The most immoral law a nation-state can make is one that coerces an individual into taking another individuals life. In the issue of conscription, it is immoral for a nation-state to use their monopoly on coercion to force an individual into service and then place them in a position where they may be required to take the life of another individual.

The nation-state does this for their own perpetuation, glory and selfish interests. It can be argued that moral clarity of any issue is lost once it becomes political and falls into the vehicle of state power. The original Defence Act of 1903 (link is to current legislative form) contained language that prohibited the government from forcing conscripts to serve outside of Australia. This was a very moral law.

World Wars

One of the first operations in World War I (WWI) by Australian forces was the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF) which invaded German New Guinea in 1914. All the members of the AN&MEF were regulars. with the creation of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), most of the AN&MEF volunteered for overseas service.

The AIF was somewhat unique due to the language of the Defence Act which stipulated that only volunteers could serve outside of Australia. Despite Billy Hughes' attempts to pass referendums on conscription which would allow the government to send conscripts overseas as part of the AIF, the AIF remained a pure volunteer force right through WWI. No other nation managed that feat.

World War II (WWII) was slightly different. By then Australia had two military structures. The 2nd AIF and the Citizens Military Forces (CMF). Essentially regular Army and Militia. It should not be forgotten that the Kokoda Track was one of the great militia victories. The Defence Act restriction on the militia meant that they could not serve outside of Australia. But this was expanded to mean Australia and its territories. Since New Guinea was an Australian territory in the 1940s the Curtin government sent the Militia to serve there.

The Curtin government was also concerned in their ability to control the Militia forces, and decided that any militia unit that had more than three-quarters as volunteers was to become an 2nd AIF unit. This handed control of them over to the regular Army and enabled those units to serve in the Middle East or Europe.

Curtin had been strongly against conscription in 1916-1917 when Hughes had been stumping the referendums. The government was able to use conscription to raise forces for the militia, but could not use it to raise troops that would serve outside of Australia.

The issue of conscription was not popular in the Australian Labor Party, consequently Curtin enacted legislation that made the area of Australia and its Territories equal to the South West Pacific. The new map of territorial Australia stopped just short of the Phillipines, western Java and Northern Borneo. The Australia Militia could now be sent anywhere is this new expanded map. It was a gross abuse of the initial intent of the original Defence Act.

Vietnam

Australia maintained citizen forces until the 1950s when they were fazed out due to cost and the Army Reserve took over that role. When Harold Holt promised Lyndon Johnson an increase in Australian participation in Vietnam, he had nowhere to turn but conscription. Australians (and other subjects under the British crown living in Australia) were conscripted into National Service as the number of Regiments in the Australian Army were expanded.

The United States also used conscription to increase their commitments to Vietnam. It is interesting to compare the American and Australian experience of Vietnam to New Zealand's. Australia and America both faced domestic protests and upheaval due to the coercive nature of the government in participating in the conflict. New Zealand only used regulars in Vietnam, and had little of the social turbulence that Australia and America faced.

The conscripts in the United States Army rebelled heavily, even within the strict structures of the military. Alcoholism and drug use became widespread. There were even incidents of soldiers killing their officers. This is the value of a Citizen Army. When they do not want to be there, they let the government know.

Returning to the Intent of the Defence Act 1903

Governments have learnt the lesson of Vietnam, and other than the US deploying Reservists in Iraq, most have only committed regular forces in overseas conflicts. Volunteers behave better, and have less dissent than conscripted militia. But even so, there was a good balance in the Defence Act 1903 between the moral beliefs of an individual, and the need for a nation-state to remain a single cohesive entity. That balance was struck by only allowing volunteers to serve in overseas conflicts.

Too often overseas conflicts are participated in for the selfish interests of the nation-state having influence with other nation-states. They are not for defence of the nation-state, nor are they to ensure the nation-state remains a single cultural and political entity. They are for the self-glory of the government.

Curtin polluted the original legislation by making Australia the same thing as the South Pacific. I would like to see the return of legislation that prohibits military conscripts serving outside of Australia. It is a moral law, that balances the rights of the individual and their role in the nation-state.

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Everitt on Augustus: "Perhaps the most instructive aspect of Augustus' approach to politics was his twin recognition that in the long run power was unsustainable without consent, and consent could best be won by associating radical constitutional change with a traditional and moralizing ideology."

Augustus saw Rome's downfall into constant civil war, which he was a major contributor to, as a loss of the moral rudder from Roman greatness of centuries before. So he passed moralising laws. These, like modern statutory restrictions aimed at morality, had no discernible effect.

This traditionalist view of morality, such as promiscuity, and not breeding enough heirs, is not the same as Harpurian or republican views of morality. The Harpurian view of morality is one of decreasing violence through moral expression, and eventually, with moral perfection, the replacement of the state with individual moral virtue. For instance Harpur believed that war would eventually become morally impossible.

Republican morality is predicated in the absence of violence. Augustus' view of morality was a political narrative designed to bind his imperial rule to the history of Roman greatness. It is not much different to the modern passage of nationalist and moralistic laws.

btw Augustus' was a horrible hypocrite and did not follow his own moralising laws.

Michael Gerson has an article in the WaPo which argues that atheists are unable to explain how someone is moral without their being some theistic intervention in the natural world; acknowledged by the individual or not. Gerson discredits Kantian morality and Bentham's utilitarianism in coming to the conclusion that without understanding that the moral qualities of "love, harmony and sympathy" flow through God as creator then morality becomes a cruel joke of nature and is deprived of goodness or moral quality.

The core question Gerson asks is:

So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: "Obey your evolutionary instincts" because those instincts are conflicted. "Respect your brain chemistry" or "follow your mental wiring" don't seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: "To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I'm going to do whatever I please." C.S. Lewis put the argument this way: "When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains."

Because atheism does not recognise a god, creator or an omniprescient entity, then it cannot understand good, only want. Gerson is arguing that atheists understand only selfishness, and not selflessness. For Gerson this does not stop atheists acting morally, but the consequence is:

Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.

Kantian morality and Benthem's utilitarianism both cover that aspect. Kant argues that reason makes an individual capable of seeing and understanding the 'supreme good'. Kant writes:

For reason recognizes the establishment of a good will as its highest practical destination.

Reason does not prohibit the understanding of moral attitudes and actions of others. According to Kant, the better developed an individuals reason, then the better capable they are of judging moral acts; and not necessarily their own.

So Gerson's argument is that an atheists ability to reason is absolutely selfish and only knowledge of god enables selflessness. Kant's morality disproves this, as it only requires one atheist to reason whether another has acted morally or immorally to make Gerson's conclusion false.

As an example, South Sea Republic focuses heavily on the morality of republicanism and the morality of democracy. Which Avocadia described in the past as having to serve the 'morality of liberty'. We spend a lot of time discussing what are immoral acts toward republican governance, of which tyranny is the most immoral.

This is not unique to South Sea Republic, Australian Republicans such as Dan Deniehy and Charles Harpur rooted their republicanism in the morality of liberty. In this environment if an atheist is capable of recognising tyranny and reasoning its destructive conclusion, then an atheist is just as capable of moral understanding in a social, cultural, economic and political environment as a theist is.

Gerson's other argument for atheism's inherent limited moral faculties is that:

In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature -- imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

Gerson is arguing that materialism equates to immorality, and that theism's faith in God and presumably the infinite space of heaven, allows the theist to understand the immorality of materialism and atheism; where an atheist who has reasoned there is no valid proof for a supernatural being cannot.

Theism undeniably has a blind spot for reason. The thesis that atheists cannot recognise immorality in others must necessarily skip past the capability of atheists to reason.

More: Discussion at HuSi and x-posted to Gary Sauer-Thompson's website. Interesting discussion at Rebecca Hartong's site too.

Update: It appears Gerson was trolling. Hitchens has replied with polemics.

I sometimes wonder if authors write books specifically for me. Walter Mead's Special Providence is one such book. It discusses American foreign policy under the broad washes of Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Wilsonian and Jacksonian doctrines. It also asks why is American foreign policy blind to its own history, presuming it all started with WWII, when American politics and even the American nation was so reliant on American politicians getting the foreign policy right.

One quote caught my eye. What we Australian foreign policy watchers would call realism or real-politick, Mead calls Continentalist. This is the 19thC elitist "grand state" foreign policy advocated by the likes of Bismarck, Richelieu, etc. Unlike the messiness of democratically driven foreign policy there is an inherent level of amorality in Continentalist foreign policy:

Anyone can be immoral, but the accomplished amorality of diplomacy is more difficult to acquire. As a habit of mind it is generally confined to elites, partly because its possession usually leads to successful careers.

Again, Continentalists are not wrong to observe a tendency in democratic states for public opinion to oscillate between a naive belief that the international world is simply a larger version of the domestic arena, a space that can and should be run on the same principles as the local church or at least the neighbourhood hardware store, and a disillusioned conviction that there are no principles, not even any pragmatic ones, in international life.

In other words, democracies tend either to rise above or sink below the morality appropriate to the international scene.

Mead's analysis is a bit simplistic and in overly black and white terms in order to make his point. But the apparent amorality, even Hobbesian state, of international order and democracy's trouble in coming to terms with that amorality is a good point.

It is interesting to note that international liberalism tries to bring a morality to foreign affairs by introducing the blunt truth to diplomatic relations rather than the sins of omission and bluff in diplomatic communication. Australia's two best advocates of it, Doc Evatt and Sam Burton, practiced a very pure version of international liberalism in the late 1940s. It did not last as the realpolitick, realism or continentalism of the cold war intruded - creating a binary international diplomatic environment.

Ricky Gervais has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about atheism and asks;

But what are atheists really being accused of?

Atheism isn't an issue in Australia. Very few people are religious and most people speak openly derisively of religion. This is true of most industrial nations - other than the US. In the United States religiousness is very strong, particularly on the East Coast.

The main issue with religion in America is that people assume that morality flows from your relationship with god. The more devout, the greater the morality. Atheism poses a problem in this rationality as no faith in god means the absence of morality. Forget intellectual fancies like nihilism; atheists are amoral, incapable of being moral and hence subhuman.

It isn't pleasant for moderate atheists and as a consequence they tend to palm things off as "not being religious" rather than stating they are atheists. The simple fact is that atheists are moral as well and knowledge of god or a close relationship with god is not the determinant for an individual's morality.