Apologies for the delayed response, I appreciate the effort you put into your reply and I felt that I could not fully parse it and form a proper response in my ill state a couple of days ago.
I understand what you’re saying! I do recognize that culture can be very important to a lot of people and that it can give them a sense of belonging, strengthen their bonds with their community, and give them a day-to-day purpose to do what they do. I strongly believe that if people choose to do so, they have the right to fight and die to protect their culture and that there’s nothing wrong with that. The issue I raise is with drafts specifically because they compel people to fight and die for a cause they may not believe in. A draft is essentially a sacrifice of unwilling innocent people in order to protect a culture, and I don’t think that such a large-scale sacrifice can be justified to protect something that is NOT human life.
The location of culture is not explicitly stated in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I believe that aspects of it would be spread out across the hierarchy, but are at most at the level of (and are only part of) “belonging and love.” This is because as you have stated, culture can be important for giving people a sense of belonging and makes them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. If you are forced to fight and die a brutal death, you are losing your safety and physiological needs in order to protect others’ belonging and love, and to me, that is unfair and wrong. This isn’t necessarily always the case - extremes like sacrificing one person to save a nation do seem right to me - but the immense scale of suffering and death of unwilling and innocent people wrought by a draft is unjustifiable for what it protects.
Even though culture as you describe it is clearly valuable, it is something that can only be experienced through the lens of people and therefore only has as much value as the people who experience it. By supporting a draft, you’re essentially making the moral judgement call that it is okay to force numerous people to die brutal and bloody deaths so that others can enrich their lives through a strong and protected culture. The cost in human lives, violations of their rights, and infliction of suffering is simply too great.
This comment was specifically about why land is essential to culture.
About drafting, In other comments, I explained how I think that you have the responsibility to defend the culture that raised you. It’s like paying taxes in a social-democracy, you may have become self-sufficient and don’t need the social system anymore, but you have the moral responsibility to contribute back (at least through taxes), so the next underprivileged group can benefit from what allowed you to reach this point: public education, medicine, culture, research, other public infrastructure and services, etc.
So defending your people/culture/land is an extension of this thought.
Of course, I wish people would enlist out of free will, but not everyone has high moral standards (imperfect education perhaps), so you need constrains, that’s also why laws and enforcement are needed.
To be honest, I had a pacifist period where I would have preferred to run away from any military conflict. But now, I think we can’t deal in absolute, we have to work with compromises, in this case, supporting the lesser evil that will reduce the amount of deaths and destruction. I think getting drafted people killed to stop Putin’s imperialism is a lesser evil than letting it destroy a democracy and its culture. I believe he will not stop until he has done the same to all the ex-USSR countries, and that stopping him in Ukraine should reduce the amount of destruction.
The big differences between taxes and the draft are:
You usually still live even if you get taxed.
Taxes are a cost of participating in society. If you want to stop paying them, you can using money entirely and go live on a boat or something. It’s not super viable, but taxes aren’t technically mandatory.
Getting drafted is more akin to slavery than taxes. It also threatens your well-being in a way that taxes do not.
Apologies for the delayed response, I appreciate the effort you put into your reply and I felt that I could not fully parse it and form a proper response in my ill state a couple of days ago.
I understand what you’re saying! I do recognize that culture can be very important to a lot of people and that it can give them a sense of belonging, strengthen their bonds with their community, and give them a day-to-day purpose to do what they do. I strongly believe that if people choose to do so, they have the right to fight and die to protect their culture and that there’s nothing wrong with that. The issue I raise is with drafts specifically because they compel people to fight and die for a cause they may not believe in. A draft is essentially a sacrifice of unwilling innocent people in order to protect a culture, and I don’t think that such a large-scale sacrifice can be justified to protect something that is NOT human life.
The location of culture is not explicitly stated in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I believe that aspects of it would be spread out across the hierarchy, but are at most at the level of (and are only part of) “belonging and love.” This is because as you have stated, culture can be important for giving people a sense of belonging and makes them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. If you are forced to fight and die a brutal death, you are losing your safety and physiological needs in order to protect others’ belonging and love, and to me, that is unfair and wrong. This isn’t necessarily always the case - extremes like sacrificing one person to save a nation do seem right to me - but the immense scale of suffering and death of unwilling and innocent people wrought by a draft is unjustifiable for what it protects.
Even though culture as you describe it is clearly valuable, it is something that can only be experienced through the lens of people and therefore only has as much value as the people who experience it. By supporting a draft, you’re essentially making the moral judgement call that it is okay to force numerous people to die brutal and bloody deaths so that others can enrich their lives through a strong and protected culture. The cost in human lives, violations of their rights, and infliction of suffering is simply too great.
This comment was specifically about why land is essential to culture.
About drafting, In other comments, I explained how I think that you have the responsibility to defend the culture that raised you. It’s like paying taxes in a social-democracy, you may have become self-sufficient and don’t need the social system anymore, but you have the moral responsibility to contribute back (at least through taxes), so the next underprivileged group can benefit from what allowed you to reach this point: public education, medicine, culture, research, other public infrastructure and services, etc.
So defending your people/culture/land is an extension of this thought.
Of course, I wish people would enlist out of free will, but not everyone has high moral standards (imperfect education perhaps), so you need constrains, that’s also why laws and enforcement are needed.
To be honest, I had a pacifist period where I would have preferred to run away from any military conflict. But now, I think we can’t deal in absolute, we have to work with compromises, in this case, supporting the lesser evil that will reduce the amount of deaths and destruction. I think getting drafted people killed to stop Putin’s imperialism is a lesser evil than letting it destroy a democracy and its culture. I believe he will not stop until he has done the same to all the ex-USSR countries, and that stopping him in Ukraine should reduce the amount of destruction.
The big differences between taxes and the draft are:
You usually still live even if you get taxed.
Taxes are a cost of participating in society. If you want to stop paying them, you can using money entirely and go live on a boat or something. It’s not super viable, but taxes aren’t technically mandatory.
Getting drafted is more akin to slavery than taxes. It also threatens your well-being in a way that taxes do not.