CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION. – The act by which a citizen refuses to obey the order of the public authority to perform ordinary military service or to mobilize in the event of war, invoking personal reasons of conscience, which are usually religious, moral, and humanitarian, is called c. o. This could in itself have a broader meaning than the one described. Nothing, in fact, would prevent calling any resistance to the injunctions of the public authority for moral reasons c. o., especially when it exceeds the limits of its power. In the broad sense, the martyrs, for example, were conscientious objectors. Today, however, this designation could be attributed to them only improperly, since the meaning of the expression has been restricted to passive resistance to military service.
Moreover, in order to have a clear understanding of the crux of the moral question raised by c. o., it is necessary to distinguish opposition made for general reasons, from which derives an absolute condemnation of the use of weapons under any circumstances, from opposition based on particular reasons, e.g., the alleged injustice of a specific conflict. Although the latter too is substantially a c. o., this designation is nevertheless understood to mean only the former, which alone will therefore be discussed.
C. o. is a rather recent phenomenon.
It found favorable ground for its emergence in the individualistic subjectivism introduced by the Protestant Reformation, whose principal promoters, basing themselves on certain texts of Sacred Scripture interpreted according to the subjectivist criterion, declared every war immoral and illicit and consequently cooperation through the performance of military service impermissible; more generally, they upheld the principle of personal inspiration, which was to serve as a pedestal for elevating subjective conviction into the sole criterion of moral life. In fact, some Protestant sects, returning to these premises, adopted the principle of nonresistance to evil and, declaring every resort to force illicit because it causes the death of one’s neighbor, prohibited by the Fifth Commandment, elevated disobedience to conscription laws, particularly in wartime, into a religious principle. Such are the Mennonites, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, Shakers, Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.
The Protestant origin of c. o. can be demonstrated by means of some statistics, although imperfect ones. From 1914 to 1915, 350 conscientious objectors were tried in Switzerland, of whom 206 invoked religious reasons, 77 moral reasons, and 67 political reasons; yet almost all were Protestants. During the last world war, Canada had 10,700 objectors, among whom only 28 professed the Catholic religion. During the same period, the United States had 30,000 objectors, most of whom came from the Mennonite and Quaker sects, and only 150 from the Catholic community.
Nevertheless, in addition to the dissident sects, the pacifist and humanitarian movements contributed to strengthening the present-day abstentionist movement. These movements conducted intense propaganda against war and in favor of peace, producing conscientious objectors everywhere, even in Latin countries, where until shortly before they could be said to be unknown. The attitude of the public authority toward c. o. varies. England, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Finland legally recognize it and have developed a special statute, more or less liberal, for objectors. Some legislation accepts c. o. only for religious reasons, as in the United States; other legislation accepts it for any reason, as in England, and objectors are assigned to auxiliary services or ordinary labor. In other countries it is not recognized, and objectors are punished with various sanctions for refusal to obey.
Catholic doctrine, unanimous in rejecting it until shortly before, became divided, particularly after the Second World War, into two currents. To obtain an exact picture, it is necessary to present the arguments of the two opposing opinions and then draw the definitive conclusions from them. The reasons supporting the opinion favorable to c. o. are religious and moral in nature; they nevertheless also contain an element of pacifist humanitarianism.
From the religious point of view, it is observed that the use of force, and consequently war as well, is contrary to the divine precept of nonresistance to evil, of charity toward one’s neighbor, and to the spirit of meekness that pervades the Sermon on the Mount, in which the most refined essence of Christianity is contained. Moreover, there is the Fifth Commandment, non ammazzare, which both the individual and the State are called upon to observe. In support of these positions, the tradition of the primitive Church is invoked, since it is said to have been opposed to military service; Tertullian, Lactantius, and Origen are cited as representatives of this tradition, together with certain instances of Christian military resistance.
From the moral point of view, the reasons derive either from the right of subjective conscience or from the objective immorality of war, especially modern war. According to Catholic morality, conscience is the ultimate and proximate criterion of the morality of an act, which man must always follow, even on the assumption that it is erroneous, on pain of falling into a moral fault imputable to him. Conscience therefore creates an obligation, to which, it is added, a right is attached, since duty and right are correlative, and the public authority must respect them. The objector therefore has the right to be respected and to assert his opposition to military service by refusing obedience to the order of the civil power.
All the more so, it is added, since modern war, because of the immense evils it produces and their disproportion to the right that one would intend to defend through it, must in every case be considered unjust; and since cooperation in injustice is morally illicit, resistance to the summons to arms and to the performance of military service becomes licit, as the latter has no other purpose than to prepare for future conflicts. Nor should one forget that the supreme authority of the Church has repeatedly condemned compulsory conscription, and that moral theologians, for their part, have defined the relevant laws as penal laws, which do not bind in conscience. The conscientious objector
would therefore be legitimately opposing the injunction of the public authority.
The principle, on the other hand, on which the contrary thesis rests is twofold: the instrumental nature of the use of force, and the demands of the common good. The use of force, war (v.), is in itself neither good nor evil, but derives its morality from the end toward which it is directed. If the end is the defense of an individual or social right, it is just; otherwise, it is unjust. From this exact formulation, centered on the instrumental nature of violence, it follows that the use of weapons is in itself indifferent; if this were not so, it would not even be licit to maintain an armed police force for the protection of internal order. This conclusion is not altered by the fact that modern war is more harmful than wars in the past, since law always remains the supreme social good of the moral order, and its violation cannot be equaled by any evil of the material order. As such, it must be protected and defended, and until a superior authority capable of providing for this exists within international society, this task will belong to the States. In any event, even admitting the immense evils caused by modern wars, one can never deny the right of legitimate defense; hence, although offensive war may be called unjust, the same judgment cannot be pronounced concerning defensive war, since vim vi repellere omnia iura permittunt. Now, if the use of weapons can be legitimate in even a single case, as it undoubtedly can in legitimate defense, military service remains legitimate and obligatory, and the o. di c. loses any objective foundation.
Moreover, the common good requires that the citizen, who shares in all the goods of collective life, should in turn defend that life, when necessary, against enemies who threaten it both from within and from without. The rights of the collective body are, on the other hand, stronger than individual rights, which must yield to them whenever the superior demands of the social good require II. Man must therefore be prepared to sacrifice his personal good in order to defend the existence, freedom, and unity of the social body to which he belongs. The conclusion is consequently the same: so long as the fatherland does not become an empty name, it is his duty to render the service necessary for its defense.
The evangelical counsels cannot be invoked against this straightforward thesis. Directed toward individual sanctification and proposed in view of an otherworldly reward for the renunciations accepted in observing them, they cannot likewise be applied to social life, since the latter has no future life in which it might receive the reward for the renunciations it has undergone. The precept of nonresistance to evil cannot be applied without leaving crime unpunished and disrupting order. Indeed, it must be emphasized that the public authority has no power to make such renunciations, since by doing so it would violate the rights of its subjects, whose defense is its supreme duty.
It is also clear that the commandment do not kill cannot be given the absolute meaning attributed to it by conscientious objectors. Undoubtedly, man has a sacred right to life; nevertheless, there are cases in which this right loses its force in the face of the demands of a higher right. This is certainly the case with individual legitimate defense against an unjust aggressor, which, according to the common judgment of Catholic theologians, may extend even 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 abandoning it because of the moral dangers Christians encountered in its exercise. The three names usually cited do not constitute the tradition, which was oriented differently. History, moreover, shows that Christians served in the armies of pagan emperors without perceiving any incompatibility with their religious profession, until an attempt was made to impose idolatrous worship upon them.
The argument derived from the alleged right of subjective conscience is internally vitiated by the equivocation of modern moral subjectivism. There is no doubt that conscience is a norm of conduct to which the individual has a duty to conform, even on the supposition that his practical judgment is erroneous. This obligation, however, when conscience is subjective, is not accompanied, as is falsely claimed, by the right to put it into practice in social life, within which—both for the certainty of law and for the maintenance of order—only the objective norm, whether natural or positive, can have validity. One who is in error, provided that the error is held 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. Otherwise, the foundations on which social life rests would be torn up. For if one admits, even in the single case of the o. di c., the power of subjective conscience to assert itself by refusing obedience to the order of the authority, then, since the principle is general, one would have to recognize the existence of the same power with regard to every provision, whose binding force would ultimately depend on the subjects’ acceptance. And this would lead directly to anarchy.
Nor does the argument based on the condemnation of compulsory conscription have greater probative value. Even granting the full legitimacy of that condemnation, the final judgment cannot disregard the fact that today all nations maintain standing armies and that, consequently, one of them cannot remain defenseless if it wishes to provide for its own security. Necessity and the defective organization of international society require, in this case, that arms be borne; nor could the public authority act otherwise without failing in its office. In view, therefore, of the higher social good, the citizen too has the duty to submit to its orders by rendering the military service required. It should also be observed that conscription laws may in some sense be called penal only with respect to ordinary military service, and never with regard to a mobilization ordered to repel an unjust aggression. It is not worth dwelling on the alleged messianic inspiration of certain conscientious objectors. Right and duty cannot be established or measured by the vague and obscure criterion derived from a false and nebulous mysticism. Gathering the fruits of this critical examination, one may conclude with the traditional thesis that the o. di c. finds no support either in morality or in law, and must therefore be rejected as disobedience imputable to the objector and punishable according to law. This does not, however, prevent the public authority, for practical reasons, from tolerating it and regulating it legally.