The Washington Post has an interesting “Outlook’s 4th
Annual Spring Cleaning” page in the Outlook Section, p. B4, link here.
I’ll take up a couple of the items. One is criticism of the all-volunteer
military by Thomas E. Ricks. The
commentator writes that the all-volunteer military is successful “militarily”,
but not politically and ethically. He says we were reckless when we invaded
Iraq and would not have done so with a draft.
Conscription raises the idea that individuals must share the
risks and perils that it takes to provide them a stable and prosperous
culture. That means, individuals must be
open to exposure to sacrifice for the common good. This, as I’ve noted recently, was a paramount
part of “moral thinking”. The Supreme
Court has even ruled that the male-only draft is constitutional. As a “moral
precept”, it began to unravel in the 1960s with the Vietnam era conscription,
of which I was a part.
The draft didn’t keep us out of Vietnam, but maybe the
convenience of student deferments did.
When the debate over gays in the military erupted a quarter-century
later, the irony of the whole paradigm was exposed, although by the 1990s a lot
of people had forgotten we used to have a draft.
But after 9/11, Charles Moskos, one of the originators of "don't ask don't tell", argued vigorously for returning to conscription and suggested that (back in 2001) DADT could be easily repealed if the (both-sex) military draft were re-imposed.
There’s something else about the idea of this kind of “moral
duty”. Shared sacrifice is still not the
same thing as shared purpose.
Another topic is school “Grades”, by Tulane professor
Melissa Harris-Perry. But when I was
growing up, Grades were a kind of currency, a measure of self-worth. Life was actually pretty rich and interesting
even in the days before I was on my own as an adult with my own fiat money and
bills.
The topic of Software Patents (Christina Mulligan and
Timothy B. Lee) I’ll take up momentarily on the trademark blog.
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