Why I Don't Thank Members of the Military for Their "Service"

(This is coming completely off the top of my head, and is thus largely unstructured, and might be a little jumbled. I am essentially thinking out loud about a subject that’s become increasingly important to me in the past couple of years. Bear with me.)

I do not thank members of the military for their “service”. I do not consider employment in the military to carry with it a sense of “honor”. I do not, in the sense that is generally meant, “support the troops”.

Let me clarify.

I do consider the current American military occupations, at their core, immoral. I do see acceptance of collateral damage as completely unjustifiable. I do see the moral exemption given by most people to agents of the State as non-existent. Therefore, I do consider complicity in the current operations of the U.S. military as morally wrong. This does not mean, however, that I see soldiers as monsters devoid of any humanity. Nor does it mean that my primary reason for not participating in the almost universal rituals of reverence for the military comes from resentment. Many people’s prima facie similar outlook towards the military is simplistically antagonistic for its own sake, so I can understand why my perspective can appear that way, but I can not stress enough that this is not the case.

My vocal criticism of enlistment in the military and refusal to give support for “service” is instead an attempt to prevent others from falling into the trap, and to oppose the process that allows the “War, what isn’t it good for?” mindset to continue. What is it that gets people to decide upon a career in the military? For a lot of them, it’s the simple promise of things like a college education and a way out of poverty. But is that enough to convince someone to kill, or to be a part of an organization that kills? Not for everyone, and certainly not for the number of people who join the military for that reason. What allows them to bypass this moral block is cultural reversal of the killing (or complicity therein)’s status. Even in times of general cultural disapproval of the war at hand, the same surrounding culture will egg them on, telling them that it’s a great honor to serve in the armed forces. This doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense when analyzed critically (how can taking part in an unjustified action be honorable?), but the sheer strength of public opinion is enough to carry it across the bridge of cognitive dissonance for almost everyone.

Is it really virtuous to take part in unjustified military action? I do believe that there exist hypothetical cases (though extraordinarily unlikely ones) in which war could potentially be Just, which implies the potential justification of a hypothetical military. Most people do. The problem, though, is that they extend that hypothetical justification to reality, despite the fact that the reality does not line up with the situations that would be necessary (I don’t have time here to go into detail about my thoughts on Just war theory, but for now, just know that nothing since 1776 probably qualifies for the United States) for that hypothetical justification. The hypothetical justification of legitimate defense of liberty is used to defend the reality of senseless slaughter and creation of more and more hostility to the United States. This is essentially what Rand calls an “anti-concept”: a vague idea that uses the valid and sound propositions of one claim to justify the invalid or unsound propositions of another. American lives are not being saved by enraging the populations we occupy. Foreign nations are not being helped by having their cities wrecked and people accidentally killed in collateral damage. This is insanity, but those who name it and explicitly state the necessary conclusion that employment in the United States military is actually a disservice, both to the American citizenry and to those we claim to be making democracy safe for, are called insane.

People who join the military are not making the same conscious decision that they would be making if they robbed a bank to pay for college. They are acting with ignorance of the moral blindfold put over their eyes by every person who thanks soldiers for their “service”, and goes on and on about the supposed intrinsic honor of the occupation, or puts a yellow ribbon on the back of their car. When a soldier steps on a landmine, they were pushed onto it by those who claimed to respect them most.

I don’t want to cause further hardship to people who have seen the Hell of war. I just don’t want to spit on those hardships by telling them that it meant something, when it didn’t, and the blame goes to those who said it did. I want to make sure that the reality is clear to an impressionable youth confronted by amoral military recruiters willing to tell them anything to use their mind and body for the destruction of themselves and others. Furthermore, this is a gravely personal issue to me. I know what’s being dealt with. There are four people I’ve known that have at one time or another been very close and dear to me that went on to join the military. One wants nothing more than to escape the ordeal. Another has been deeply psychologically traumatized. Someone else, that I once considered my best friend, has been so fundamentally and profoundly reshaped as a person that neither I nor various others who knew him have any actual connection to him now, being nothing more than the same body housing an entirely different person. And the fourth is now buried in a military cemetery.

My attitude is not one of hatred, but of fear for those I love.

To summarize, this quote from the 1964 film, The Americanization of Emily, displays the proper attitude towards “gratitude” for military “service”:

“I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades… we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We… perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices…

My brother died at Anzio - an everyday soldier’s death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud… [N]ow my other brother can’t wait to reach enlistment age. That’ll be in September. May be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution. What has my mother got for pretending bravery was admirable? She’s under constant sedation and terrified she may wake up one morning and find her last son has run off to be brave.”

I have a preliminary theory of population ethics that seems to work reasonably well: total utilitarianism, with the constraint that the addition of a new person must improve the total utility of the world by more than the utility of the additional person.

For example, suppose you have a trillion rat brains on heroin that are experiencing an extremely positive level of utility. You could create a trillion-first brain, which would experience slightly less utility and also reduce the utility of the other brains, because there’d be less heroin to go around - but the new brain’s utility would still be high enough to make up for the decrease, so total utility would be greater if you created it. But total utility would increase by less than the utility of the new brain, so by this theory, you shouldn’t create it.

So this theory avoids the Repugnant Conclusion without committing to a view with other problems, like average utilitarianism.

Why make this modification to utilitarianism rather than accepting the repugnant conclusion?

Why accept the repugnant conclusion? Creating a world with lives barely worth living seems pretty bad. And creating new people at the expense of those who already exist doesn’t seem like it’s actually making the world better, even if it increases total utility, which suggests that a simple maximization of total utility isn’t quite the right approach.

You’re taking an ethical intuitionist approach to this because you are recognizing that creating lives barely worth living “seems” pretty bad and modifying your ethical theory to be more in alignment with your intuitions. But from a utilitarian perspective worse or better is only defined by increased or decreased total utility. The point of utilitarianism is that the only thing that matters is suffering.

You modified utilitarian theory includes two principles: 1. maximize utility and 2. avoid RC. For utilitarians #1 > all other considerations. But for you #2 > #1 > all other considerations. But what is the justification for this other consideration #2 being more important than #1 other than it “seems” pretty bad?

I think lying seems bad. So in many instances lying > maximize utility in terms of moral significance for me. Am I wrong to do that? I don’t think so. I feel it’s similar to what you have done. This is why I’m an intuitionist and not a utilitarian. Maybe you could consider a lot of other intuitions as well.

Utilitarianism is about maximizing global well-being, and there are ambiguities about what that means when the size of the population isn't fixed, and how to aggregate new and potential lives into the calculus. Total utilitarianism says to just add their utility to the total, but the repugnance of the repugnant conclusion suggests that kind of aggregation doesn't capture what we want from a theory for maximizing global well-being. It's not about avoiding the RC vs maximizing utility, but that the RC helps us revise what we're looking for in a theory about maximizing utility.

Creating a world with a lot of lives barely worth living seems bad from a broadly utilitarian perspective, because it seems to do poorly in terms of well-being. And if a world where utility is successfully maximized doesn't seem that great, then we need a better specification for what it means to maximize utility.

I have a preliminary theory of population ethics that seems to work reasonably well: total utilitarianism, with the constraint that the addition of a new person must improve the total utility of the world by more than the utility of the additional person.

For example, suppose you have a trillion rat brains on heroin that are experiencing an extremely positive level of utility. You could create a trillion-first brain, which would experience slightly less utility and also reduce the utility of the other brains, because there’d be less heroin to go around - but the new brain’s utility would still be high enough to make up for the decrease, so total utility would be greater if you created it. But total utility would increase by less than the utility of the new brain, so by this theory, you shouldn’t create it.

So this theory avoids the Repugnant Conclusion without committing to a view with other problems, like average utilitarianism.

Why make this modification to utilitarianism rather than accepting the repugnant conclusion?

Why accept the repugnant conclusion? Creating a world with lives barely worth living seems pretty bad. And creating new people at the expense of those who already exist doesn't seem like it's actually making the world better, even if it increases total utility, which suggests that a simple maximization of total utility isn't quite the right approach.

In general, I think blame avoidance/deflection is an important social and institutional dynamic that’s not talked about enough. If a bad outcome would get you blamed, you want to avoid it much more than an equivalent one that would be passed over in silence. So you shrug and say “No one could have foreseen that” even though you did foresee it, but the individual incentives were against you preventing it.

Also, if publicly predicting a bad outcome means you personally have to do more work, you're incentivized to keep your predictions to yourself.

For example, imagine you think some possible event will make your employer's business go poorly, which might be preventable, but only with a lot of work. Others think the business will continue to be fine. If you keep talking, someone will eventually say "Well, why don’t you do something about it?", and you don't want to be the one guy doing something about it because if you're wrong, you'd do a lot of work for nothing, and if you're right, you get a pat on the back, which isn't worth all the effort. So you keep quiet, and when the event happens, you shrug, knowing that the incentives were structured against accurate prediction. Why be accurate if you don't get the benefits of accuracy?

On the other hand, if you don't push the work on the predictor, you incentivize frivolous predictions. If preventing a forecasted disaster is someone else's problem, there'll be more false alarms. Why be accurate if you don't pay the costs of inaccuracy?

so much religious belief seems to stem from a basic confusion over what emotions mean, and the fact that they provide feedback on what’s happening inside your head, not out there in the world.

so many conversion stories involve someone visiting a cathedral and feeling an emotion and concluding on that basis that the Christian god is real and miracles described in the bible really happened and people go to heaven when they die, when those conclusions don’t follow from the premise at all!

and it’s not a simple oversight, a lot of apologetics even rely on it, like half of C. S. Lewis’ guff is him saying he feels a sense of dissatisfaction sometimes and this is obviously evidence that the Christian god is real and miracles described in the bible really happened blah blah blah and like dude is there no other possible reason why you might feel this emotion, or why this emotion might exist in the first place?

I can get tingly sometimes when I listen to the right music in the right frame of mind but that doesn’t constitute proof that there’s a god of nightcore dubstep remixes out there rearranging the cosmos for my personal benefit, as cool as that would be.

When urban public transit construction projects employ union labor, that’s typically seen as a good thing - it’s providing decently-paying jobs to working-class people. But that increases costs, which makes those projects less attractive. Assuming that poor people are disproportionate users of public transit, they’re disproportionately affected by its absence or inconvenience. If it’s too expensive to build a station a few blocks away, they’re the ones who’ll have to walk a long way. (The same goes for running those systems. Cheap efficient services are better than jobs programs.)

The same goes for making public transit clean and safe. It’s true that enforcing civilized behavior on trains and in stations will sometimes require police enforcement, occasionally there’ll be scenes of police brutality when a cop goes too far, and the targets will be disproportionately poor. But the beneficiaries will be disproportionately poor too! If you just want to get to your low-paying job, you want to sit down on the train and relax, not worry that you’re sitting in filth or that you’ll be harassed by thugs.