I don’t 100% agree with smapti’s “you have to serve because it’s the law” argument. However, in this case, the OP has made it clear that he/she wants to avoid service simply because it would be inconvenient. The OP has nothing against conscription as long as it applies only to everyone except him/herself.
We’ve had this discussion before – you may not be capable of it, but the vast majority of humans recognize that Nazi law, and Confederate law, and many other laws, were incredibly unjust and opposing them was the only moral decision.
At the very least, you must recognize that you’re not going to convince anyone that it was wrong to oppose the white supremacist laws of the Nazis, Apartheid South Africans, and Confederates, right? You’re entitled to your beliefs, but good luck convincing anyone that Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Jews who escaped Germany were in the wrong.
A personal opinion of what the law ought to be does not alter the fact of what the law is.
And yet, none of those laws were undone by individuals simply deciding that the law didn’t apply to them because they felt like they weren’t subject to the social contract. They were undone by voters, legislatures, courts, and armies acting on their legitimate authority to decide what the law is.
It is fundamentally impossible to achieve justice by promoting anarchy.
You forgot “revolution”, or the threat of it, which by definition is illegal, as part of what may be used to change an unjust regime, Smapti. I suppose Mandela spent decades in prison for illegal activities for nothing. But this is really a hijack.
Back to the subject – as Bear_Nenno states in his first post and I tried to probe earlier, **mifset **needs to look within and find if his motivation is really mere convenience/comfort or there is some actual moral position, either pacifistic or libertarian, or if he’s just seeking a justifying rationalization so he can bear to look at himself in the mirror. Because part of what makes his position especially weak in his case is that *virtually everyone *in his society is *equally * asked to put his plans in the back burner and expected to put themselves at risk doing things they may have qualms about. So it’s not as if he will be put at an unfair disadvantage relative to his cohort peers when it comes to opportunity costs. OTOH in his society, dodging service could be likely to entail more than just disapproving looks from your in-laws at family dinners or people unfriending you on the network, but rather to be a mark that follows him through life with actual cost in future opportunities.
The civil disobedience of Mandela, MLK Jr., and other activists was absolutely critical to changing public opinion and ultimately getting those laws changed. You’ll be very lonely condemning the civil disobedience of Mandela and MLK Jr., though you will have some white supremacists to keep you company.
No. Conscription is a limitation on freedom that should not occur. It violates one’s right to life to be forced into harms way. You lose freedom of speech and expression. You lose freedom of movement. You may wind up with a full on mental illness.
Those who choose to join of their own free will and are fully aware of what they are doing are okay, but not otherwise.
This is something that is just true, regardless of what other think, since what is being described is slavery. That’s just an inconvenient truth, so countries pretend otherwise. But what else can it be, when your government can come in and control your life like that?
The OP doesn’t need to search himself for his reasons. They are irrelevant. Whatever his reasons for choosing otherwise, no government should be able to take away his own choice, his bodily sovereignty.
Fortunately, this is nonsense.
The disobedience of the fugitive slave laws in the North helped lay the groundwork for southern secession and consequently the end of slavery. The Montgomery Bus Boycott led to a change in law. Outlaws skirting Prohibition brought it to an end. The same thing is happening with marijuana as we speak. Throughout history, deserters have compromised military campaigns.
Clearly, yes, they are mere excuses to justify your inner selfishness.
Selfishness is not inherently evil or wrong. We all act (at least at times) in pursuit of our personal self interest rather than altruism. It’s OK to be selfish, the world economy runs on selfishness, so we shouldn’t say it’s all bad, nor is it always OK.
There will be people like BigT who would not begrudge you a bit of selfishness on this topic. There will be others who will judge you harshly for this bit of selfishness.
However your pursue your future, at least be honest about it. Don’t pretend you have some noble cause driving your choices when it’s really about your personal situation. If you can’t stand up and be honest about not serving, you should serve, and be honest why you did it. “I didn’t want to serve, but I couldn’t spend the rest of my life lying about why I didn’t.”
That’s neither here nor there. I was only commenting on Smapti’sequation of following laws with moral rectitude which is, not to put too fine a point on it, pants-on-head.
Nonsense. By your own stated standards, if he can get away with not doing what the government tells him to do, he has, by showing himself to be more powerful than the government in that particular area, established himself as the relevant law-creating authority. QED.
What if this was May 1948. You and your family had recently immigrated to Isreal from Europe after surviving the holocaust. You have settled into a nice community and started a new life.
But now an arab army is threatening your village. A truck rolls into your village and a man in a green uniform starts handing out rifles and tells every able bodied man (and even some women) to grab a gun and get ready to fight for not just your life, but the lives of their village and even their nation.
What would you do?
What should I do when I visit the Easter Bunny?
What if he was punching your mother? What would you do?
What is the lesson here? If it was once justifiable to take up arms against Arabs, it is still justifiable? Should we still be avenging Pearl Harbor or the Alamo?
Wait a second. The principles of civil disobedience held by Ghandi, King, Mandela et al included being willing to go to jail to show the immorality of the law. The OP has clearly stated his real problem with serving in the IDF is because it interferes with his career goals, not because the service itself is immoral.
If the OP sincerely objects to the immorality of the Israeli army, I’m sure the government will be able to find a non-military alternative for him.
FWIW, while I thankfully was born late enough to skirt the last years of my own country’s mandatory conscription, the general way to deal with objectors was “If you have moral objections wrt killing, we’ll put you in a non-combat role”.
In my opinion as a pacifist, that’s still not acceptable. It doesn’t matter if you’re “just” driving a truck or treating wounded or shifting crates of ammunition or fixing helicopter engines : you’re still helping and enabling the guys and gals pulling triggers. Which makes you just as complicit in the killing of another human being.
Can the same be said about other forms of civil service ? Well, yeah, kinda. Your being used to fix potholes or oversee a street crossing and the like still means you’re enabling the next person to become a soldier. The whole of society is responsible for making warfare possible. It’s a more indirect responsibility, but you’re still involved.
Well its not like your gonna be calling in a shake and bake on Gaza, are you able to pick the service if you choose ultimately to serve your time, I thought they allowed conscientious objectors to drive ambulances and so forth. Lastly, is your lack of service going to be noted on your resume, possilbly getting yourself blackballed from future employment.
There is no easy answer to the morality of your action, specially from someone like me who is five thousand miles away. Are you morally fine with going to prison if you choose not to serve.
IIRC in Israel it’s normal (at least for Jewish citizens) to go to university after their military service.
If the law states that you must turn over any members of [insert ethnic/religious/political group] you come across to the authorities for extermination or enslavement, then refusing to turn them in wrong. Your moral, ethical, or personal concerns are irrelevant. :rolleyes:
What his problem is exactly isn’t that clear to me. He indeed started by saying he didn’t want to serve for convenience, but the rest of his post is rather confusing wrt his motivations.
And it doesn’t seem in fact that Israel is offering any alternative to military service other than jail (correct me if I’m wrong). Unless famously your reason for not serving is “too busy reading the scriptures, sorry”, that is.
Finally, Gandhi, King and Mandela were great people (generally speaking), but you have no moral obligation to follow the principles of civil disobedience when faced with an unjust law, and doing so is pretty often counter-productive. To give an example, you probably wouldn’t say that people shouldn’t have secretly hidden Jews or helped slaves to escape and should instead have waved signs openly in the streets and take the consequences. Maybe at a different scale, if you think the state has no right to force you to serve in a military that might be used for purposes you find immoral, you don’t have any moral obligation to accept to serve a jail sentence for it.
Your reasoning leads to the conclusion that slaves have no moral right to escape or revolt, for instance, or that under the Nazi regime Jews had a moral obligation to turn themselves in.
Is that your contention?
Take a rifle. Shoot him dead. Get my family into the truck and drive off as fast as possible.
Sorry Smapti but that only works for a certain definition of “doing the right thing” where that definition is “not breaking the law”
For pretty much everyone else it is much more fluid. A mundane example, A homosexual person in 1950’s Britain was breaking the law by just having gay sex in the privacy of their own home and yet we are comfortable saying that they were actively doing the right thing.