Wartime ethics is weird
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.