I did not realize I had a parament record.
At least for many people involved the evil, or at least the greater evil, was the US government. For them, the only moral course of action was to oppose the war with any means possible.
Do you believe that people in the countries whose behavior you’re defining as “evil” are entitled to avoid the draft so they won’t have to partake in that evil?
Seems to me that you’re saying that evading, or even legally avoiding, conscription is always wrong because to do so is to cause someone else to be conscripted and put in harm’s way and possibly killed.
I do not see you acknowledging in any way that the justness, or lack thereof, of the war the draftee is being forced to fight has any bearing on the morality of avoiding or evading conscription.
Nor do I see any acknowledgement that the legitimacy of the government doing the conscription matters at all. Surely this is an oversight? Do you mean to say that a government that does not have the consent of the governed still commands the moral authority to conscript?
Let’s say, for example, that China decides to deal with the Uighur problem once and for all. Now, the People’s Liberation Army will certainly meet with resistance, and that resistance will quite likely be assisted, at least in the form of arms supplies, by the international community. So a pretty large-scale conflict is likely. But the end, the goal, of the PRC action is to exterminate the Uighurs.
Is it wrong, is it immoral, for a Chinese man of military age, who qualifies for conscription, to evade that draft? To go underground, to flee the country? Or just to seek an exemption from the draft, exploiting connections and wealth?
There’s a pretty obvious point you’re missing. The military kills people. Lots of innocent civilians were killed or burned by napalm because of action by draftees. Agreeing to be drafted puts other people in danger. If someone refused to be drafted, that means they didn’t participate in dropping napalm. Think of the innocent lives that were spared because they refused the draft.
Excellent reply, What-Exit. Emulates my thoughts completely.
Is there any evidence that US armed forces napalm attacks were prevented due to a lack of draftees?
I could argue that a dearth of well connected upper middle class conscripts made the war more palatable to those in power. I could argue that removing many draftees who are conscious of and disturbed by the evils of war means that the remaining draftees are likely to be, on average, more violent, more willing to kill.
It’s certainly not a simple P x Q calculation with draft avoidance leading to fewer deaths.
Well, a majority of Americans refusing the draft probably would have lead to less death. Can’t have a war if no one shows up.
But in the end, I wouldn’t say I’m morally opposed to killing. Sometimes people need killing. But I’m never abdicating my decision on when and why that happens. That’s why I equated Paul’s conscription position above with “forcing people to agree something is evil and must be stopped”. I’ll join the goddamn army myself if I think something is evil and needs to be stopped. What the hell else is the draft if not deciding that for me?
I see this has generated a lively discussion. Here’s something to throw into the equation, in support of the point I made earlier. In this archival article, there is a video entitled “Draft dodgers fight for all-inclusive amnesty”. In it, a mother who lost her only son in Vietnam speaks out in support of the draft dodgers, telling them that while the “leaders” have blamed the evaders for the deaths of those who served, they all know that the deaths wouldn’t have occured if the government had listened to what the resisters were saying and had stopped the war. Just another something to think about.
If it didn’t, then why were draftees needed? Why did they object to the draft evaders?
It’s obvious that some military action was prevented. We can’t possibly know what happened on the road not taken. We can’t identify any specific attack that didn’t happen. But there were some.
In my view, the comparisons to the trolley problem are inapposite. The initial conditions and the choice of action are different, which affects the moral calculus.
You are standing at the edge of a crowd of people.
Outside the crowd, someone with a bow aims and shoots an arrow at your head.
If you duck, the arrow will strike an unpredictable person behind you, as the crowd is sufficiently dense to guarantee only that some random individual will be hit.
Are you obligated to stand motionless and allow the arrow to impale your skull, because by avoiding it, you then become morally culpable for the injury suffered by the person behind you?
Why does your act of ducking transfer culpability from the person who originally shot the arrow?
As a matter of logic that would be true if and only if:
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The service was unable to actually train up the desired quota of interchangeable warm bodies. If they wanted 20K new soldiers this year and got 20K, it’s doesn’t matter in the slightest which 20K it was. Nor what the mix of volunteers and draftees was.
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If there was a shortfall and they only got e.g. 19K AND they weren’t able to rejigger things to take the shortfall elsewhere on Earth or in a non-combat role. 1K fewer troops guarding Germany or being recreation specialists in Kansas would leave the combat capability in Viet Nam unaffected.
Insofar as I know, tactics in Viet Nam were never constrained by a lack of warm bodies due to draft problems. The DoD was hamstrung in various ways to various degrees by budgets, by both Johnson’s & Nixon’s White Houses, and by many other limiting factors. Warm meat wasn’t really one of them.
Switching to commenting on @Paul_was_in_Saudi’s contention …
ISTM it depends on a very narrow reading of the facts.
If
- You assume the war itself is a given.
- You assume the way the war is being fought (from grand strategy to individual unit deployment and tactics) is a given.
- You assume the military’s intake goals (volunteers + draftees) are a given.
- You assume the military’s intake goals (volunteers + draftees) will be achieved.
- You assume any discussion of the war’s morality is off-limits.
- You assume any discussion of the draft’s morality is off-limits.
- You assume a would-be draftee has only one moral imperitive: to obey the call-up.
Then it follows that by failing the latter you’ve done a bad thing. Which decision imperils, not the next guy in line immediately behind you, but rather the person at the very end of the line who’d otherwise be call-up number e.g. 20,001.
It seems to me that Paul’s thrown out the entire household along with the baby, bassinet, and most of the water before he begins and is now left evaluating but a teaspoon of dirty bathwater.
Ethics is best practiced with a wide angle lens, not looking through a soda straw.