Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Analogy for opting out of Pascal's Wager

Previously I blogged about how the flaw with Pascal's Wager is that the best a person without faith can do is go through the motions of having faith, which is utter hypocrisy and not about to fool the deity anyway (and isn't it terribly disrespectful to the deity to presume to fool it just by putting on an act?)

Today my shower gave me an analogy:

Suppose you have a military in a society that values being a big brave strong soldier. There are also some pacifists in this society. Some of the pacifists opt out of joining the military, claiming conscientious objector status, and simply go about their everyday lives as usual even if it does attract scorn from society. However, other pacifists still want the societal respect that comes with being a big brave strong soldier, so they join the military. However, they don't care about achieving the military's goals or getting the job done, they just care about appearances. So they do the absolute minimum they can get away with and only when someone is looking. They use any excuse to get out of doing their duty. They don't care about the cause, they don't care about their buddies, they just care that people will look at them and go "Look, a big brave strong soldier!"

Now it's true that in some cases these closeted pacifist soldiers might still be helpful - sometimes you just need manpower - but mostly they're detrimental to your military's mission and reputation. And even if you don't agree with their pacifism, isn't what the conscientious objectors are doing more honourable?

1 comment:

laura k said...

Nice! I like this.