Unintentionally, I suppose I’ve made this punkassbody(autonomy) week over here at punkassblog, at least as far as my posts are concerned. Seeing as how this is also our first week in existence, some folks are probably wondering if that’s all I intend to carp about. The answer: nyet. But I am enjoying myself, and the debates have been a blast, so I figured I would follow up on a promise I made and discuss the consription issue as it relates to my views on bodily coercion.
Caveat #1) I’m riffing here. This particular angle is not something set in stone, so I reserve the right to shuck and jive down the line.
Caveat #2) I don’t actually know whether I will consider conscription acceptable or unacceptable under the umbrella of “bodily autonomy over all else” by the end of the post. Should be fun to find out.
Caveat #3) I’m gonna geek out on philosophy crap, so if that isn’t your thing, please move onto the next post. And, again, I promise I won’t be like this all or even most of the time. I think.
Enter my lair to see where we wind up…
Before we begin, let’s be clear: this post examines the implications for conscription (forcibly drafting people into military service) via my working philosophy of bodily autonomy. If you don’t know what the eff I’m talking about or don’t like that philosophy, please read/discuss/chew me out over here. For the rest of you, a brief recap:
1) body = what comes with me when I jump in the air naked
2) body = person; it’s the only empirical way to describe or define a single individual
3) personal rights (speech, voting, etc) are valued because a person is valued
4) the value of these rights derives from the person and thus the body
5) so violating the body = violating the person = violating the core value of all personal rights
So if you care about any personal rights, you have to protect the person/body from being violated. This means I have bodily autonomy. You stay out of my body and I stay out of yours, or we are jacking up the foundation of all the rights we supposedly hold dear.
So can Uncle Sam haul me off to Iran against my will or not?
Relax, we’ll get there. I told you there would be philosophy crap involved. Buckle up.
When justifying the right to bodily autonomy, I was asked where that came from, to which I responded:
There’s no god on punkassblog, at least none that I can see or rely on, so all rights I discuss come from the same place: rational constructs we try to create for the social good.
And where do we create these rational constructs? Why, in ye olde political state, of course. The political state allows us to actualize our rational constructs in a common space that binds all of its members. When I argue for something like bodily autonomy, I am asking that the political state legislate and enforce laws based on its principles. The state is the vehicle through which we can protect rights and foster social good.
I’m real Hobbesian when it comes to human nature. I think that without any government at all our our lives would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” I disagree completely with his conclusion that we’re never allowed to rebel against a government as a result, but we agree that human beings can be super-mega-awful to each other in total anarchy.
Maybe you’re a noble savage kinda person or a total anarchist. If so, you probably don’t care about preserving a state of any kind; you’d rather do away with them all. And, hey, that’s cool daddio, but I’d ask you how we could resolve disputes like “I think that foot of yours is mine and I wanna take it home right now.” Seems to me we need a common rights framework to protect ourselves and a political state to make us all stick to it.
This dramatically impacts the bodily autonomy philosophy. I can only protect a person from bodily invasion or coercion if I can impress the value of the person/body on everyone around me through a rational construct, and I need a state to actualize a rational construct. Thus, I can’t demand or enforce protection of bodily autonomy without a state.
Well, damn. I hate the idea of a draft, but if the existence of a state is genuinely threatened, especially if it is by another state with a different rights framework that sucks a nut, we could all lose our right to bodily autonomy.
Before we get there (I know, so many assumptions to establish first — you can see why there isn’t much of a market for philosophy), though, would drafting me violate my bodily autonomy? Verily, yea. If you force me to stand in front of bullets, I call shenanigans as far as protecting my body is concerned.
But if drafting 1/3 or 1/2 of a population would give you a reasonable chance of defending the state from destruction, then, arguably, you’ve done a great service to bodily autonomy. Instead of everyone losing it, 1/2 – 2/3 of the people kept it. Now we get into whether utilitarianism (greatest good for greatest number) is a legitimate value, and if you aren’t dozing now, you surely will be if we go down that road.
If you always believe in the individual over the collective, then conscripting me to die for some else’s bodily autonomy is never okay. And you might be exactly right. But I’m going to make a tentative exception: if, as stated above, you need a state to have bodily autonomy, you can only violate my bodily autonomy via conscription — and only if there is a direct threat to the existence of the state and said conscription, in concert with others, stands a reasonable chance of defending that state.
Man, now that is a loaded statement. How do you decide if a state is directly threatened? I would say Iran and Iraq are not direct threats, but the wingnuts would disagree. How do you know the intruding state doesn’t subscribe to your framework or can’t be changed to do so? How the hell can you know if drafting me can actually protect the state or not?
Tough questions. That’s why arguing for/against a draft is one of the thorniest issues this side of bodily rights.
So I think I technically believe in my exception for now, though perhaps one of you will dissuade me. But I think if the answer to one of those clarification questions is in doubt, you can’t invoke the exception. If Hitler is standing on the shores of France, lobbing bombs at England, and gearing up to head in for a cuppa, almost no one could empirically argue against affirmative answers to them (except the last one, I suppose). But if we’re talking about Iran or Vietnam as a threat to the US, there’s an awful lot of doubt, so I say you can’t invoke the exception.
Now, I will close with an statement obvious to 99% of you but one that must be made for the “other guys:” The exception applies only to the act of conscription and can not be invoked for any fetus-related nonsensery. A mother choosing not to let a fetus use her body has nothing to do with a draft, does not directly threaten the state, and thus you can not override her bodily autonomy. And if anyone says “but what if 100% of all mothers do it and then there is no future generation to continue the state?” I will find you and key your car.
But what if 100% of all mothers do it and then there is no future generation to continue the state?
You are officially effed in the a, McBoing. If I can ever afford a ticket to the Bahamas, I will seriously jack up that Masarati of yours.
Conscription and anti-abortion legislation are fundamentally about the same thing so you’d think the feasibility of coersion should be considered the same way which of course it isn’t. At the risk of oversimplifying, conscription means that your body belongs to the state because it needs your body to protect the citizens and that need overrides your rights because the group’s survival is more important than any one individual whether you like it or not. Prohibiting abortion means that your body belongs to the state because it needs your body to produce more citizens and that need overrides your rights because… However it’s pretty universally accepted that volunteer army is far superior to the drafted army for rather obvious reasons and ultimately the state benefits from having an army comprised of volunteers. In other words, there are purely practical reasons to prefer that people volunteer their bodies ias opposed to forcing them to do so. You’d think the same logic would apply to reproduction: isn’t it better for everybody involved including the society as a whole to have women volunteer to bear children as opposed to forcing them to do so? I wonder how many ardent anti-abortionists support the draft…