Conscription Meets Every One of Martha Nussbaum’s Criteria for Objectification

Conscription treats individuals as objects, tools to use for the state’s purposes.

Mysid, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Green: No armed service. Blue: No conscription. Purple: active, but limited conscription Orange: plans to abolish conscription. Red: active conscription. Grey: No information.

Martha Nussbaum laid out seven ways a person can be objectified. It’s most often used to talk about sexism, exploitation, and sexual violence, but the framework is broader than that.

Objectification, in Nussbaum’s sense, is about what happens when a person is treated as a thing.

And conscription meets all seven of Nussbaum’s criteria.

Martha Nussbaum Picture by: Robin Holland (website), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

1. Instrumentality: A Person Used as a Tool

Instrumentality is treating a person primarily as a means to someone else’s ends.

Conscription does this openly.

The conscript is not there because they have chosen the goal. They are there because the state needs bodies for deterrence, defence, projection of power, or political leverage.

Their value is functional:

• Can you carry equipment?
• Can you follow orders?
• Can you occupy space?
• Can you absorb risk?

The individual’s own goals, values, fears, or future plans are secondary at best. Often irrelevant.

That doesn’t mean the goals are unjustified. But it does mean the person is being used as a tool to achieve them.

Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, via Wikimedia Commons

2. Denial of Autonomy: Choice Is Removed

Autonomy is the ability to govern oneself.

Conscription explicitly suspends this.

You don’t choose whether to serve. You don’t choose the risks you’re exposed to. You don’t choose whether your body is placed in harm’s way.

Even conscientious objection is usually tightly constrained, bureaucratic, and conditional, autonomy filtered through permission.

When refusal is punished, compliance is not consent.

Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, via Wikimedia Commons

3. Inertness: Treated as Passive and Replaceable

Nussbaum describes inertness as treating a person as lacking agency or activity, as something to be deployed rather than a participant.

Conscription systems are built around interchangeability.

When one body is injured, another is trained. When one deserts, another is conscripted. When one dies, the system continues.

Individual judgment is often framed as a problem. Initiative is permitted only when authorised. The ideal conscript is responsive, obedient, and predictable.

This isn’t accidental it’s necessary for the system to function.

And it treats people as passive units within a machine.

IDF Spokesperson’s Unit https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Idf_back_from_lebanon.jpg

4. Fungibility: Interchangeable Parts

Fungibility is treating people as if they are equivalent and replaceable.

Conscription relies on this.

Training is standardised. Roles are assigned based on need. Losses are counted statistically.

Even language reflects this: “manpower” “force strength” “casualty numbers”

No matter how much rhetoric exists about honour or sacrifice, the structure itself requires that individuals be substitutable.

A system that collapses when one person is removed is fragile. Conscription systems are designed not to be fragile.

SPC Joshua Leonard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

5. Violability: Bodies as Legitimately Harmable

Violability is the idea that a person’s body can be broken, invaded, or destroyed for a purpose.

Conscription normalises this.

The state claims the right to:

• Expose your body to injury or death
• Train it
• Push it beyond its limits
• Accept its destruction

Death in service is tragic… but expected.

And expected harm is harm that has been authorised.

Nima Najafzadeh, via Wikimedia Commons

6. Ownership: The State Claims Your Body

Ownership doesn’t require literal property rights. It’s about control.

During conscription, the state determines:

• Where your body must be
• What it must do
• What risks it must take
• What penalties follow disobedience

Your body becomes temporarily nationalised.

This is why desertion is treated as theft or betrayal. You are taking something back that the system believes it has a right to.

Ministério da Defesa/PH Freitas, via Wikimedia Commons

7. Denial of Subjectivity: Inner Life Is Secondary

Finally, denial of subjectivity is treating someone as if their feelings, experiences, and inner life don’t matter.

Conscription often acknowledges fear, grief, and trauma but only up to the point that they don’t interfere with function.

Fear is weakness. Hesitation is failure. Trauma is managed after usefulness ends.

The system may care about morale, but morale is instrumental, valuable because it improves performance, not because inner lives have inherent moral weight.

대한민국 국방부 — Ministry of National Defense of the Republic of Korea, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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