(If the country being invaded is democratic and holds elections during wartime, this decision would even have collective approval from citizens, since they’d regularly vote on whether to continue their defensive war or change to a government more willing to surrender to the invaders.)
There’s some force to this—but in most cases only a minority of citizens are at risk of conscription. This is usually true on demographics alone—e.g., men 25-60 in Ukraine, significantly narrower in 20th century US conscriptions—and then is narrowed down further. A fair number of people who are demographically eligible know they would have discretionary exemptions or mandatory exclusions (e.g., based on disability, occupation, single parenthood, etc.). Those who would reap the benefits of not surrendering to invaders, but would not personally bear the costs of conscription, would be incentivized to vote for more than the optimal amount of conscription (and for undercompensating those who were conscripted).
[content warning: buncha rambly thoughts that might not make much sense]
certainly—see my bit about how my preferred solution would be to run a volunteer army even if that takes ruinously high taxes on the rest of the population. (The United States, to its credit, has indeed run an all-volunteer army ever since the end of the Vietnam War in 1973! But having an immense population makes this relatively easy; smaller countries face sharper trade-offs and tend to orient more towards conscription. See for instance the fact that Russia’s army is less reliant on conscripts than Ukraine’s.)
but also, almost every policy in society has unequal benefits, perhaps helping a small group at the expense of more diffuse harm to a larger group, or vice versa. For example, greater investment in bike lanes and public transit (at the expense of simply building more roads) helps cyclists and public-transit users at the expense of car-drivers. Using taxes to fund a public-school system is basically ripping off people who don’t have children and subsidizing those that do; et cetera. at some point, instead of trying to make sure that every policy comes out even for everyone involved, you have to just kind of throw up your hands, hope that different policies pointing in different directions even out in the end, and rely on some sense of individual willingness to sacrifice for the common good to smooth over the asymmetries.
One could similarly say it’s unfair that residents of Lviv (who are very far from the Ukranian front line, and would almost certainly remain part of a Ukrainian “rump state” even in the case of dramatic eventual Russian victory) are being asked to make large sacrifices for the defense of faraway eastern Ukraine. (And why are residents of southeastern Poland, so near to Lviv, asked to sacrifice so much less than their neighbors?!)
Perhaps there is some galaxy-brained solution to problems like this, where all of Europe (or all of Ukraine’s allies, globally) could optimally tax themselves some fractional percent in accordance with how near or far they are to Ukraine itself? Or one could be even more idealistic and imagine a unified coalition of allies where everyone decides centrally which wars to support and then contributes resources evenly to that end (such that the armies in eastern Ukraine would have a proportionate number of frenchmen, americans, etc). But in practice nobody has figured out how a scheme like that would possibly work, or why countries would be motivated to adopt it, how it could be credibly fair and neutral and immune to various abuses, etc.
Another weakness to the idea of democratic feedback is simply that it isn’t very powerful—every couple of years you get essentially a binary choice between the leading two coalitions, so you can do a reasonably good job expressing your opinion on whatever is considered the #1 issue of the day, but it’s very hard to express nuanced views on multiple issues through the use of just one vote. So, in this sense, democracy isn’t really a guarantee of representation across many issues, so much as a safety valve that will hopefully fix problems one-by-one as they rise to the position of #1 most-egregiously-wrong-thing in society.
I think that today’s “liberal democracy” is pretty far from some kind of ethically ideal world with optimally representative governance (or optimally pursuing-the-welfare-of-the-population governance, which might be a totally different system)! Whatever is the ideal system of optimal governance, it would probably seem pretty alien to us, perhaps extremely convoluted in parts (like the complicated mechanisms for Venice selecting the Doge) and overly-financialized in certain ways (insofar as it might rely on weird market-like mechanisms to process information).
But conscription doesn’t stand out to me as being especially worse than other policy issues that are similarly unfair in this regard (maybe it’s higher-stakes than those other issues, but it’s similar in kind) -- it’s a little unfair and inelegant and kind of a blunt instrument, just like all of our policies are in this busted world where nations are merely operating with “the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried”.
There’s some force to this—but in most cases only a minority of citizens are at risk of conscription. This is usually true on demographics alone—e.g., men 25-60 in Ukraine, significantly narrower in 20th century US conscriptions—and then is narrowed down further. A fair number of people who are demographically eligible know they would have discretionary exemptions or mandatory exclusions (e.g., based on disability, occupation, single parenthood, etc.). Those who would reap the benefits of not surrendering to invaders, but would not personally bear the costs of conscription, would be incentivized to vote for more than the optimal amount of conscription (and for undercompensating those who were conscripted).
[content warning: buncha rambly thoughts that might not make much sense]
certainly—see my bit about how my preferred solution would be to run a volunteer army even if that takes ruinously high taxes on the rest of the population. (The United States, to its credit, has indeed run an all-volunteer army ever since the end of the Vietnam War in 1973! But having an immense population makes this relatively easy; smaller countries face sharper trade-offs and tend to orient more towards conscription. See for instance the fact that Russia’s army is less reliant on conscripts than Ukraine’s.)
but also, almost every policy in society has unequal benefits, perhaps helping a small group at the expense of more diffuse harm to a larger group, or vice versa. For example, greater investment in bike lanes and public transit (at the expense of simply building more roads) helps cyclists and public-transit users at the expense of car-drivers. Using taxes to fund a public-school system is basically ripping off people who don’t have children and subsidizing those that do; et cetera. at some point, instead of trying to make sure that every policy comes out even for everyone involved, you have to just kind of throw up your hands, hope that different policies pointing in different directions even out in the end, and rely on some sense of individual willingness to sacrifice for the common good to smooth over the asymmetries.
One could similarly say it’s unfair that residents of Lviv (who are very far from the Ukranian front line, and would almost certainly remain part of a Ukrainian “rump state” even in the case of dramatic eventual Russian victory) are being asked to make large sacrifices for the defense of faraway eastern Ukraine. (And why are residents of southeastern Poland, so near to Lviv, asked to sacrifice so much less than their neighbors?!)
Perhaps there is some galaxy-brained solution to problems like this, where all of Europe (or all of Ukraine’s allies, globally) could optimally tax themselves some fractional percent in accordance with how near or far they are to Ukraine itself? Or one could be even more idealistic and imagine a unified coalition of allies where everyone decides centrally which wars to support and then contributes resources evenly to that end (such that the armies in eastern Ukraine would have a proportionate number of frenchmen, americans, etc). But in practice nobody has figured out how a scheme like that would possibly work, or why countries would be motivated to adopt it, how it could be credibly fair and neutral and immune to various abuses, etc.
Another weakness to the idea of democratic feedback is simply that it isn’t very powerful—every couple of years you get essentially a binary choice between the leading two coalitions, so you can do a reasonably good job expressing your opinion on whatever is considered the #1 issue of the day, but it’s very hard to express nuanced views on multiple issues through the use of just one vote. So, in this sense, democracy isn’t really a guarantee of representation across many issues, so much as a safety valve that will hopefully fix problems one-by-one as they rise to the position of #1 most-egregiously-wrong-thing in society.
I think that today’s “liberal democracy” is pretty far from some kind of ethically ideal world with optimally representative governance (or optimally pursuing-the-welfare-of-the-population governance, which might be a totally different system)! Whatever is the ideal system of optimal governance, it would probably seem pretty alien to us, perhaps extremely convoluted in parts (like the complicated mechanisms for Venice selecting the Doge) and overly-financialized in certain ways (insofar as it might rely on weird market-like mechanisms to process information).
But conscription doesn’t stand out to me as being especially worse than other policy issues that are similarly unfair in this regard (maybe it’s higher-stakes than those other issues, but it’s similar in kind) -- it’s a little unfair and inelegant and kind of a blunt instrument, just like all of our policies are in this busted world where nations are merely operating with “the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried”.