Apologies for the delayed response, I appreciate the effort you put into your reply and I felt that I could not fully parse it and form a proper response in my ill state a couple of days ago.
I understand what you’re saying! I do recognize that culture can be very important to a lot of people and that it can give them a sense of belonging, strengthen their bonds with their community, and give them a day-to-day purpose to do what they do. I strongly believe that if people choose to do so, they have the right to fight and die to protect their culture and that there’s nothing wrong with that. The issue I raise is with drafts specifically because they compel people to fight and die for a cause they may not believe in. A draft is essentially a sacrifice of unwilling innocent people in order to protect a culture, and I don’t think that such a large-scale sacrifice can be justified to protect something that is NOT human life.
The location of culture is not explicitly stated in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I believe that aspects of it would be spread out across the hierarchy, but are at most at the level of (and are only part of) “belonging and love.” This is because as you have stated, culture can be important for giving people a sense of belonging and makes them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. If you are forced to fight and die a brutal death, you are losing your safety and physiological needs in order to protect others’ belonging and love, and to me, that is unfair and wrong. This isn’t necessarily always the case - extremes like sacrificing one person to save a nation do seem right to me - but the immense scale of suffering and death of unwilling and innocent people wrought by a draft is unjustifiable for what it protects.
Even though culture as you describe it is clearly valuable, it is something that can only be experienced through the lens of people and therefore only has as much value as the people who experience it. By supporting a draft, you’re essentially making the moral judgement call that it is okay to force numerous people to die brutal and bloody deaths so that others can enrich their lives through a strong and protected culture. The cost in human lives, violations of their rights, and infliction of suffering is simply too great.
Apologies for the delayed response, I appreciate the effort you put into your reply and I felt that I could not fully parse it and form a proper response in my ill state a couple of days ago.
I understand what you’re saying! I do recognize that culture can be very important to a lot of people and that it can give them a sense of belonging, strengthen their bonds with their community, and give them a day-to-day purpose to do what they do. I strongly believe that if people choose to do so, they have the right to fight and die to protect their culture and that there’s nothing wrong with that. The issue I raise is with drafts specifically because they compel people to fight and die for a cause they may not believe in. A draft is essentially a sacrifice of unwilling innocent people in order to protect a culture, and I don’t think that such a large-scale sacrifice can be justified to protect something that is NOT human life.
The location of culture is not explicitly stated in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I believe that aspects of it would be spread out across the hierarchy, but are at most at the level of (and are only part of) “belonging and love.” This is because as you have stated, culture can be important for giving people a sense of belonging and makes them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. If you are forced to fight and die a brutal death, you are losing your safety and physiological needs in order to protect others’ belonging and love, and to me, that is unfair and wrong. This isn’t necessarily always the case - extremes like sacrificing one person to save a nation do seem right to me - but the immense scale of suffering and death of unwilling and innocent people wrought by a draft is unjustifiable for what it protects.
Even though culture as you describe it is clearly valuable, it is something that can only be experienced through the lens of people and therefore only has as much value as the people who experience it. By supporting a draft, you’re essentially making the moral judgement call that it is okay to force numerous people to die brutal and bloody deaths so that others can enrich their lives through a strong and protected culture. The cost in human lives, violations of their rights, and infliction of suffering is simply too great.