Not the first draft, not the last?

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Via Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, the bill to reinstate the military draft that Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has been pushing is coming to a vote.

The Republican leadership, however, has placed it in the "Suspension Calendar", which is apparently a fast-track, no debate process reserved for noncontroversial items (clarification will be appreciated). Rangel, at a press conference, is rightly indignant.

I won't debate the merits of the bill, since I haven't made up my mind about the concept of compulsory service. My antipathy to all things military—which seem to me incompatible with academic values, at the æsthetic level if nothing else—is somewhat attenuated by Rangel's inclussion of a non-martial civil service alternative.

Read more!Some policies seem valid or repugnant not in themselves, but in terms of the arguments used to justify them. An argument for the draft (or its equivalent) as an expression of love for one's country or as a method of national socialization disturbs me deeply. I have often said that I viscerally reject any political theory that requires me to love my fellow. I'll gladly give anyone their due, as a matter of justice, but solidarity as a normative principle is another story.

But this still leaves at least two other grounds for a compulsory civil service. On strict contractarian grounds, civil service can be conceived as a kind of lump-sum payment to the common pot for whatever benefits you drew from society from birth until adulthood. But why must the payment be made all at once and in so onerous a manner? There is no reason to suppose that could not contribute to society in a suitable way over the entire course of one's life. To think of the benefits of social cooperation as this kind of social debt gives the state too much of a claim on its citizens, a point raised by Jacob Levy some time ago (link forthcoming).

One remaining ground for a compulsory draft is that it distributes the burdens of social cooperation more fairly. Now, the validity of this argument depends on the underlying social conditions that make some groups (minorities, the poor) more likely to opt for military service, not because of a preference for whatever values such service encourages, but because they have no other viable options. I believe that, at the enlisted level at least, this is Rangel's motivation for the bill.

It was also, it is important to point out, John Rawls's motivation for opposing educational exemptions to the draft during the Vietnam War. Rawls was a child of privilege who had voluntarilly enlisted in the Navy during World War Two, as so many other men of wealth did during that period. But by the 1960s, he recognized, the well-to-do were not going off to war and educational exemptions allowed then to stay on friendly shores. Less privileged young men, who had not made it into college, could give no excuse and were sent to Vietnam. The very inequalities of educational achievement were compounded and reinforced by inequalities in military service. So Rawls fought to repeal educational exemptions just as he fought against the War.

The benefit of the distributive justification is that it does not commit one to an unqualified defense of compulsory military (or civil) service. To render such service justly voluntary one need only eliminate the injustices that make it a compulsory sub-optimal choice. If the military promotes genuine values, values that should be attractive to a significant segment of the population, then recruitment should reflect that. If recruitment falls off dramatically we would lament in vain the poor civic virtue of bourgeois children. Instead we should acknowledge that socially valuable work deserver to be rewarded, and match the incentive to make such sacrifice to the fact that, in the days of the waning nation-state, military duty is difficult, dangerous, and ever less glorious.