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Freedom Of Choice: Individualism vs The Common Good

  • motleymagazine
  • Nov 3, 2024
  • 4 min read

By Deputy Editor In Chief Tiernán Ó Ruairc



I was staying at a hostel on Abbey Street in Dublin for a few nights over the summer, sitting at the hostel bar, sipping my pints and chatting away to couple of American and Spanish tourists who were trying Guinness for the first time.This bar was only accepting cashless payments so this one particular man stood out. He produced a wad of cash, fresh crisp fifties and tens and tried ordering a stout, but was politely refused and sat alone for several minutes. Eventually he approached me, he withdrew fifteen euro from his wallet and asked if I would buy his next two drinks using my card.


After several rounds of Guiness and whisky we started to talk. His thick accent and broken English required him to use google translate for more detailed parts of our discussions. His name was Artem. He revealed pretty early on that he was in Dublin to apply for international protection, he admitted to being a deserter. He was in fact a Ukrainian fisherman from outside Odessa. He had been turned down when he applied for the temporary protection afforded to most of the Ukrainians who had arrived in Ireland and stated that he didn’t understand why the state would not take him in. He began to talk of his pacifist ideology and his disdain for violence and war. He made it clear that no matter what he would not be returning to Ukraine to fight, he just needed to set up somewhere safe so he could bring his wife from Ukraine.


It must have been several hours we sat there discussing the war and politics, he enjoyed fishing and wished to take up a job soon as fisherman here in Ireland or anywhere that would hire him. Many things ran through my mind as Artem spoke of his pacifist ideas, however consistently I felt annoyed and angry at a man who in my eyes had abandoned his country. It was and is easy to sit here and question his right to look for safety from the war and exercise his right to not fight in a war started by the Kremlin. However, it still seemed selfish that he put his desire for his own safety and more importantly his political beliefs over that of his fellow country men’s freedom from the Russian caused war. Artem had chosen his own individual rights and prioritised himself over every other Ukrainian man, woman and child. His decision to leave conflicted with the common good for the people of Ukraine.


Ultimately the international protection office and the Ukrainian military courts will be the ones who determine if Artem’s right to be a pacifist during Ukraine’s unjust war is a crime or an unforgivable act against the common good of the Ukrainian people.


The whole experience was an interesting view into the war and seeing Artem worn and tired describing fighting and how surreal it was to be free from it brought into focus for me the idea of the common good. The common good as a concept has been discussed since Plato, it continued to be discussed by philosophers like Cicero too who coined common good as ‘Salus populi’ which means safety of the people, it is along those lines that common good is defined as an outcome achieved via a shared will. We’ve seen this, whether it was Covid-19 which saw millions give up basic day to day activities to curb the spread of the virus in the name of the common good or post 9/11 which saw American citizens give up many rights in the name of it. In fact, anyone no matter what their position who displayed individualistic tendencies during Covid-19 pandemic suffered. In Ireland we saw major resignations because of a golfing dinner in the Connemara aka Golfgate and serious backlash for players and coaches involved with the senior Dublin football panel who were seen partaking in group training during intense Covid restrictions.

These two incidents faced massive backlash from the public who deemed the common good to have been sidestepped by a self-proclaimed elite few who were ‘above’ participation in the pandemic restrictions. It’s hard to imagine a world where the same doesn’t happen to Artem, aside from my own view on it, what if when the war ends in a Ukraine victory and people return home, any of the 768,000 military age men who fled Ukraine to the EU, as reported by the BBC in December of 2023, do those men receive state help as the country rebuilds or does the country reject men like Artem the same way senators and management were rejected in Golfgate and in the Dublin setup?


Artem’s newfound freedom from military orders and harsh war conditions achieved solely through his attachment to his individual right to freedom of expression may be his long-term downfall as the country now looks upon him the same way it has begun to look at Russian sympathisers. In a quest to fulfil his need to feel free, Artem has neglected to fulfil his role as an integral cog in the system which is in the international common good. Artem is not the first deserter nor is he the last before the war is over, however every time that number of military aged men that has fled Ukraine increases it becomes harder to establish with less and less people involved in a system that creates a common good.



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