Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [39]
In recent years, the most privileged young people in American society have not opted for military service. The title of a recent book about the class composition of the armed forces captures this well: AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service.12 Of the 750 members of Princeton’s class of 1956, the majority—450 students—joined the military after graduation. Of the 1,108 members of Princeton’s class of 2006, only 9 students enlisted.13 A similar pattern is found at other elite universities—and in the nation’s capital. Only 2 percent of members of Congress have a son or daughter serving in the military.14
Congressman Charles Rangel, a Democrat from Harlem who is a decorated Korean War veteran, considers this unfair, and has called for reinstatement of the draft. “As long as Americans are being shipped off to war,” he wrote, “then everyone should be vulnerable, not just those who, because of economic circumstances, are attracted by lucrative enlistment bonuses and educational incentives.” He points out that, in New York City, “the disproportionate burden of service is dramatic. In 2004, 70% of the volunteers in the city were black or Hispanic, recruited from lower income communities.”15
Rangel opposed the Iraq War, and believes it never would have been launched if the children of policy-makers had had to share the burden of fighting it. He also argues that, given the unequal opportunities in American society, allocating military service by the market is unfair to those with the fewest alternatives:
The great majority of people bearing arms for this country in Iraq are from the poorer communities in our inner cities and rural areas, places where enlistment bonuses of up to $40,000 and thousands in educational benefits are very attractive. For people who have college as an option, those incentives—at the risk to one’s life—don’t mean a thing.16
So the first objection to the market rationale for a volunteer army is concerned with unfairness and coercion—the unfairness of class discrimination and the coercion that can occur if economic disadvantage compels young people to risk their lives in exchange for a college education and other benefits.
Notice that the coercion objection is not an objection to the volunteer army as such. It only applies to a volunteer army that operates in a society with substantial inequalities. Alleviate those inequalities, and you remove the objection. Imagine, for example, a perfectly equal society, in which everyone had access to the same educational opportunities. In such a society, no one could complain that the choice to enlist in the military was less than free, because unfairly pressured by economic necessity.
Of course, no society is perfectly equal. So the risk of coercion always hovers over the choices people make in the labor market. How much equality is needed to ensure that market choices are free rather than coerced? At what point do inequalities in the background conditions of society undermine the fairness of social institutions (such as the volunteer army) based on individual choice? Under what conditions is the free market really free? To answer these questions, we’ll need to examine moral and political philosophies that see freedom—not utility—at the heart of justice. So let’s postpone these questions until we turn to Immanuel Kant and John Rawls in later chapters.
Objection 2: Civic virtue and the common good
In the meantime, let’s consider a second objection to the use of markets in allocating military service—the objection in the name of civic virtue and the common good.
This objection says that military service is not just another job; it’s a civic obligation. According to this argument,