You are confused, as always. If war is 24 times less deadly than a regular peacetime environment, then it is a minor nuisance.

If war is a minor nuisance, then conscription is barely worth talking about.

If war is 24 times less deadly than a regular peacetime environment, then it is a minor nuisance. — Olivier5

Why would the aspects of a peacetime environment all disappear during war? If gravity forms part of a peacetime environment, does it disappear during war?

As such a government, in conscripting, is taking away a meaningful choice over what outcomes a person wants to contribute toward and imposing a very severe burden in doing so. I don't think there's any precedent for that. — Isaac

I think that's a solid argument sketch for the claim that conscription isn't just unless (insert caveats here). And that makes sense of the sub argument regarding harm trade offs of being ruled by Russia vs being ruled by Ukraine.

There is a bit of an equivocation there though, the expanded conscription in that instance is a response to invasion, and so the trade off ought turn on the disruptive consequences of unresisted or successful invasion rather than the steady state of an established government's qualify of life statistics. If you took the measure in contested territory, those measures would go down.

However, I think your argument does hit more home against conscription in the abstract, in which an abstract trade off between the suffering of surrender+politics vs the imposition of individual suffering that is conscription. That bears on whether it's a permissible continuous government policy. I say permissible rather than just there because the ground for conscription being 'okay in the abstract' isn't that it's just in every case, it's that it's not unjust in some cases (permissible).

Can you think of a case where conscription wouldn't be unjust? (By that I don't mean that it would be just, I mean that it could be like meh rather than hell yeah or the devil)

Though that may be weakened by the extent to which an individual is obliged, through social embedding, to defend something which is worth defending from the real risk of its waning or destruction. How much of that is a romantic attachment to a culture being rationalised remains to be seen, in each case (like _db and their Graeber quote said below)

I guess the logic is that by living in a country, you enjoy all the benefits provided by it, and that if the country's existence is threatened, you owe it to the country as your duty to fight and possibly die in order to preserve it. You're a selfish cowardly traitor if you don't. — _db

I repeat:

If war is 24 times less deadly than a regular peacetime environment, then it is a minor nuisance.

If war is a minor nuisance, then conscription is barely worth talking about. — Olivier5

There is a bit of an equivocation there though, the expanded conscription in that instance is a response to invasion, and so the trade off ought turn on the disruptive consequences of unresisted or successful invasion rather than the steady state of an established government's qualify of life statistics. — fdrake

Yes, that's true, and harder to predict. But my argument (in the general case) only requires a reasonable dispute as to the benefits. I think even if we accept your criticism here, there remains a reasonable scope for dispute as to the benefits of military resistance, although smaller?

Can you think of a case where conscription wouldn't be unjust? — fdrake

Yeah, I don't see any reason why it must be the case that there's sufficient reasonable dispute as to the merits of military resistance. There will always be disagreement, of course, but ethically, we're importing notions of reasonableness anyway, so...

One would be hard pushed to make a reasonable argument that life under the Nazis, for example, would be no less equitable than life under Churchill/Chamberlain. They had unequivocally unjust policies. So I think conscription might be justified to fight something like that. With caveats. I think the OHCHR guidelines are sensible with regards to the right to express a religious belief, for example.

How much of that is a romantic attachment to a culture being rationalised remains to be seen, in each case (like _db and their Graeber quote said — fdrake

Yeah. We owe our countries. But this is about a government's right to dictate how we pay that debt. We're not just passive recipients of benefits, we're the creators of them too.

I think it still comes back to the relationship between individual autonomous contributions to a common goal, and a government dictating that process. I think there's a balance to strike based on reasonable dispute over methods and the scale of the imposition. I don't think anyone could raise a reasonable argument that the imposition is small, so it's about how reasonable it is, in any case, to dispute the method.

It seems the alternative is to suggest the government can impose anything, no matter how severe, only on the grounds it thinks it will thereby improve things. I don't think anyone wants to go there.

I repeat: — Olivier5

Why would you do that? It's nonsense. Do corporations stop profiteering during war? No.

So why would the deaths caused by their doing so stop during war.

War involves a lot of death, on top of the deaths already caused by greed and profiteering.

The choices are profiteering plus war, or just profiteering.

War involves a lot of death, on top of the deaths already caused by greed and profiteering. — Isaac

According to your fake 'statistics', war involves only a minute increase in casualties, almost negligible.

According to your fake 'statistics' — Olivier5

They're from the OHCHR and the WHO. Are they part of the Russian propaganda machine too? They get everywhere those damn Ruskies!

They're from the OHCHR and the WHO. — Isaac

Except the OHCHR warned that their data is not reliable statistic but a count a minima. I explained it to you already but you didn't listen, bent on lying as you tend to be

the OHCHR warned that their data is not reliable statistic but a count a minima. — Olivier5

The death toll would need to be 30 times higher to refute the argument, making this invasion one of the deadliest invasions ever, outpacing the Nazi occupation of Poland, the genocides in Congo, the Napoleonic wars, even the entire first world war... Is that the claim you're making?

On what grounds? Absolutely no one from any agency, official or otherwise, is giving figures anywhere near that magnitude.

The death toll would need to be 30 times higher to refute the argument.... — Isaac

Not true, because you are comparing very different variables. One, the OHCHR data, represents a very partial account of civilians (only) casualties from bombing and other direct war effects, which according to their site might vastly underestimate the real number of directly war-induced civilian casualties.

The WHO data, on the other hand, is an estimate of excess deaths due to avoidable factors such as pollution or poor access to health care in peacetime.

In order to do a proper comparison between the respective lethality of war and peace in Ukraine, you would need to estimate the number of excess deaths due to the war, including through an induced deterioration of the civilians' access to health care and many many other indirect risk factors affected by the war. This number won't even stop rising at the end of the war because the Ukrainian society will take time to recover from the blow.

And this number might well be 30 times higher than the very partial OHCHR body count. You cannot possibly know until you estimate it.

No. The claim in question was...

you'll probably suffer more harm from capitalists and mean neighbors in peace time than you'd do in a war from an invading force. — baker

...so the only account needed is of deaths from invading forces.

And more importantly, @baker used the word 'probably'. So to dismiss those comments as "crass" you'd have to show it's not even probable. Your current argument that we can't know either way falls massively short of that requirement.

But for the sake of argument. Is it your claim that the resulting figure would be 30 times larger?

If you want to include all the knock on effects of war, then we'd need to include the knock on effects of profiteering too, yes? All the social issues, the food crises in other countries, the environmental damage - pollution, global warming... Do you want to go there? Is your claim seriously going to be that war outstrips the death toll from all that?

I'd love to see the figures you'd use.

'Harm' is a much wider concept that 'death'.

'Harm' is a much wider concept that 'death'. — Olivier5

So?

So why count only direct bombing casualties vastly undercounted on one hand, and all possible estimated indirect "excess deaths" on the other? If in both cases we are talking of 'harm', it ought to be compared through similar harm metrics.

So why count only direct bombing casualties vastly undercounted on one hand, and all possible estimated indirect "excess deaths" on the other? If in both cases we are talking of 'harm', it ought to be compared through similar harm metrics. — Olivier5

What?

We're either measuring 'harm' or 'death'. I measured 'death' - deaths from bombings etc, vs deaths from profiteering. Same measure.

We could measure harms, but I don't see any reason why the result would be any different. If anything war is more likely to have a higher kill/harm ratio simply because the purpose is to kill. That would make a harm to harm comparison even more unbalanced.

You can't compare apples and oranges. I won't make it simpler than that for you.

You can't compare apples and oranges. — Olivier5

I was comparing deaths per thousand population with...deaths per thousand population.

But I'll bear your excellent advice in mind in future should I ever be tempted into juxtaposing fruit.

Sure. I also recommend you get out of your basement for once in your life, and visit a real war zone. Only then might you be able -- with any luck and a divine intervention or two -- to understand the crassness of a comment belittling other people's suffering from the safety of one's crapper.

One would be hard pushed to make a reasonable argument that life under the Nazis, for example, would be no less equitable than life under Churchill/Chamberlain. They had unequivocally unjust policies. So I think conscription might be justified to fight something like that. — Isaac

So, the last time your own country faced a possible threat of invasion, that time conscription was OK. :roll:

Because then, the enemy was exceptionally bad. But otherwise, seems it hasn't been. :snicker:

But didn't Hitler want a peace with the UK in 1940?

BERLIN, July 19, 1940 (UP) -- Adolf Hitler today addressed an "appeal to reason" to Great Britain to avert "destruction of a great world empire," but he made it clear that rejection would mean an attack with all of the forces at the command of the Axis powers.

"In this hour and before this body," the Nazi Fuehrer told the German Reichstag in the presence of Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, "I feel myself obliged to make one more appeal to reason to England."

Wouldn't then making peace with Germany have been then reasonable, Isaac?

Wouldn't then making peace with Germany have been then reasonable, Isaac? — ssu

If you're suggesting that the difference between the Nazi regime and 1940s England is much the same as the difference between modern Russia and modern Ukraine then there's nothing more to say. If you're seriously prepared to sink that low, no arguments are going to have any impact.

Where, in 1940s England, were the plans to exterminate an entire fucking race?

No.

In September 3rd 1939 Great Britain declared war and immediately went ahead with the National Service Act, which imposed conscription on all males aged between 18 and 41. Only those medically unfit were exempted, as were others in key industries and jobs such as baking, farming, medicine, and engineering. Later in 1940 the enemy state, Germany, sought peace without any territorial demands from Great Britain.

I'm just asking how this goes with your line of thinking on this thread.

I'm just asking how this goes with your line of thinking on this thread. — ssu

So, the last time your own country faced a possible threat of invasion, that time conscription was OK. :roll: — ssu

...is not 'just asking'.

I've already made it fairly clear. My argument is that the balance between autonomy and civil duties ought be weighed by factors such as the degree of imposition and the reasonableness of disagreement over means.

In most cases of war, there is a very reasonable disagreement over means.

In the case of Nazi ideology attempting to dominate Europe, there is far less reasonable disagreement over means.

There's nothing complicated about that except for the dogmatist desperately trying to warp the facts to avoid having to even contemplate the possibility that Ukraine might be anything other than a nation of saints and angels.

Because then, the enemy was exceptionally bad. But otherwise, seems it hasn't been. :snicker: — ssu

Personally, I don't see much of a difference between MM. Putin and Hitler, prior to the Holocaust, or between the UK in the 40's and Ukraine now, for that matter...

Personally, I don't see much of a difference between MM. Putin and Hitler, prior to the Holocaust, or between the UK in the 40's and Ukraine now, for that matter... — Olivier5

Seems that Isaac see's a lot of difference.

Seems that Isaac see's a lot of difference. — ssu

Let him tell us what those differences are.

Seems that Isaac see's a lot of difference. — ssu

Let him tell us what those differences are. — Olivier5

If you two want to embarrass yourselves by suggesting that the differences between Nazi Germany and 1940s England were about the same as those between modern Ukraine and Russia I'm happy to just leave you to it. I consider the argument already won when it reaches that level of utter stupidity.

Was there no pollution, corruption and profiteering in the UK in the 40's? Was it not a very imperfect democracy, ruled in fact by a filthy rich aristocratic class? So where is the essential difference with Ukraine now? The queen?

Isn't the Putin regime a fascist and militaristic dictatorship, just like the Nazis were?

So Russia's great and wise leader, Vladimir Putin, has called for partial mobilisation. @Isaac is going to tell us how criminal such a decision was, any moment now.

Isaac is going to tell us how criminal such a decision was, any moment now. — Olivier5

Unlike your good self, I don't feel the need to use discussion forums just to tell the world how I feel about things. If someone wants to put forward a proposal that what Putin's doing is fine and normal, I'll happily critique it, but no, as yet I don't have this narcissistic driving passion to inform the world at large how I feel about every damn thing happening in it.