“Justifying Military Conscription”

Abstract

ABSTRACT I argue that wartime military conscription can be justified only if potential conscripts have duties to enlist, or duties to participate in an enlistment lottery, that conscription forces them to discharge. I explore whether our interpersonal duties to rescue can ground a duty to enlist. I reject the claim that our duties to rescue can only permit, not require, us to kill. I then argue that whether the risks of military enlistment exceed what can be demanded by an ordinary duty to rescue partly depends on how we ought to define and calculate rescue costs. I defend a broad definition of rescue costs and contrast ex ante and ex post approaches to calculating rescue costs. I then consider three possible bases of an extraordinary duty of rescue that might ground a duty to enlist. We might have secondary duties to incur ordinarily supererogatory rescue costs. We might have duties to avert moral catastrophes at ordinarily supererogatory cost. And we might have duties to avoid freeriding that can ground extraordinary duties of rescue.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Philosophical Perspectives, 2026 · DOI ↗