The Committee on Conscientious Objection to Paying for War of New York Yearly Meeting is bringing this query before New York Yearly Meeting:
If I promised you a life of comfort, a good family, membership in a wonderful church, meaningful work, college education for your children and energetic defense of your human rights in exchange for one small thing:
You agree to pay for the killing of one person. Just one. Nobody you know.
And you won’t be the only one. Everybody is chipping in.
You don’t actually have to do it yourself, just make a small contribution.
Would you do it?
What a sobering query…. My instinct, of course, is to say no, That is too easy. How can I possibly reconcile my beliefs with the reality that I pay full taxes to the US government. Especially when I belive our government to be the largest and most duplicitous wager of wars in our time.
This is recognizably a capital punsihment question. To give depth to that debate, I begin by putting myself into the frame of mind of a person who answers firmly yes. Then I do the same for a person who answers firmly no. The first function of the query is to teach me understanding of, and empathy for, both respondents.
As a matter of intellectual honesty, my second reaction is to wonder whether the question has actually been put to me–whether I have ever had opportunity to exercise an answer to it. In this stage of the investigation, the question applies to areas including capital punishment, military policy, and ordinary greed. Changing the word “kill” to the word “deprive,” I put the question to myself many times every day.
Getting back to the pure statement of the query, I realize that no public referendum or candidate for office has ever explicitly asked my permission to kill a person. The absence of that question is not the result of poor drafting. Instead, it grows out of the complexity of our human existence. No real world situation in my life has constituted a simple binary choice between social chaos and deadly force. It is questionable whether, as implied by the query, I have ever been offered social order as a direct result of deadly force.
I have in my lifetime exercised an answer to the milder form of the question. John D. Rockefeller is sometimes accused of providing miserable lives for his coal miners. Is it immoral of me to attend the University of Chicago that was built upon selfish monetary gain derived from that exploitation? I do not particularly question the Rockefeller family or my own purity, but rather the whole economic system that has placed me in an advantaged position over my fellow humans. Ernstraud Magazine (www.ernstraud.org) is my attempt during my remaining years to grapple with these issues.