Cross-posted from my website.
The ethical principles that most people hold—and hold most strongly—go completely out the window when it comes to war.
Normal time: Killing is bad. In fact it's pretty much the worst thing you can do.
Wartime: Killing is great! Kill as many people as you can! If you're really good at killing, you get a medal!
(Just so long as you kill the right people.)
Normal time: Slavery is a blight upon humanity, one of the greatest and most shameful tragedies in history.
Wartime: Slavery is actually totally fine if people are being enslaved by the government for the purposes of killing other people! And in fact, slavery is essential, and if you object to it then you're betraying your country!
(If it weren't so depressing, it would be funny to see the contorted logic people come up with to argue that conscription isn't slavery.)
Normal time: If your employer is behaving unethically and you speak out, you deserve special protections and your employer must not retaliate against you.
Wartime: If you refuse to obey your employer's unethical demands, that's a crime; and you will be prosecuted through a special court, and by the way the court is run by your employer.
Not to say I fully agree with common-sense ethics, but according to common-sense ethics, you are morally justified in killing anyone who attempts to draft you, out of self-defense.
Imagine there's a criminal organization that runs an underground boxing ring where the boxers are coerced into joining. Someone from the organization tries to kidnap you and force you to participate in a boxing match. If you resisted the kidnapper, and even if you used lethal force against them, then you'd be justified on grounds of self-defense. The kidnapper was going to endanger your life; you are morally entitled to use any means necessary to prevent them from doing that.
And yet, if the military came to your house to attempt to force you to go to war, most people would say you're not allowed to resist. It's perfectly ethical for someone to kidnap you and forcing you to fight and endanger your life, as long as that someone works for the government. Even people who oppose the draft usually don't think it's okay to forcibly resist.
While we're on the subject of wartime ethics, here's a combination of common beliefs that doesn't make sense:
- Killing civilians in wartime is morally wrong.
- Killing enemy soldiers is fine, even if they were drafted.
Whether someone gets drafted is a matter of luck. Why does it become okay to kill someone after their name comes up in a lottery?
Going back to the underground boxing analogy: if you get forced into a boxing match at gunpoint, and you kill the other boxer, I won't hold it against you. Your captor is responsible for the death, not you. Nonetheless, the person who died was just as innocent as you were.
What I believe
I'm a utilitarian; I often disagree with common-sense ethics. I believe that conscription could, in principle, be justified on utilitarian grounds. It could be justified in the same way that murder could, in principle, be justified. But there is a strong temptation to rationalize doing harm in the name of the greater good. Murder is rightly illegal, and conscription should be illegal for the same reasons. Even utilitarians should obey moral rules, because your brain is trying to trick you.
The only way to justify a draft is naive consequentialism: we are suspending people's rights in this case because it's worth it. I call it naive because drafts usually don't come out looking good if you properly consider the consequences, and properly consider that you can't trust your own reasoning on the consequences.
History shows that war is rarely justified on utilitarian grounds. As far as I can tell, war mostly happens due to a combination of not assigning moral value to people in enemy countries—which wouldn't happen if people were more utilitarian—and the people responsible for declaring war not having to face the lethal consequences themselves.
I think it's important to consider that the future enforcement of these principles depends on the more righteous system being capable of defeating any less righteous system that challenges it. A principle that precludes its own perpetuation would in some sense be inconsistent.
There's also this weird dilemma that it might be beneficial to be able to make credible threats that would be clearly bad if carried out, like the old MAD doctrine.
David D Friedman wrote a very interesting blog post on this topic which significantly influenced my thinking, arguing that if you reject the validity of human shields, then you should also accept the possible acceptability (in sufficiently dire circumstances) of conscription:
Similarly, you argue that (according to normal ethics) killing people is forbidden normally, but encouraged during war. But neither seems true to me: killing is permitted to normal people if necessary in self defense or the defense of others, and killing in war is only permitted if the war is just - ie a war of national defense or the defense of others.
I don’t want to sound too facetious here but I genuinely believe that you can resolve this ‘paradox’ by just holding that all of these things are categorically bad and that war is not a special case.
Conscription in particular seems really bad; if your country is undertaking an offensive war then it’s probably completely indefensible, and if it’s a defensive war then defending your country should be self-evidently valuable to enough people that you wouldn’t need it.
I also don’t think that even defensive wars hold killing to be morally good—otherwise you would see more situations where one side murders combatants who have been disarmed. Instead, most countries have historically imprisoned them or let them go. This seems, at least, consistent with peacetime ethics around imprisonment?
But there's clearly a coordination problem around defense that conscription is a (brute) solution to.
Suppose my country is attacked by a tyrranical warmonger, and to hold off the invaders we need 10% the population to go fight (and some of them will die!) in miserable trench warfare conditions. The rest need to work on the homefront, keeping the economy running, making munitions etc. Personally I'd rather work on the homefront (or just flee the country, perhaps)! But if everyone does that, nobody will head to the trenches, the country will quickly fold, and the warmonger invader will just roll right on to the next country (which will similarly fold)!
It seems almost like a "run on the bank" dynamic -- it might be in everyone's collective interests to put up a fight, but it's in everyone's individual interests to simply flee. So, absent some more elegant galaxy-brained solution (assurance contracts, prediction markets, etc??) maybe the government should defend the collective interests of society by stepping in to prevent people from "running on the bank" by fleeing the country / dodging the draft.
(If the country being invaded is democratic and holds elections during wartime, this decision would even have collective approval from citizens, since they'd regularly vote on whether to continue their defensive war or change to a government more willing to surrender to the invaders.)
Of course there are better and worse forms of conscription: paying soldiers enough that you don't need conscription is better than paying them only a little (although in practice high pay might strain the finances of an invaded country), which is better than not paying them at all.
The OP seems to be viewing things entirely from the perspective of individual rights and liberties, but not proposing how else we might solve the coordination problem of providing for collective defense.
Eg, by his own logic, OP should surely agree that taxes are theft, any governments funded by such flagrant immoral confiscation are completely illegitimate, and anarcho-capitalism is the only ethically acceptable form of human social relations. Yet I suspect the OP does not believe this, even though the analogy to conscription seems reasonably strong (albeit not exact).
There's some force to this -- but in most cases only a minority of citizens are at risk of conscription. This is usually true on demographics alone -- e.g., men 25-60 in Ukraine, significantly narrower in 20th century US conscriptions -- and then is narrowed down further. A fair number of people who are demographically eligible know they would have discretionary exemptions or mandatory exclusions (e.g., based on disability, occupation, single parenthood, etc.). Those who would reap the benefits of not surrendering to invaders, but would not personally bear the costs of conscription, would be incentivized to vote for more than the optimal amount of conscription (and for undercompensating those who were conscripted).
[content warning: buncha rambly thoughts that might not make much sense]
certainly -- see my bit about how my preferred solution would be to run a volunteer army even if that takes ruinously high taxes on the rest of the population. (The United States, to its credit, has indeed run an all-volunteer army ever since the end of the Vietnam War in 1973! But having an immense population makes this relatively easy; smaller countries face sharper trade-offs and tend to orient more towards conscription. See for instance the fact that Russia's army is less reliant on conscripts than Ukraine's.)
but also, almost every policy in society has unequal benefits, perhaps helping a small group at the expense of more diffuse harm to a larger group, or vice versa. For example, greater investment in bike lanes and public transit (at the expense of simply building more roads) helps cyclists and public-transit users at the expense of car-drivers. Using taxes to fund a public-school system is basically ripping off people who don't have children and subsidizing those that do; et cetera. at some point, instead of trying to make sure that every policy comes out even for everyone involved, you have to just kind of throw up your hands, hope that different policies pointing in different directions even out in the end, and rely on some sense of individual willingness to sacrifice for the common good to smooth over the asymmetries.
One could similarly say it's unfair that residents of Lviv (who are very far from the Ukranian front line, and would almost certainly remain part of a Ukrainian "rump state" even in the case of dramatic eventual Russian victory) are being asked to make large sacrifices for the defense of faraway eastern Ukraine. (And why are residents of southeastern Poland, so near to Lviv, asked to sacrifice so much less than their neighbors?!)
Perhaps there is some galaxy-brained solution to problems like this, where all of Europe (or all of Ukraine's allies, globally) could optimally tax themselves some fractional percent in accordance with how near or far they are to Ukraine itself? Or one could be even more idealistic and imagine a unified coalition of allies where everyone decides centrally which wars to support and then contributes resources evenly to that end (such that the armies in eastern Ukraine would have a proportionate number of frenchmen, americans, etc). But in practice nobody has figured out how a scheme like that would possibly work, or why countries would be motivated to adopt it, how it could be credibly fair and neutral and immune to various abuses, etc.
Another weakness to the idea of democratic feedback is simply that it isn't very powerful -- every couple of years you get essentially a binary choice between the leading two coalitions, so you can do a reasonably good job expressing your opinion on whatever is considered the #1 issue of the day, but it's very hard to express nuanced views on multiple issues through the use of just one vote. So, in this sense, democracy isn't really a guarantee of representation across many issues, so much as a safety valve that will hopefully fix problems one-by-one as they rise to the position of #1 most-egregiously-wrong-thing in society.
I think that today's "liberal democracy" is pretty far from some kind of ethically ideal world with optimally representative governance (or optimally pursuing-the-welfare-of-the-population governance, which might be a totally different system)! Whatever is the ideal system of optimal governance, it would probably seem pretty alien to us, perhaps extremely convoluted in parts (like the complicated mechanisms for Venice selecting the Doge) and overly-financialized in certain ways (insofar as it might rely on weird market-like mechanisms to process information).
But conscription doesn't stand out to me as being especially worse than other policy issues that are similarly unfair in this regard (maybe it's higher-stakes than those other issues, but it's similar in kind) -- it's a little unfair and inelegant and kind of a blunt instrument, just like all of our policies are in this busted world where nations are merely operating with "the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried".
Wouldn't this sort of reasoning also say that FTX was justified in committing fraud if they could donate users' money to global health charities? They metaphorically conscripted their users to fight against a great problem. People in the developed world failed to coordinate to fund tractable global health interventions, and FTX attempted to fix this coordination problem by defrauding them.
(I don't think that's an accurate description of what FTX did, but it doesn't matter for the purposes of this analogy.)
1. people should have freedom of speech to argue for and against different courses of action -- some people saying we should surrender because the costs of fighting would be too high and occupation won't be so bad, others arguing the opposite. (This often doesn't happen in practice -- places like Ukraine will ban russia-friendly media, governments like the USA in WW2 will run pro-war support-the-trooops propaganda and ban opposing messages, etc. I think this is where a lot of the badness of even defensive war comes from -- people are too quick to assume that invaders will be infinitely terrible, that surrender is unthinkable, etc.)
2. then people should basically get to occasionally vote on whether to keep fighting the war or not, what liberties to infringe upon versus not, etc (you don't necessarily need to vote right at the start of the war, since in democracy there's a preexisting social contract including stuff like "if there's a war, some of you guys are getting drafted, here's how it works, by living here as a citizen you accept these terms and conditions")
IMO, under those conditions (and as long as the burdens / infringements-of-liberty of the war are reasonably equitably shared throughout society, not like people voting "let's send all the ethnic-minority people to fight while we stay home"), it is ethically justifiable to do quite a lot of temporarily curtailing individual liberties in the name of collective defense.
Finally, to be clear, I totally agree with you that conscription is a very intense infringement on individual human liberty! I'm just saying that sometimes, if a society is stuck between a rock and a hard place, infringements on liberty can be ethically justifiable IMO. (Ideally IMO I'd like it if countries, even under dire circumstances, should try to pay their soldiers at least something reasonably close to the "free-market wage", ie the salary that would get them to willingly volunteer. If this requires extremely high taxes on the rest of the populace, so be it! If the citizens hate taxes so much, then they can go fight in the war and get paid instead of paying the taxes! And thereby a fair equilibrium can be determined, whereby the burden of warfighting is being shared equally between citizens & soldiers. But my guess is that most ordinary people in a real-world scenario would probably vote for traditional conscription, rather than embracing my libertarian burden-sharing scheme, and I think their democratic choice is also worthy of respect even if it's not morally optimal in my view.)
Also agreed that societies in general seem a little too rearing-to-go to get into fights, likely make irrational decisions on this basis, etc. It would be great if everyone in the world could chill out on their hawkishness by like 50% or more... unfortunately there are probably weird adversarial dynamics where you have to act freakishly tough & hawkish in order to create credible deterrence, so it's not obvious that individual countries should "unilaterally disarm" by doving-out (although over the long arc of history, democracies have generally sort of done this, seemingly to their great benefit). But to the extent anybody can come up with some way to make the whole world marginally less belligerent, that would obviously be a huge win IMO.
I agree. The resolution is that ordinarily-unethical behavior done during wartime is still unethical. (At least in the majority of cases, I don't want to claim there are never exceptions.)
For something to be "illegal," it must be sanctioned by coercive law. Therefore, to declare conscription "illegal," you would need executive authority. You might even need to raise your own army if a political conflict arises between supporters and opponents of your legislative initiative.
The situation would be different if you were a pacifist (non-violent). In that case, you would have to face the consequences in all areas.