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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>That’s not their call to make. Inventors of technologies that could be used for war have never had the right to deny access to those technologies to the elected civilian government.[1]

>[1] The government can make you go over to southeast Asia and kill people personally.

Is this a normative statement? In other words are you simply claiming "the government has men with guns and therefore can force people/companies do whatever they want", or are you claiming that "the government should be able to commandeer civilian resources for whatever it wants"?

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It’s a descriptive statement about the law. But you’re mischaracterizing the normative principle underlying the law. It’s not based on power, but rather the moral duties incumbent on citizens.

>but rather the moral duties incumbent on citizens.

Is it a "moral duty" to aid your government, especially in the current social/political environment? Conscription is theoretically still allowed in the US, and you're theoretically supposed to register for the SSS, but nobody has been prosecuted for failure to do so in decades. That suggests the "moral duty" aspect has significantly weakened. Moreover if we're making comparisons to the draft, it's also worth noting the draft allows for conscientious objection. That makes your claim of "that’s not their call to make" quite questionable.

> That’s not their call to make.

Whether they participate voluntarily in a commercial transaction or participate only when compelled to by law (setting aside the question of whether the government does or should have that power) is certainly their call to make.

Just as any individual can decide whether to volunteer, whether to wait until drafted, or whether to refuse to be drafted and face the consequences.

(History shows these decisions, and the rights to make them, are meaningful at scale!)

Finally, governments who expect their leading scientists to do groundbreaking work simply out of fear of imprisonment are NGMI against governments whose scientists believe in their cause.

If anyone thinks the moral justification for selective service has diminished, they should launch a campaign to repeal it and see how it goes over. I suspect that the non-prosecution more reflects the public’s leniency in the absence of major threats since the fall of the soviet union than a change in the underlying normative view.

Conscientious objection still puts the ball in the government’s court. You have to make your case to the government that you have a deeply held religious or moral belief that precludes participation in war, and then the government decides what it wants to do. It’s not clear to me how a corporation would prove the existence of such a belief. But even if that was possible, it wouldn’t give the company the right to decide unilaterally.

> they should launch a campaign to repeal it and see how it goes over

You are conflating lack of true representation (what we have), with lack of support. It's very possible that the broad majority of the electorate would in fact get rid of conscription in the U.S. if they actually had a say in the matter? [1]

> I suspect that the non-prosecution more reflects the public’s leniency in the absence of major threats since the fall of the soviet union than a change in the underlying normative view.

Or more people are wising up to the reality that the real risk to their safety and security is from within not from without, its from people like you who would happily subjugate and violate your countrymen while telling them it's all for their own protection.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/28642/vast-majority-americans-o...

That poll asks whether the U.S. should have a draft “at this time,” which was four years after the Iraq war. That’s completely different than asking whether they agree with the principle that the government can conscript people into war.

But go ahead and run on repealing Selective Service. Ideally in time for midterms.

The moral duty of a citizen is to sabotage their country when it becomes immoral.

Nearly every country would be 'sabotaged' then - and rightfully so. ALL gvts are a sophisticated manifestation of the more lowly protection racket run by the mafia. i.e 'We protect you from harm by the other mafia'.

Value judgments aside, organized crime often does arise in a self-organizing way from marginalized groups.

Anyways, it all boils down to a simple fact: pacifism can't enforce itself.

Who decides what’s moral in a democracy? You?

Human beings all and each have the agency to make this choice for themselves.

So individuals have a “duty … to sabotage their country when it becomes immoral” according to individually-defined standards of morality? That seems like an unworkable way to run any society with more than a few people.

In practice the opposite is true. There's not enough people willing to sabotage countries like 1933 Germany or Putin's Russia.

Not one person in the current administration or its party (or yourself) would agree with you a few years ago in regards to the administration having communications with Twitter/Meta over a laptop story, regardless if any strongarming even took place at all.

> It’s not based on power, but rather the moral duties incumbent on citizens.

People largely tend not to believe in this kind of jingoistic bullshit nowadays.

Far right parties are gaining ground everywhere from France to Germany to Italy to Japan. But go ahead tell me that humanist universalism is actually what’s on the upswing.

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