I was Naval Construction Force, so no riverine patrol for me. I did end up in Vietnam, on a Marine base north of Danang. Luckily for me, it was a supply base, so pretty pretty much rear echelon, although we did receive the odd rocket or mortar attacks.
My question is more of a philosophical exercise, as I feel no guilt or shame for my role in all that. If you stay home and someone else has to go in your place (as has been posited), how different is that from volunteering for something of lower risk if someone else still has to fill your shoes in the shit? Are there degrees of culpability? Was George Bush’s ability to get a Guard assignment because of his connections worse than what I did? Clinton’s deferments? Trump’s bone spurs? How does someone make that judgment objectively?
I know there are likely no real answers to any of that, but it’s an interesting mental exercise.
This trivializes slavery. Your family was not broken apart and sold while you served in Vietnam.
This incorrectly implies that typically educated 19 year olds could make a careful objective study of the statements of the United States government, and the empire of Japan, in 1942, compare it to the on-the-ground reality of life for civilians in the war theatre, weigh the likely outcomes based on valid historical comparables, and then, in their great inborn wisdom, wisely decide whether or not to go fight in the World-War-I-like total horror of Okinawa combat.
Nowadays, the risk profile is different. We fight wars where only a tiny percentage of the troops face front line risks. As a result, there is no real shortage of volunteers to fight endless wars without conscription.
There’s more kinds of slavery than American chattel slavery, and I did no trivializing at all. Involuntary servitude is slavery, despite what the ILO may say
American society’s failure to properly educate its youth as to their duty doesn’t excuse the immorality of the enslavement of said youth. If anything, it makes it worse.
I don’t think so. In theory someone else may have taken your spot, but in theory you might have served in the Army not in Vietnam. My Dad was already in the Air Force when Korea got started, he spent the Korean years of his service in Iceland of all places.
If 18 year old me in the 80s was of the same mind in 1967, I would have join the Navy or Air Force too. I joined the Navy in the 80s.
The draft lottery was intrinsically unfair anyway. So I find it hard to worry about the morals connected to it.
Is answering the call to the draft a legal act? Is answering the call to the draft to serve in an immoral war a legal act?
Do you see where I’m going with this chain of logic? You seem to recognize that there is a difference between the law and morality. Do you recognize that morality is not a mere subset of the law?
I would suppose the worlds of the law and morality intersect only on rare occasions. The OP asked about morality. For some reason people are talking about legality.
Your two statements seem at odd to one another. You have decided on a moral issue and then said you do not worry about the morality of that issue. Seems to me you are already soaking in it.
Then I’m really not sure where you’re coming from. Someone evading or dodging or whatever word you want to use in relation to the draft does not put someone else in danger. The decisions, the actions, of people in positions of power who brought about the war are what put people in danger.
If a politician, let’s call him LBJ, has 100 people who are bound by law to follow him, and he makes a decision to commit 10 (any 10) of them to a dangerous task, that’s on him. All the 100? They are equally blameless. If the poor, faceless individual assigned number 93 gets picked to go through some lottery, he has no more a moral obligation to actually go than anyone whose number wasn’t picked unless you give some special deference to the law itself as a basis for moral obligation. That’s what I’m driving at. Unless you consider legal obligations themselves to be moral obligations, than I can see no basis to assign moral culpability to anyone but the person or individuals who decide that a set number of individuals should be put in danger.
Which isn’t to say that these faceless individuals assigned to a number are not themselves moral agents, only that they can’t be on the hook for how many go and, frankly, no, I don’t think there is a moral obligation to surrender one’s own autonomy in place of another. If one guy in ten gets picked to take a bullet, he is no more obliged to actually take it than the other nine are to step forward and stand between him and the bullet. It might be morally praise worthy of any one of them to do so, but it is not morally obligatory.
Similarly, if one of the ten actually voted for this random “bullet firing” to take place because they thought it would build character for the whole group, but then they took steps to ensure that they personally would be eliminated from consideration, then I can judge them for that. I can hold them morally blameworthy both for their support of this horrific scenario and also for the hypocrisy.
I am not sure I can follow your points. Perhaps I am distracted.
People who took steps to remove themselves from danger put other people in danger. This is morally reprehensible.
I see the philosopher who popularized the Trolley Problem passed away the other day. In this case, ]the trolley is coming down the track. One of the workmen in its path grabs a nearby pedestrian and pushers her onto the track in order get himself out of the way.
This is morally wrong even if the local laws allowed it.
This is not The Trolley Problem. In The Trolley Problem the work person has to chose whether or not to push a switching lever that will divert a trolley from running over 5 people to a track where only one person will be run over. If s/he does nothing 5 die, if s/he takes action and pushes switch one dies. (From Wikipedia)
I decline to respond to your hypo because I don’t think it’s sufficiently hashed out to represent the issue, so how about this…
How about instead of it being a workman throwing a pedestrian onto the track, we make it some politician who threw hundreds of thousands of pedestrians onto the track to stop a bus (yes, a bus, not a trolley), and told each and every one of them that if they didn’t stop that bus—with their lives if necessary—there were a bunch of dominoes down the line (way down the line, so far down no one could actually see them) that would get knocked over, and that if those dominoes got knocked over a whole bunch of pre-schools were going to blow up?
The politician wasn’t sure how many pedestrians’ bodies it would take to stop that bus, but he was prepared to throw as many as it might take into the path of that bus to stop it.
What if each pedestrian, of their own volition, according to their own conscience, could have actually just stepped out of the way of that bus and let it go on by?
What if—big if—every single pedestrian on that track had equal opportunity to step out of the way, perhaps because they each determined it would be morally wrong to prevent that bus from going on its self-determined path, and they weren’t entirely convinced about that whole, crazy-sounding “dominoes to blow up a bunch of pre-schools” story the politician was trying to sell the, on?
Would it be immoral to step out of line, or should every last one of those pedestrians stand there, regardless of what they thought, and let themselves be run over on this one guy’s say so?
I was very impressed in the recent obituary of the philosopher who died the other day of the endless variations of this wonderful thought experiment. Apparently Trolley-ology is a subset of general philosophical enquiry.
I like the version I set out. One person saves himself at the risk to another. The other person had no real choice, he was shoved. Yes, I like it quite a bit considering I gave it all of three minute’s thought.
You have fundamentally misunderstood the problem (draft evasion and Vietnam) if you think it reduces down to that. Also, I’ll note that your scenario relies on the tacit assumption that the construction worker put himself on the tracks.
Never mind that you never actually suggested that either one of them (the pedestrian or the construction worker) was needed to stop the trolley and save any number of lives through an individual sacrifice. I have charitably inferred that, though, even as I still think your scenario fails to capture key aspects of the moral question at issue.
I would have thought my workman found himself in a dangerous situation. (As a young man in 1968 might have.) Further my workman. flung himself out of danger. (As a draft-dodger did.) Even though his action put someone else in his dangerous position. (As did a draft-dodger.)
In both cases, the person who was placed in the danger did nothing to deserve it. In both cases, a person was willing to save himself even at the risk to another person.
Seems to me a more appropriate trolley analogy would be: a politician evil moustache-twirling villain pushes you onto the tracks in front of a speeding trolley. The villain says, “If you get off the tracks I’ll push this other innocent person onto the tracks instead.” Do you have a moral responsibility to stay on the tracks, or culpability for the death of the other innocent person if you get off? I would say categorically no.
Well, it is nice to imagine that evil is not done by people like you or me, but rather by villains in black hats. But of course evil is really very banal and pedestrian.
You are persistently refusing to address the issue that what some draft refusers were doing was refusing to kill people. I can’t think of any clearer way of endangering people than actively trying to kill them.
Or do you think that anyone defined by a country’s current law as “enemies” therefore ceases to be “people”?