CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION. – Conscientious objection is the act by which a citizen refuses to obey a public authority’s order to perform ordinary military service or to mobilize in time of war, opposing personal reasons of conscience, which are usually religious, moral, or humanitarian. The term could be understood in a broader sense. Indeed, nothing would prevent the term “conscientious objection” from being applied to any resistance to the injunctions of public authority on moral grounds, especially when such authority exceeds the limits of its power. In a broad sense, for example, the martyrs were conscientious objectors. However, today this designation could only be applied to them improperly, since the term’s meaning has been narrowed to passive resistance against military service.
Moreover, to grasp the moral issue at stake in conscientious objection, it is necessary to distinguish between opposition based on general principles—from which derives the absolute condemnation of the use of weapons in any circumstance—and opposition grounded in particular motives, such as the belief that a specific conflict is unjust. Although the latter is also essentially a form of conscientious objection, the term is commonly reserved for the former, and it is this alone that will be discussed here.
Conscientious objection is a rather recent phenomenon.
It found fertile ground for its emergence in the individualistic subjectivism introduced by the Protestant Reformation. Its principal promoters, basing themselves on certain passages of Holy Scripture interpreted through a subjectivist lens, declared any war immoral and illicit, and consequently prohibited cooperation with military service. More broadly, they upheld the principle of personal inspiration, which was to serve as the foundation for elevating subjective conviction to the sole criterion of moral life. In practice, some Protestant sects, building on these premises, adopted the principle of non-resistance to evil, declaring any recourse to force illicit because it causes the death of one’s neighbor, which is forbidden by the Fifth Commandment. They elevated disobedience to laws of conscience—particularly in time of war—to the status of a religious principle. Such groups include the Mennonites, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, Shakers, Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others.
The Protestant origin of conscientious objection can be demonstrated by some—albeit imperfect—statistics. Between 1914 and 1915, Switzerland tried 350 conscientious objectors, of whom 206 cited religious motives, 77 moral motives, and 67 political motives; however, nearly all were Protestants. During the last world war, Canada had 10,700 conscientious objectors, of whom only 28 were Catholic. In the same period, the United States had 30,000 objectors, most of whom came from the Mennonite and Quaker communities, with only 150 from the Catholic community.
In reinforcing the modern abstentionist movement, in addition to dissident sects, pacifist and humanitarian currents have contributed, conducting intense propaganda against war and in favor of peace. This has given rise to conscientious objectors even in Latin countries, where such figures were previously unknown. The attitude of public authority toward conscientious objection varies. England, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Finland legally recognize it and have established special, more or less liberal statutes for objectors. In some legal systems, only religiously motivated conscientious objection is accepted, as in the United States; in others, any motive is accepted, as in England, where objectors are assigned to auxiliary services or ordinary labor. In other countries, conscientious objection is not recognized, and objectors are punished with various sanctions for refusal to obey.
Catholic doctrine, until recently unanimous in rejecting conscientious objection, has since the Second World War divided into two opposing currents. To provide an accurate overview, the arguments of both opinions must be presented before drawing definitive conclusions. The reasons supporting the view favorable to conscientious objection are of a religious and moral nature, though they also carry a tinge of pacifist humanitarianism.
From a religious standpoint, it is argued that the use of force—and consequently war—is contrary to the divine precept of non-resistance to evil, to the commandment of charity toward one’s neighbor, and to the spirit of meekness that permeates the Sermon on the Mount, in which the most refined essence of Christianity is contained. Moreover, there is the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” which both individuals and the state are called to observe. To support these positions, the tradition of the early Church is invoked, which is said to have opposed military service, with Tertullian, Lactantius, and Origen cited as representatives of this tradition, along with some instances of Christian military resistance.
From a moral standpoint, the arguments derive either from the right of subjective conscience or from the objective immorality of war, especially modern war. Conscience, according to Catholic moral teaching, is the ultimate and proximate criterion of the morality of an act, which a person must always follow, even if it is erroneous, lest they incur moral guilt imputable to themselves. Conscience, it is argued, thus creates an obligation, to which—it is added—a right is attached, since duty and right are correlative and must be respected by public authority. The objector therefore has the right to be respected and to assert their opposition to military service by refusing to obey the civil authority’s order.
Furthermore, it is argued, modern war, because of the immense evils it produces and their disproportion to the rights it seeks to uphold, can no longer be justified. Since cooperation in injustice is morally illicit, resistance to the call to arms and to the performance of military service—which serves no purpose other than preparing for future conflicts—becomes licit. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that the supreme authority of the Church has repeatedly condemned obligatory conscience, and that moralists, for their part, have defined laws of this kind as penal laws that do not bind in conscience. Conscientious objection, therefore, would legitimately oppose the injunction of public authority.
The principle on which the opposing thesis is based is twofold: the instrumentality of the use of force and the exigency of the common good. The use of force, and consequently war (v.), is in itself neither good nor evil, but derives its morality from the end to which it is directed. If the end is the defense of individual or social rights, it is just; otherwise, it is unjust. From this precise formulation, centered on the instrumental nature of violence, it follows that the use of arms is in itself indifferent; if it were not, even the maintenance of an armed police force for the protection of internal order would not be permissible. This conclusion is not altered by the fact that modern war is more destructive than past wars, since right remains the highest social good of moral order, whose violation cannot be equaled by any material evil. As such, it must be protected and defended, and this defense, as long as there is no superior authority in the international community capable of providing it, will fall to the States. However, despite the immense evils caused by modern wars, the right to legitimate defense cannot be denied, and thus, while offensive war may be unjust, the same judgment cannot be pronounced regarding defensive war, since vim vi repellere omnia iura permittunt. Now, if the use of arms can be legitimate in only one case—as is undoubtedly that of legitimate defense—then the performance of military service remains legitimate and obligatory, and the objection of conscience loses any objective foundation.
Moreover, the common good requires that the citizen, who shares in all the goods of collective life, should defend this life when necessary against enemies who threaten it both internally and externally. The rights of the community are, in turn, stronger than individual rights, which must yield to them when the superior exigencies of social good so require. Man must, therefore, be prepared to sacrifice his personal good to defend the existence, freedom, and unity of the social body to which he belongs. The conclusion is thus the same: as long as the fatherland does not become an empty name, it is obligatory to render the necessary service for its defense.
Against this straightforward thesis, it is useless to appeal to evangelical counsels, which, aimed at individual sanctification and suggested with a view to a future reward for the renunciations accepted in their observance, cannot equally be applied to social life, since this does not have a future life in which it may receive the reward for the renunciations made. The precept of non-resistance to evil cannot be applied without leaving crime unpunished and order overturned. It must indeed be emphasized that public authority does not have the faculty to make such renunciations, for by doing so it would violate the rights of its subjects, whose defense is its supreme duty.
It is also clear that the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" cannot be given the absolute meaning attributed to it by conscientious objectors. Undoubtedly, man has a sacred right to life, and yet there are cases in which this right loses its force in the face of the exigencies of a higher right. This is certainly the case with individual legitimate defense against an unjust aggressor, which, according to the common teaching of Catholic theologians, may even extend to the killing of the adversary. The State, too, possesses the right of legitimate defense and may therefore legitimately cause the death of its adversaries without thereby violating the Fifth Commandment. As for the opposition of the early Church to military service, it is now firmly established that the Fathers were not opposed to it on religious principle but sometimes advised its abandonment because of the moral dangers Christians encountered in its practice. The three names usually cited do not form a tradition oriented in a different direction. History shows, moreover, that Christians served in the armies of pagan emperors without seeing any contradiction with their religious profession, until idolatrous worship was imposed upon them.
The argument drawn from the supposed right of subjective conscience is entirely vitiated by the equivocation of modern moral subjectivism. There is no doubt that conscience is a norm of conduct to which the individual has the duty to conform, even in the supposition that his practical judgment is erroneous. This obligation, however, when conscience is subjective, is not accompanied by the right—as is falsely claimed—to be translated into practice in social life, within which, for the sake of legal certainty and the maintenance of order, only the objective or natural or positive norm can have value. One who errs, acting in good faith, has only the right not to be disturbed in his private life and not to be forced to change his opinion; but when he acts socially, the subjective norm must yield to the objective norm of justice. If this were not so, the very foundations on which social life rests would be undermined, for if the faculty of subjective conscience is admitted—even only in the case of conscientious objection—to assert itself by refusing obedience to the authority’s order, then, since this is a general principle, the same faculty would have to be recognized with regard to any disposition whose binding force would ultimately depend on the acceptance of the subjects. And this would lead directly to anarchy.
No greater probative value attaches to the argument based on the condemnation of obligatory conscience. Even if the full legitimacy of such condemnation is admitted, in the final analysis one cannot overlook the fact that today all nations maintain standing armies, and thus it is impossible for any one of them to remain unarmed if it wishes to provide for its own security. Necessity and the defective organization of international society impose in this case the need to be armed, and public authority could not act otherwise without failing in its office. In view of the higher social good, therefore, the citizen also has the duty to submit to its orders by rendering the required military service. It should be noted, moreover, that laws of conscience can be said to be in some way penal only with regard to ordinary military service and never with regard to a mobilization decreed to repel an unjust aggression. There is no need to dwell on the alleged messianic inspiration of some conscientious objectors. Right and duty cannot be established or measured by the vague and obscure criterion derived from a false and nebulous mysticism. Summing up the fruit of this critical examination, one may conclude with the traditional thesis that conscientious objection finds no support either in morality or in law, and must therefore be rejected as culpable disobedience punishable under the law. This does not prevent, however, the public authority, for practical reasons, from tolerating it, regulating it by law.