This article explores the political implications of opposition to war, focusing on the example of conscientious objection to military service. Conscientious objection is often treated as a fundamentally ethical issue; however, this article argues for centering questions of justice in analyses of responses to war. There is a risk that starting with ethics takes for granted the social significance of ethical responses and overlooks particular ethical practices in the reproduction of wider inequalities. More specifically, when an issue is narrowly framed in terms of ethics, it can have implications for who is allowed to speak and what they can speak about. Thinking about war as an issue of justice—in the sense of how society allocates the things that it values—allows the broader issues of hierarchy, distribution, and recognition to be in the foreground. The article focuses on the example of an Indian subject of the British Empire who applied for exemption from military service during the Second World War. The valorization on conscience by the British state prioritized a limited form of opposition to bloodshed grounded in personal moral scruples, to the exclusion of anti‐imperial self‐determination, and turned the war into an issue of individual ethics rather than global inequality.

中文翻译：

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英帝国的正义，良心与战争

本文探讨了反对战争的政治含义，重点是出于良心拒服兵役的例子。出于良心拒服兵役通常被视为根本上的道德问题；但是，本文主张在对战争反应的分析中以正义为中心。从伦理学出发，存在道德回应的社会意义被认为是理所当然的事情，而在更广泛的不平等再现中却忽视了特定的道德实践，这是有风险的。更具体地说，当一个问题在道德上被狭义地界定时，它可能会影响谁被允许发言和他们可以谈论什么。从社会如何分配其重视的事物的角度考虑，将战争视为正义问题，可以带来更广泛的等级，分布，并被认为是最重要的。本文以第二次世界大战期间申请豁免兵役的大英帝国印第安人为例。英国政府对良心的重视优先考虑了有限的形式的反对，以反对基于个人道德顾虑的流血为由，反对反帝自决，并将战争变成了个人道德问题，而不是全球不平等问题。