By Dr. Danny Singh
Abstract:
The purpose of this essay is to delve into an interesting and contemporary topic on conscription. Although it may appear ethical to engage in warfare to protect one’s state (that is, to protect one’s national territory and borders from existential threats and to act in self-defence), killing in war can never satisfy the law of armed conflict’s (LOAC) proportionality principle. To reach this argument, the paper will outline the main ethics of just war theory in relation to the ethics of initiating war (jus ad bellum), as explored in Christian theological thinking, followed by an exploration of the ethics of conduct whilst engaged in an armed conflict (jus in bello). This will be followed by a consideration of main traditionalist and revisionist thought related to the ethics of killing in war, with the intention of presenting different perspectives of just war theory, rather than raising a conflated debate between both camps. There will also be a discussion of the debate surrounding the reciprocity of soldiers’ lives during warfare. This considers whether all soldiers lose their moral right to not being killed; or whether the killing of soldiers on only one side, who are held to be in the wrong, is justified. The linkage with conscription is then made to discuss whether killing in war is justified when the ethical rules of waging war and conduct within it are obeyed. The conclusion will support an assessment of the just war tradition to contend that the LOAC principle of military necessity may be justified to attack a side held to be in the wrong, but any civilian lives taken—which is inevitable in any armed conflict or third-party asymmetric intervention—cannot support the wider principle of proportionality jus in bello. Furthermore, the moral status of combatants may be equal as argued from the traditionalist perspective, but from a revisionist outlook all soldiers are morally innocent because they are fighting for political reasons of the state. It can thus be debated that conscription is not right from an ethical, rather than political, point of view.
