A lot of “social” philosophers have strong beliefs in Human rights. But they do acknowledge that no one has a convincing list of rights and the usual suggestions can conflict and no one has a method of resolving conflicts.

I believe Australia used to have a system of admitting foreign doctors provided they could pass the Australian medical exams. It was a special visa and one of the requirements was that they had to practice in rural towns for some years. It was a solution to the problem of small, isolated towns with no doctors. Were their rights violated by being told where to practice? Perhaps not – they weren’t force to enter Australia.

Then you mention (briefly) Socrates, and segue immediately into the Christian narrative of man’s individual struggles with salvation. But I think you glitzed over something significant with Socrates, something that is sadly missing in our social narrative today. We’re all about individual rights (and the need of the individual to restrict everybody *else’s* rights) and being privileged to receive from others what we think is ours.

Nobody EVER talks about what we owe society. That part of the narrative is lost. And no, I don’t mean owing every living cent we earn in taxes. Not that kind of owing.

I got this kind of crap from my son when he was 16 and all angsty. (is that a word? It is now) “You have to support me until I’m 18.” He didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about what he owed us, of course. Being required to contribute to the household was an intolerable burden, but by damn, we owed him for merely having birthed him. Apparently all those years of diapers and food and shelter and love weren’t enough.

I grow increasingly weary of the same kind of demands from people who are allegedly grown up and capable of caring for themselves. “Pay for all my health needs.” “Protect me from every danger under the sun.” “Raise and educate my children.” “Entertain me endlessly.”

But few want to ask what they can contribute to all this. People want protection, but they won’t enlist in the military. They want health care, but they think “Insurance” means that they never have to spend a dime for any care, rather than just being covered for catastrophic care. (if car insurance worked like that it would cost half your income) They dont’ want to actually participate in their children’s education, they just think it should be done for them, but completely to their preference. Hell, half of them don’t even VOTE! But they all think they can complain about the politicians, even though they won’t get off their asses to vote the bastards out.

Of course there are exceptions to all of these points. Many people do vote, enlist, participate, give back. But the vast majority spend much more time demanding than they do providing.

And your point that most people never consider what their individual rights might rob from the rights of another is well taken. How to instill a greater empathy and a better understanding of legitimate differences in desires is a huge problem. Thinking first of others when one is surrounded by messages of Me, Me, ME, is asking people to develop skills in a vacuum.

Wouldn’t it be great if our social conversation got a bit more mature, and became less like a teenager demanding that the world owes them a living, and more like grownups who can think through the consequences of their choices, and who perhaps realized that the blessings we enjoy are worthy of a bit of social return? If we all realized there isn’t just one narrative, or two, but many, on every issue?

But that’s another planet I’m thinking of. It’s certainly not this one.

Before you start jumping up and down on my head, I do know that in practice this would wreck an army.”

This is what you get for not being interested in military history. Armies can and do work on this practice, including, historically, the Prussian Army, which those officers at Nurnberg counted as ancestor to theirs.

There is an old story of one of Frederick the Great’s engagements, that he ordered a subordinate commander to attack immediately “or I will have your head.” The General replied that “His majesty may have my head after the battle, but during it, I must use it to better serve him.” This was very much part of the tradition Hitler’s generals had inherited. So was Blucher showing up at balls in the illegal uniform of his disbanded regiment. So was Yorck of Warttenburg asking the King of Prussia to his face on what basis his throne would rest if he abolished his nobles’ hereditary priviledge.
More directly to the point, when Frederick II ordered the pillaging of parts of Saxony and the Electoral Palace, he had to raise a fresh regiment and commission new officers because the old line Prussian officer corps point-blank refused to do it. All of them.
Prussian officers might draft peasants, beat them for poor drill, and expect them to remain in ranks while those around them were dead or dying, but they were not people you’d order to shoot uniformed prisoners, nor to round up civilians for massacre.
“Kadaverdiziplin” (probably misspelled) comes with the SS, not the Army, and I’m told has roots in some Jesuit writings.
In the United States armed forces today, soldiers are required to execute legal orders only, and orders of a superior officer do not constitute a defense in a court-martial. Every soldier is told this in basic training, and again at intervals throughout his career.
Maybe peripheral, maybe on point: in the aftermath of 9-11, the orders issued by the White House and the Pentagon were that, though people dressed as civilians and engaged as killing civilians were not “lawful combatants” and so covered by the Geneva Conventions, they were at no time to be treated worse than it was permitted to treat members of our own armed forces in our harshest school. To my knowledge, every interrogator or guard who crossed that line was brought up on charges–and again, “orders” were not accepted as a defense.
If your conscience won’t permit you to kill enemy soldiers, you’d best not consider soldiering for a career. But neither does a good army expect soldiers to pack their ethics away with their civilian clothes.

Obama talks a lot about “false choices.” Most of it is nonsense. But this realy is one. It does not “wreck an army” for soldiers to hold law and morality above the orders of an immediate superior. To the contrary. At the worst moments, you need something in a soldier you can’t place there by regulation and court-martial. The 300 died in accordance with Sparta’s law, but Sparta had no means of enforcing that law. The hoplites had to find it within themselves.

“Wreck an army” indeed!