Posted by Jost on October 14, 2006, at 16:39:29
In reply to Re: doctor jailed for refusing order to go to Iraq, posted by Jost on October 13, 2006, at 22:46:16
My point about the low mortality was not the low mortality of non- US troops. Obviously, those are horrendous--
I meant there has been relatively very low mortality, as opposed to traumatic injury, of US troops.
This is hardly an unalloyed good-- traumatic injury is also horrendous. So I was only making the point that doctors on the battlefield are saving lives-- and this seems, overall, to be a value. I'm sure, despite the horrors of it, having one's loved one back alive, in most instances, except the worst, is something families and survivors prefer.
It doesn't mean the war, as a whole, is moral or legal, according to International Law. I'm not sure of it's legality. I'm less sure of its morality.
However, I'm also not sure that it reaches the moral pitch where if you're a doctor, you have the moral high ground in not going. That's what I"m not sure of.
Is it valuable to have people refusing to go to a morally questionable war? Undoubtedly. People can protest, refuse to enlist, protest more-- but if you've enlisted, I"m not sure, absent things I"m not at all sure I see here-- and you're a doctor who will save lives-- I'm not sure it's morally so great.
If all you're going to do is go and kill and be killed-- well that's somehow different.
The moral equivalence of this and Nazi Germany? No, that I can't see.
I think if what was happening now was what we wanted to have happen, or have planned to execute-- as our ultimate strategy-- maybe that would be-- getting there-- but I haven't yet gotten anywhere near the conclusion that our government wanted this to happen. No way.
By the way-- I'd always understood that those who practiced civil disobedience expected to be punished for it-- that was part of the idea. That you disobey, despite the consequences. Which doesn't make the consequences good- but it does make them normal science-- not Nazi science.
Jost
poster:Jost
thread:694101
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20061009/msgs/694812.html