Ok. I’ll call him now.
Much as you’d love me to be a liar, sweetheart, you got it all kerfluzzled in your head.
You said that one ethical response to a call to war was to fight it out of a sense of duty, even though you believe the war to be unjust.
Let me quote:
What does it mean to “go”, if not to fight the war? And if you fight in an unjust war, are you telling me that you’re unlikely to kill an innocent person? Though you didn’t say it outright, your position that #2 is ethical certainly gives a strong implication that killing someone unjustly is more ethical than lying to avoid killing someone unjustly. If not – if you believe it’s less ethical to join a military (intending to obey orders) in an unjust war than to deceive to get out of joining the military – I’d love to see the clarification.
I know that you have trouble debating people without calling them contemptible liars: I know how you love the misplaced ad hominem. But honestly, give it a try. It’ll be good for you.
Daniel
Ok. Here’s my notes.
Me: Dad, what do you think about draft-dodgers, people that refused to serve during Vietnam.
Dad: (direct quote) I think they are despicable human beings. ::pause:: the funny thing is… they look the same they act the same… they’re all smug… like the people protesting the war now.
(my paraphrase of continuing comments) You have to remember at the time when I was a kid, when I served, if your were a man, and you were healthy, you had a military obligation when you turned 18. That was the deal. You had to do your deal. We all knew it growing up. It wasn’t a surprise.
Why are you asking me this now?
Me: I’m talking about the war with this ***** who doesn’t believe my insight into your opinion is valid, and he asked me to ask you directly about your opinion of draft dodgers.
Dad: What did you tell him?
Me: That basically you think they are beneath contempt.
Dad: That’s fine. I don’t hold those people in high regard.
I stand corrected. Your father is not any wiser than you depicted him.
As for that, your holier-than-thou attitude and conflation of moral humility with moral relativism is doing nothing for my blood pressure. Were you willing to hold the debate without arrogant namecalling, I’d be happy to continue; but now I’ll let you have whatever last word you want, and I’ll bow out. I’ve said my piece.
Daniel
Daniel
I have not made this argument. It does not follow from the arguments I have made. It is a deliberate misinterpretation and a lie.
Your torturous to attempt to justify it is equally bullshit. Argue what I say. Quote me. If you feel that something follows from one of my statements, ask me if it is my argument as I have had the courtesy to ask you.
But do not just go ahead and falsely attribute crap to me as if I have said. I am not your sweetie and don’t go playing games pretending I said one thing when I did not.
Stop lying, and stop playing games pretending I said one thing when I did not.
Falsely attributing an argument to me that I did not make is a harmful lie, and I am quite right to point out your dishonesty. I’m not wasting my time on the sensitivities of someone who insists on putting false statements in my mouth, especially when they lack the class or the courtesy to retract them when it’s pointed out.
A spade is a spade.
There’s a matter of nuance. Daniel, your argument assumes there is a bright dividing line between just wars and unjust wars. This is not so. Was the Vietnam War “unjust.” Many think it was proper. Many think it was badly led or poorly thought-out, but not unjust.
Military actions seem to go best when soldiers aren’t merely invited to participate. Armies just don’t work that way. It’s important for all of society that our military be effective. The people at home are counting on the military to defend us. If they fail, disaster could be the fate of all of us.
What does it mean that an individual believes a war to be “unjust?” How do we know if the individual has made a properly informed decision? How can we distinguish a legitimate belief in a war’s unjustness from a mere unwillingness to make the sacrifices involved in fighting? We can’t. That’s why the US doesn’t allow individuals to make that judgment. A true pacifist can get out of serving; otherwise you don’t get to pick your wars. It won’t work to allow each soldier to decide whether to obey every order.
There are very rare situations when soldier should not obey orders. E.g., when he’s told to commit genocide. However, the much more common situation is that the soldier is frightened or would just prefer not to fight. That’s just not good enough. That position deserves no respect. In other words, the benefit of the doubt should always be given to obeying legal orders.
Lest I be accused of saying I’d bow out when I didn’t, I’m glad to talk with folks civilly on this issue, as I said before.
I agree that there’s no dividing line between just and unjust wars; this is true in virtually every ethical decision. I do not trust my government to make that decision for me: I trust an individual to decide whether a war is just long before I’ll trust a government to decide.
I’m aware that this would make it much harder to muster an army. I see that as a feature, not a bug.
I do not believe that, absent a bright line division, we should give the benefit of the doubt to obeying orders. Quite the contrary: if we are unclear whether a war is just, we should err on the side of neither killing nor facilitating the killing of people. In other words, I believe we should give the benefit of the doubt to NOT joining the war effort.
Daniel
While I admire the passion of all the arguments presented here, I have to question the overall validity of this discussion
Last night I listened to a recording of the Commandant of the USMC’s speech at the National Press Club. He insisted that while the corps honors the memory of its battles on Beleau Wood and Iwo Jima, that sort of combat is no longer necessary.
America now fights its wars with highly trained volunteers. This isn’t 1776, where some of you are running out of your houses with your hunting rifles while others won’t, with the expected results in neighborhood relations.
Besides, World War One was the last war where military casualties exceeded civilian. Whatever our convictions or ethics or whatever, we’re all on the front lines from now on.
I step away from my computer for an hour and come back to find the above comment.
You completely misconstrued my meaning. It is not your fault nor mine, although I take responsibility. It is the problem with message boards and the written word in general. It is so difficult to judge one’s character and the meaning of his words, absent the body language, tone of voice and eye contact of one on one conversation.
I did not mean to imply that Scylla would have made or is now a Nazi. Although as I re-read this thread and his use of vile language to characterize any and all who disagree with him, I have my doubts.
All I meant by my comment of his making a good German was simply to draw an analogy between his mind set and belief system and the herd mentality of the German people who marched lockstep into WWII and the Holocaust. And remember the majority of the German people were not Nazis in the strict sense of the word. No, they just believed in their government and that they had to comply with it’s wishes to fulfill their ethical responsibilities to that government. Sound Familiar?
No, Dan, I was not trying to lose the team debate. I was simply trying to point out a very nuanced concept of how easy it is for good people to be led by demagoguery (combined with a narrow and closed mind on their part) to do very evil and bad things. A nuanced concept which is extremely difficult to convey via the written word.
I guess it depends who “we” is. It’s one thing if you want to take that POV in conversation or on a message board. You have that right, although I don’t agree. I don’t respect that opinion. Nevertheless, you’re not involved in the war effort, so your anti-social opinion is not a big problem for society.
However, it’s a different story for people who are involved. If a citizen refused to pay taxes because he considered the war in Iraq to be unjust, he should be treated as just another tax cheat. If an enlisted soldier refused to obey orders because in his judgment war against Iraq was unjust, he deserves harsh punishment.
Well, what can I say? I disagree, and I’d rather have a society in which everyone who fought in an unjust war was held culpable for its actions – a society in which the injunction against killing was taken seriously. Although I can’t respect the decision to fight in an unjust war, although it chilled me to hear a Gulf War soldier talk about being lulled to sleep by the sounds of falling bombs, I can respect the people involved. They’re doing their best in this world, and even if their best leads them into horrific acts, they’re still doing their best.
Daniel
You’ve already conceded that others may rationally consider Vietnam a just war. There is also the fact that many soldiers have acted morally in an unjust war, as well as the corrollary that many soldiers have committed atrocities for the best of the reasons.
Contrary to your hyperbole our government wasn’t asking our soldiers to go out and kill innocent people. Suggesting that it did and that is what soldiers did is another harmful mischaracterization that you have made. It is a slander against all of our countrymen who fought and died with honor. The only reason I can see for making such a statement is to seek to rationalize an act of deceit and cowardice, a shirking of responsibility.
It’s a thin line that you are trying to walk. You don’t want to come out and talk shit about the men who fought and died for this country. On the other side you don’t want to give them much credit because then it makes lying and evading the duty to serve look that much worse. You choose to attack the government (which is generally safe,) instead.
It doesn’t work though. You’re saying those that didn’t refuse (or chose your ethical lying and running way while sucking off of society’s tit strategy) have agreed to murder.
The difference here is that you’re playing a rhetorical game trying to figure out how make deceit and abandoning responsibility out of cowardly sef-interest look good. Now you’re trying to act all offended and say I’m not playing anymore when it becomes clear how ridiculous your position is.
On the other side of the coin I’m talking about the ethics of being in an individual in a society, how a man of moral stature seeks to live his life. He does not run from his responsibilities. He seeks them out and fulfills them.
He most certainly doesn’t intentionally decieve so that others must fight and die in his place, and then attempt to belittle those that conducted themselves with honor just so his betrayals don’t look so reprehensible.
Yes, and a car that won’t start sure saves on gas.
**
I beleive that any ethical person who lives in a society and receives it’s benefits has an obligation to fulfill his responsibilities to that society and live by it’s rules.
I think that it is inherently obvious that if he is able and unwilling to fulfill these clearly defined responsibilties, than he has no business accepting the benefits.
Things have a price. If you are unwilling to pay the price, don’t take the thing. It should be a simple enough rule to understand.
You don’t sit down at a restaurant, eat a dinner and refuse to pay for it.
You don’t steal. You don’t force other people to carry you. You fulfill your responsibilities.
If you feel the war is unjust, be a medic, or go to jail, or serve honorably and try to bring honor to the war, or, if you feel we are wrong, go and fight for the other side.
These are not fungible relative points. This is basic ethics. You don’t steal. You fulfill your responsibilities. You don’t lie.
If you’re an adult and you don’t get it, there’s little I can do to help.
Oh for chrissakes, why don’t you two get a room?
This is supposed to be a debate on whether soldiers actually fought to directly preserve the freedoms our country enjoys, not a debate on the ethics of fighting or not in a war. Hell, that debate will never end…
No offense intended, I think it’s an interesting debate, just not what the thread was originally about.
Parse, parry, thrust, repeat…
Oh, my God! I just pulled a Mini-Mod, didn’t I? Sorry about that.
:smack:
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually the protestors and demonstrators who are the ones really out there fighting for our rights and freedoms any more.
For my money, some hippie burning a US flag in Central Park is doing a hell of a lot more to protect our first amendment rights than some Marine calling in artillery strikes on some village 10000 miles away.
I’d halfway agree with you, RTA. That hippy is doing a little bit more to protect our first-amendment rights than the Marine, but not much more. OTOH, they’re certainly not endangering me as much as the Marine is doing: no terrorist is going to strike the US because they saw a hippy burning a flag, but you betcha terrorists are gonna strike the US because they saw a village bombed by the military.
And sorry to disappoint, but ain’t no way I’m getting a room with Scylla. Someone as confused as he, who misrepresents my motives as bad as he does, and then turns around and calls me a liar, is bound to be a lousy roommate. 
Daniel
So America deserves to be attacked, because our defence provoked the attackers? The World Trade Center, Pearl Harbor, the USS Cole, various embassies were all our fault? If we just played nice, no other nation would bother us? The way to deter terrorism is to stop defending ourselves? Attacking terrorists is counter-productive, because it just engenders more terrorism? :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
“Deserves” to be attacked appeared nowhere in my posts. “Gonna” be attacked did. I’m not so interested in assigning blame as I am in increasing safety.
We liberals are realists, don’tcha know.
Daniel
What a horrible statement to make. If you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn’t make such a statement.
I’ll do my best to give you the unvarnished facts of the matter.
FOs took very high casualty rates. The reason that they did was becasue it usually took several barrages before they were able to zero in on their targets. After the first barrage the enemy would know that there was an FO hiding somewhere on high ground directing the artillery and they would go looking for him. It was a race between the FO to hit the target and escape before he was found.
Try to imagine yourself in that situation. I can’t imagine anything more hellish.
Your accusation is that FOs were in the business of bombing villages of civilians, and it’s a stupid and ignorant one.
The Viet Cong would intermingle with civilians and use them as human shields and they would place supplies and ammo dumps inside village or adjacent to villages to hide them.
Our troops never new what was a friendly village, or what was a front for the enemy.
In that kind of an environment things happened. Sometimes they happened on purpose. Nothing excuses those exceptions
But, they are exceptions, and for you to categorize them as the role of an Fo is a falsehood.
FOs took extremely high casualty rates and one of the reasons they did so was because they let the human shields work. Instead of saturating the area with fire and saving their own ass and getting the job done quickly, the FOs were trained to hit their targets without inflicting unnecessary casualties.
They did not place the civilians at risk, the Viet Cong did by hiding themselves and their supplies among villages.
Nevertheless, what the FOs did time and again was fire their initial volleys away from the target and then walk them in. They did this so they would hit their target precisely without killing civilians.
What this meant was that instead of one or two or possibly three volleys, it often took an FO five or six to hit his target.
So, picture yourself with minimal support in an area saturated by the enemy. They are actively looking for you to torture and kill you. They’re using civilians as shields. Nevertheless you stay put and risk your life taking your time so that you don’t kill civilians.
A lot of times that care, that humanity, that reluctance to take an innocent life, meant that the FO was killed or captured. These guys knew it, and they did it anyway. They sat there with their slide rules and their radios and directed the fire with humanity and regard to the civilian lives at stake.
They showed a humanity and a regard for civilian lives that their enemy did not, and they died for it.