Do citizens have a moral obligation to serve their country when it is at war?



Do citizens have a moral obligation to serve their country when it is at war?

The first reason why it is immoral to serve in any military is based on our moral freedom as human beings. Our sense of ethical obligation, our capacity to do what is morally right and not merely live according to our desires, is the source of our dignity as human beings. Since this is what justifies our lives and gives us our innate value as human beings, it is vital for each of us as individual persons to pay careful attention to the quality and implications of our actions.

A free, moral human being is personally responsible for his or her actions. This capacity for moral integrity the glory and crown of human existence. Our worth derives not from wealth or power or fame, but from our moral autonomy and dignity as persons (Mortensen, 2013).

One 20th century thinker wrote a book entitled Moral Man, Immoral Society, pointing out that people are often corrupted when they are part of institutions that pressure them to act in ways they might not choose to act as individuals. However, in a free society, individuals usually have a choice about whether to follow "immoral institutions" and can maintain at least some of their moral integrity. They can quit their job and get another job if their employer expects them to do something immoral. If their community insists they participate in a lynching, they can move to another community. If their church wants them to hate and fear those who are different, they can join another church (Barry, 1980).

They can do this because they have enough moral autonomy to want to preserve their moral integrity and dignity as human beings. Any relatively free society makes possible this moral autonomy in its citizens, even though such integrity may often require great courage and personal sacrifice. However, there is one institution in nearly every society that systematically works to obliterate this moral autonomy in its members. It systematically works to substitute in the minds of its victims a sense of participating in an illusory and immoral substitute for true moral integrity and dignity. In place of the sense of moral integrity and individual human dignity, this institution forcibly substitutes the illusory dignity of the nation-state. This institution is the military (Barry, 1980).

No military organization could operate if it respected human moral autonomy, that is, the capacity of individuals to take full responsibility for their actions. In spite of the lip service sometimes paid to the principles of moral responsibility formulated in the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals after the Second World War, military training must seek to destroy moral autonomy in those subjected to it. At Nuremburg, the victorious powers in the war put some of the Nazi leaders on trial for committing crimes such as genocide (Mortensen, 2013).

The Nazis defended themselves by saying that they were just obeying the laws of their ...