that they would be more machiavellian as well as making it fairly ethically “clean” so to speak. We as humans can’t see the consequences of our actions so we have just to rely on what our ethics tell us is the right course, since we don’t really have a better guide. The prophets, otoh, do have a better guide, and we do have a fairly broad evidence base of them seeming genuinely to care about the wellbeing of, at least, the Bajoran people. So for me anyway, I am happy to assume that their judgement was sound, being that they are operating with a level of knowledge and within an entire framework that is completely unfathomable to me and I can’t really assess any individual decisions they make fairly.
Oh I love this explanation, thank you for writing this all up!
With regard to their relative level of machiavellianism, I think being able to see clearly all the consequences of all their decisions makes it both a given that they would be more machiavellian as well as making it fairly ethically “clean” so to speak. We as humans can’t see the consequences of our actions so we have just to rely on what our ethics tell us is the right course, since we don’t really have a better guide. The prophets, otoh, do have a better guide, and we do have a fairly broad evidence base of them seeming genuinely to care about the wellbeing of, at least, the Bajoran people. So for me anyway, I am happy to assume that their judgement was sound, being that they are operating with a level of knowledge and within an entire framework that is completely unfathomable to me and I can’t really assess any individual decisions they make fairly.