Coerced Moral Agents? Individual Responsibility for Military Service

Journal of Political Philosophy

Volumn 6, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 171-189

  Mapel, David R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0032333937     PISSN: 09638016     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9760.00051     Document Type: Article

References (4)

1. For reasons of space, I will also leave aside how the problem of responsibility for becoming a solider looks if one rejects the legitimacy of war altogether or if one accepts the legitimacy of religious, civil or genocidal wars. I will focus only on duties of selective conscientious objection to wars that should be considered unjust according to the classical principles of jus ad bellum. Discussions of selective conscientious objection usually focus on the question of when the state should permit it. In this paper, I focus instead on the question of when we should blame individuals for not becoming selective conscientious objectors.
2. Walzer 1977, p. 44.
3. Walzer 1977, p. 45.
4. Walzer 1977, 306. A soldier is a coerced moral agent because the state has severely limited his options. A solider remains a coerced moral agent because "although his options may have been few, it is nevertheless accurate to say that he has allowed himself to be made into a dangerous man" (Walzer 1977, p. 145). Soldiers also remain moral agents in choosing to act according to the rules of jus in bello.