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.
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).
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.
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.