Selective Conscientious Objection Research Articles

Review of Preventing Unjust War: A Catholic Argument for Selective Conscientious Objection

Review of Preventing Unjust War: A Catholic Argument for Selective Conscientious Objection

Selective Conscientious Objection and the Prima Facie Duty Override Criteria

ABSTRACT Selective conscientious objection, a refusal to participate in a specific war due to reasons of conscience, has recently gained attention. A combatant confronted with such a decision needs guidance to help decide whether and how to object. Furthermore, those judging a combatant’s objection or failure to object need guidance. After introducing the prima facie duty override criteria, I will apply the criteria to the case of selective conscientious objection. Ultimately, I argue that the jus ad bellum criteria rebranded as the prima facie duty override criteria can help provide guidance regarding selective conscientious objection.

Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties by Peter Cajka

Reviewed by: Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties by Peter Cajka Matthew Levering Peter Cajka, Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 232 pages. Peter Cajka’s book is a complex work that can be engaged at many levels. Historically it is superb. Cajka offers lively accounts of now often forgotten but widely influential twentieth-century figures such as James Martin Gillis, C.S.P., Francis Connell, C.Ss.R., and John C. Ford, S.J., along with less influential but still notable figures such as John K. Ryan and George B. O’Toole. Gillis in particular stands out for his combination of profound social and political conservatism with a doctrine of conscience that allowed for radical conclusions, such as his strong support of the claims of the pacifist Canadian Baptist Douglas Clyde Macintosh. Cajka’s presentation of the popular Catholic thinker Daniel A. Lord, S.J., exemplifies the striking combination of conservatism and radical thought: “In the Protestant and secular imagination, Lord qualified as a Catholic reactionary; but like other Catholic thinkers trained in the Thomistic mode, he was a fierce defender of conscience rights”—notably in defending the rights of conscientious objectors to military service, on the grounds that Catholics are bound by divine law, as recognized in conscience, “not to fight in an unjust war” (53–54). For the period of World War II, Cajka pays particular attention to the Catholic Worker movement, which affirmed Christian pacifism. But he also attends to the ways in which Catholics responded (for example) to the military’s requiring quartermasters to hand out contraception and to the military’s building of “officially designated prostitution zones” in which the prostitutes had all passed medical exams for venereal disease (57). He also notes important Catholic responses, led by John Ford, S.J., to such events as the blanket bombing of Hamburg in 1943 that resulted—somewhat inadvertently—in the deaths of more than forty thousand civilians. Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, archbishop of Washington, D.C., insisted after the war (in the early years of the Cold War) that “Catholics could join an American army fighting against godless communism, but no unjust law would force them to violate conscience to bomb innocents” (61). Cajka devotes a chapter to the Vietnam era that is filled with details that were largely new to me and that demonstrate how “the principle of selective conscientious objection, the just-war framework, and the rights of conscience were overlapping logics in a particularly Catholic approach to resisting [End Page 96] the draft” (68). Here he focuses on the Catholic Peace Fellowship, which emerged from the Protestant Fellowship of Reconciliation in conjunction with the Catholic Worker movement. The Catholic Peace Fellowship was founded by the Catholic Worker leaders James Forest and Tom Cornell in 1964, encouraged by Daniel Berrigan, S.J., and others. In 1965, Forest published a booklet with ecclesiastical approval (from the Apostolic Vicar for the United States Armed Forces) titled Catholics and Conscientious Objection. Cajka also draws valuable connections in this chapter to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which powerfully appealed to God’s law and conscience (including societal conscience) and argued that an unjust law is no law at all. Cajka turns from his chapter on Vietnam-era conscientious objection to a chapter on the rejection of the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae on conscience grounds. He focuses on the clash between Cardinal O’Boyle and a group of priests of the Washington, D.C. archdiocese, beginning with Cardinal O’Boyle’s removal of Joseph O’Donoghue from active ministry due to his questioning of the truth of Humanae Vitae. Shortly after Vatican II, a group of Washington priests had come together, and, in 1966, they named their group the Association of Washington Priests, led by O’Donoghue, John Corrigan, Shane MacCarthy, and others—later supported by the establishment of the Center for Christian Renewal. As Cajka frames the issue, “O’Boyle spoke for the clarity of the law. O’Donoghue, Corrigan, and their fellow priests pulled for conscience, a concept that they thought heralded...

Preventing Just War: A Catholic Argument for Selective Conscientious Objection, edited by RogerBergman (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020), xiv + 199 pp.

Preventing Just War: A Catholic Argument for Selective Conscientious Objection, edited by RogerBergman (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020), xiv + 199 pp.

Selective Conscientious Objection in Healthcare

Most discussions of conscientious objection in healthcare assume that the objection is universal: a doctor objects to all abortions. I want to investigate selective objections, where a doctor objects to one abortion but not to another, depending on the circumstances. I consider not only objections to abortion, but also objections to the withdrawal of life-saving treatment at the request of a competent patient, which is almost always selective. I explore how the objector might articulate the selective objection, and what impact it might have on the patient, within the conceptual space of relevant statutes and professional guidelines.

‘Exempted soldiers’ in the ‘New Sensitivity Military’: public opinion among Jewish Israelis concerning selective conscientious objection (military refusal) and the Military Recruitment Model

In recent decades (the ‗post-heroic‘ condition) - threats of widespread selective conscientious objection have become a political tool to advance opposing political agendas in Israel. This article examines attitudes amongst the Israeli public concerning the legitimacy of demands that different groups of soldiers be exempted from military operations to which they are ideologically opposed (such as serving in the occupied territories or, conversely, participating in evacuation of settlements). The results point to a multi-cultural model embracing diversity management not as a neo-liberal ideal but rather as a strategy for co-option, containment and inclusion, with a view to preserving the “people's army” model.

Refusing to Kill: Selective Conscientious Objection and Professional Military Duties

ABSTRACTThis article explores the legal implications of objections of conscience against participation in particular military activities or conflicts (selective conscientious objection) as these are expressed by professional members of the armed forces. It does so by exploring how established human rights principles and norms related to the right of conscientious objection to military service may be extended to professional members of the armed forces seeking a discharge from military duties. The article outlines applicable human rights standards relating to objections of conscience and compares how objections by professional members of the armed forces are dealt with by the judiciary in the United Kingdom and Germany. Finally, the article uses empirical research data to map the recognition of selective conscientious objection to military duties in other member states of the Council of Europe that operate with fully professional armies and provides an extensive analysis of state practice identifying significant gaps, best practices, and future challenges for the Council of Europe’s member states when it comes to this important question within military ethics, namely, the ethical relationship between the individual’s conscience and the use of armed force.

Teaching to Prevent Unjust War

This essay describes an undergraduate course, “Christian Ethics of War and Peace,” taught for more than two decades at a Catholic university. I first situate the course within the debate between just war philosophers Michael Walzer and Jeff McMahan on the moral equivalency of soldiers and the right of conscientious objection to unjust war. The development of SCO (selective conscientious objection) in the Catholic tradition is traced from Augustine to John Paul II. The Sic et Non of Abelard is invoked as a precedent for the course pedagogy, in which students are asked to develop and articulate their own personal conscience in light of the long-standing tension between arguments for pacifism and for just war. Borrowing from contemporary cognitive psychology, this task is described as one of “reflective judgment” regarding an “ill-structured problem.” The major writing assignment is described and one student’s testimony on its challenge is offered.

Epistemic Authority, Sovereignty, and Selective Conscientious Objection

This paper discusses some of the practical difficulties confronting Jeff McMahan’s proposal of a jus ad bellum court of experts for deciding the justice of war, and recommends two revisions. First, following the earlier proposals of Vitoria, Suarez, and Grotius, leaders could have a say in appointing judges to the ad bellum court; second, the court could be an organ of the International Criminal Court. Though significant practical challenges remain, these revisions make McMahan’s proposal fairer to democratic governments, and give the court a better chance for successful implementation in the prevailing Westphalian system of state sovereignty.

Civic Conscience, Selective Conscientious Objection and Lack of Choice

AbstractMost democratic states tolerate, to various extents, conscientious objection. The same states tend not to tolerate acts of civil disobedience and what they perceive as selective conscientious objection. In this paper it is claimed that the dichotomy between civil disobedience and conscientious objection is often misguided; that the existence of a “civic conscience” makes it impossible to differentiate between conscientious objection and civil disobedience; and that there is no such thing as “selective” conscientious objection—or that classifying an objection as “selective” has no significant moral or practical implications. These claims are supported by a preliminary, more general argument according to which conscientious objection is and should be tolerated because the objector lacks the ability to choose his conscience and to decide whether to act upon it. The lack‐of‐choice argument, it is claimed, applies equally to all types of conscientious objection, including those that are mistakenly called “selective” objection. It also applies to one type of civil disobedience. As a result, if a state is willing to tolerate non‐selective conscientious objection, it may and at times must also tolerate selective conscientious objection and (one type of) civil disobedience and to a similar degree (all other things being equal).

Conscientious Refusal, the Requirement of Justification, and the Fetishisation of Conscience in Healthcare: A Polish Perspective

A dogma accepted in many ethical and legal frameworks is that the reasons that lie behind conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare cannot be evaluated or judged by anyone other than the objector herself, because conscience is individual, autonomous, and inaccessible to any outside evaluation. In this paper I argue that this view is mistaken: physicians have an obligation to reveal and explain their reasons for CO and that these reasons may be evaluated either ex ante or ex post. In arguing for my claims I refer mostly to the Polish context and I defend some novel claims that have not been analyzed extensively in the debates on CO. First, I introduce a moral threshold requirement: CO is justified only if the reasons behind a refusal are of moral nature and meet a certain threshold of importance. Second, I highlight the similarities between CO in healthcare and the regulations concerning military refusals, including an emerging practice of granting the right to selective CO status to professional soldiers, that places the burden of proof on a petitioner for CO status. My argument highlights the special status of refusing to kill human organism (military conflicts, abortion, assisted-suicide), and shows that certain other common forms of CO do not warrant accommodation (e.g. emergency contraception).

Book Review: Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War

Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War. By Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2012. xxvii + 144 pp. $16.00 (paper).Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini have written a difficult book to read. Its difficulty stems not from its style, which is disconcertingly clear, but from its subject matter-the moral injury-which is a distinct and often devastating category of suffering that affects large numbers of veterans.Both authors speak honestly of the ways war has affected their own families. Brock, now co-director of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School, is the daughter of a Japanese mother and an American medic whose experiences in Vietnam took a profound toll on him and, by extension, his family. Lettini, a member of the faculty at Starr King School for the Ministry, lost two members of her family to postwar violence.Their growing awareness of moral injury-its reality, depth, and pervasiveness-led them to organize a Truth Commission on Conscience in War, which was held at Riverside Church in New York in 2012. That event brought together five truth commissioners, as well as a Virginia psychiatrist, a legal expert on conscientious objection, three religious leaders, and a number of veterans, fourteen of whom testified about their own experience. One outcome of that event is the Soul Repair Center at Brite; another is this book, which tells the stories and provides lengthy quotations of four of the participants. They include an Italian American veteran of Vietnam; a soldiertumed-chaplain with special interest in selective conscientious objection; an African American woman, a veteran herself, now a pastor, whose son was deployed in Iraq; and a Nicaraguan-born son of revolutionary parents who refused redeployment, went AWOL, and received a dishonorable discharge and prison term.The authors define moral injury as the result of either behavior which violates the soldiers own moral values or which contradicts the stated values of their leaders and the institutions that support them. Neither Brock nor Lettini is an absolute pacifist; they take the Christian tradition of just war theory and its criteria with great seriousness and point out that official American military policies affirm strong principles for the appropriate conduct of war. But they describe how the training recruits receive, deeply instilled bonds of loyalty to each other and to the group, and the actual practice of anti-insurgency warfare ignore such definitions and instead lead to behavior which is brutal and erodes the ability to make critical decisions.Five chapters form the body of this book. The first describes the motivations that lead young men and women to serve in the military, and reminds us of the role of economic inequality in recruitment. The second chapter looks at the ways in which participating in war, especially the types of military action where the distinction between friends and enemies is unclear, permanently changes people.In the third chapter, Coming Home Is Hell, the authors explore what it is like for veterans to return home after a period of military action which not only contradicts their expectations and belies the promises made to them at the time they entered the armed forces, but also leaves them with a legacy of profound guilt for behavior that violated their own moral standards. Veterans return from combat to solitary confinement. …

SINCERITY, ACCURACY AND SELECTIVE CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION

Conscientious objectors to military service are either general objectors or selective objectors. The former object to all wars; the latter object to only some wars. There is widespread popular and political support in western liberal democracies for exemptions for general objectors, but currently there is little support for exemptions for selective objectors. Many who advocate exemptions for selective objectors attempt to build upon the strength of support that is enjoyed by exemptions for general objectors. They argue that selective objectors – like general objectors – sincerely believe that it would be deeply morally wrong for them to fight in the wars to which they object. I argue that a stronger moral case for exemptions for selective objectors relies upon a different claim: selective objections are often accurate. It is often immoral to fight in the wars to which selective objectors object. While some advocates of exemptions for selective objectors have identified accuracy as a reason for offering exemptions, they have usually not adequately distinguished sincerity from accuracy. However, keeping these two moral reasons for exemptions distinct clarifies and strengthens the moral case for exemptions for selective conscientious objectors.

‘Saying No’: Command Responsibility and the Ethics of Selective Conscientious Objection

Pleading conscientious objection1 (CO) as a general means of avoiding conscription into military service has, of course, been with us for centuries. Latterly, and following the growing importance a...

Sergeant Davis's Stern Charge: The Obligation of Officers to Preserve the Humanity of Their Troops

This article examines what it might mean for officers to be held responsible for safeguarding not just the lives of their troops, but also the humanity of their troops. How should such a charge be understood, and can it be justified? Arguably, any experience of combat is an assault on the participants’ humanity. The idea that officers should try to shield their troops from combat altogether, however, is untenable, for reasons that are discussed (including the danger of selective conscientious objection). Nor, it is argued, can officers guarantee or ensure that they will never lead troops in conflicts that violate jus ad bellum criteria. If officers are to be held responsible for protecting their troops in any way beyond the physical, it must be against specific, severe threats to their humanity that occur in the course of waging war. Candidates for threats of this kind are considered, leading to the conclusion that the greatest threats arise from jus in bello violations that dehumanize the victim and degrade the perpetrator. The question is then raised whether officers in fact can protect their troops from committing such violations, and the argument is advanced that the command climate officers create in their units plays a significant role in encouraging or deterring serious transgressions of the warrior's code.

Integrity and Selective Conscientious Objection

Through an examination of military virtues, this article demonstrates that selective conscientious objection, if undertaken after proper deliberation, is compatible with the form of integrity demanded by military institutions. By demanding that soldiers show integrity and punishing them when they do, these institutions are acting inconsistently. The article also examines arguments that permitting selective conscientious objection would harm military effectiveness, and shows that in fact it may bring some benefits. Finally, the article considers the proposal that military personnel who believe that they are being ordered to participate in an unjust war should both refuse to obey their orders and also willingly accept punishment. It will be shown that while this position has some points in its favour, it also suffers from several weaknesses. Even if one accepts the necessity of punishment of some type, subjecting selective conscientious objectors to a dishonourable discharge from the military is inappropriate.

Selective Conscientious Objection in the Aftermath of Iraq: Reconsidering Objection to a Specific War

Although a right of conscientious objection to military service became widely recognised within the twentieth century, selective conscientious objection has always proven more controversial. In the aftermath of fresh claims of selective conscientious objection arising out of the Iraq ‘war’, and what is argued to be a changing context to conflict and conscientious objection, this paper sets out to reconsider the case for granting protection to military personnel who object to deployment within specific conflict situations. It is contended that in principle selective conscientious objectors should be afforded recognition by the law in the same way that absolute conscientious objectors can be. However, although it is possible to establish limited grounds upon which such a right might be recognised, the perceived constitutional consequences of such an approach make it highly unlikely that selective conscientious objection will be treated sympathetically by either courts or government.

A Matter of Conscience: The Selective Conscientious Objector, Catholic College Students, and the Vietnam War

College students played a significant, if not central, role in the anti-Vietnam war movement. With the deployment of the first combat troops in 1965, more college students, predominantly white, began focusing their attention on the government's evolving policy in Vietnam. Two primary reasons for their grow ing interest were, first, white college students' diminishing role in the civil rights movement due to the emergence of black power, and second, male college students' increasing possibility of being drafted due to the government's rising draft calls. Catholic college students, in contrast to their restrained response to the civil rights movement, joined the anti-Vietnam war movement early and remained active until the end of the war in 1973. Like their non-Catholic counterparts, Catholic student activists fostered debate on the war by sponsoring teach-ins on United States foreign policy, encouraging intercollegiate participation in mass demonstrations, and demanding on-campus draft-counseling services. By outward appearances, Catholic college students appeared to be motivated by the same forces as college students nationally. They, too, believed that it was an imperialistic war sponsored by the mil itary-industrial complex, and/or that the draft was not intended primarily to supply troops for the war, but to channel youth into professions deemed to be in the national interest. However, despite these shared beliefs about the war and the draft, many Catholic students' involvement in the anti-war movement was also motivated and

Disobeying Manifestly Illegal Orders

When a controversial armed conflict occurs, the issue of conscientious objection, specifically selective conscientious objection, arises. Whenever armed conflict itself raises complicated internati...

The Challenge of Selective Conscientious Objection in Israel

Whether refusal is an act of civil disobedience meant to challenge the state politically as a form of protest, or an action which reflects a deep moral objection to the policies of the state, selective conscientious objection presents the state and its citizens with a number of difficult legal and moral challenges. Appeals to authority outside of the state, whether religious or secular, influence both citizenship and the behavior of the government itself. As Israel raises funds to defend IDF officers from charges of human rights violations in the United Kingdom, it may find itself in need of a better defense against those citizens hesitant to be placed in harm's way, militarily and legally. At some point in the future it may find itself unable to field soldiers for whom service in the Occupied Territories is prohibited by inviolable secular or religious law. And for those who will continue to argue that they cannot abide service in an army of occupation, an expression sounded in 1968 by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the moral crisis of an individual conscience rent between obligations to the state and obligations to self, will linger along with the pain of a conscience nurtured and then rejected by this democratic society.