ratio between risk and monetary expense, and the value of an individual life. For example, recent public debates in Israel have centered on whether all soldiers need bulletproof vests, and whether the defensive materials used on transportation vehicles need to be of the best quality available. How high a price to pay for the return of a captured soldier is another controversial deliberation. Yet conscience and moral good are not negotiated in the same way. Conscience is thought of in absolute terms. The state cannot directly ask a citizen, even a soldier, to do something they have already concluded is wrong. Likewise, although giving one’s life for the state is considered the ultimate sacrifice, going against one’s conscience for the state is not similarly esteemed.
How did conscience come to acquire such protections against the normative expectations requiring sacrifice? Some anthropologists have recently suggested ethics as a productive anthropological category. They note that, worldwide, people have varied ethical traditions concerning how to do the “right thing,” that is, on the rules and norms that govern social interactions. Conscience is an ethical idea that developed and became important in Europe and in the Western tradition. It came to be considered one of the truest and most authentic forms through which an individual could take a stance in society. Conscience is the idea of an internal faculty that judges our actions and informs us of its conclusions through feelings of guilt, shame, purity, and innocence. The modern meaning of conscience incorporates a sense of an individual ethical regulator, and that the dictates of conscience require the individual to privilege these imperatives above other social obligations. As a result, when someone testifies or witnesses to their conscience, there is public recognition that it is authentic and compulsory, despite the lack of other evidence. Conscience has become a powerful idea that is simultaneously a way through which some people experience and understand their ethical encounters, and a cultural symbol and rationality through which people explain their actions to their community. A long-term interaction of intellectual thought and popular culture has contributed to the high cultural reverence for conscience. From Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment to the film Blade Runner, to dramatic acts of political protest, conscience has been reinforced as a cultural value with new idioms in each generation. Jewish thinkers, steeped in European philosophical traditions, have contributed greatly to this tradition as well. Among those who developed the idea of conscience and contributed to its current importance are Baruch Spinoza, Hannah Arendt, Michael Walzer, Emmanuel Levinas, and Judith Butler. The value of conscience followed Israel’s European founders into the state’s institutions and laws. However, not everyone in Israel is equally steeped in this European tradition; we will see that influence of conscience is uneven.3
Wendy Brown (2008) cites liberal tolerance as an outcome of early European religious wars that ultimately separated political and religious authority in the West. When the idea of universal rights emerged in the human rights framework, conscience was a category thought worthy of protection. Ideas of human rights were formalized after World War II in the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With this declaration, conscience evolved from a peculiar Western European belief about the relationship between consciousness and ethics to a sanctified and universal human attribute requiring protection. Human rights discourse has gained hegemonic status, and its verdicts on a given state’s protections for conscience (most often concerning political prisoners) can contribute to that state’s global reputation as a liberal democracy or an oppressive regime. Despite Israel’s sometimes-contentious relationship with the United Nations, and the not-infrequent claims of human rights violations lodged against the state, human rights remain of great importance in Israel. The significance of human rights is part of the historical and institutional legacy of being a somewhat deviant branch of the European colonial project, as well as Israel’s self-understanding as a rights-oriented democracy. This understanding is used to make claims about the legitimacy of the state, and to offer a favorable comparison vis-à-vis the other countries in the Middle East, which receive worse human rights reports, especially regarding women, homosexuality, and political dissent.
Conscientious objectors find themselves neither here nor there. Having balked at the entailments of religious and ethnic affiliation, their dissent is considered a betrayal by most of Jewish Israeli society. Yet they are not at home, in security or culture, with Palestinians. Their attempts to do the right thing are often frustrated in the midst of social encounters not with a single other, but with many others (Jewish others as well as Palestinian), all of whom make incompatible demands. They find that responsiveness to one responsibility often means the betrayal of another. We will see that they also cannot rest in the satisfaction that their decision was correct. Rather, they are constantly pulled to “give account” (Keane 2010) of their actions and gain the acceptance of their society through public confessions and testimonies and through appeals to military and government institutions for recognition.
The task of giving account is made especially difficult by forces and intellectual genealogies beyond their control. Their claims that conscience motivates their actions sometimes make their acts of dissent somewhat palatable in Israeli society. Yet the historical process through which conscience acquired its protected status prevents conscientious objectors from fully translating this conscience into political activism. Conscience once meant shared knowledge, making you an ideal witness in court. The genealogy of conscience has been traced to older understandings of conscience in Greek literature, such as syneidesis, which is the awareness of something. The Latin conscientia had similar connotations. Scholars in the Middle Ages used both nearly interchangeably for some time. Historian Anders Schinkel has meticulously traced the slow separation, during which conscience took on connotations of being a private inner ethical faculty as opposed to a form of public knowledge (2007).
The move to “witnessing” to conscience in the way we now understand it, as an inner belief, began to take place in the life and times of Thomas Hobbes, some four hundred years ago. Hobbes was less than smitten with this transformation in the meaning and found numerous problems in its application. He claimed that the new meaning of conscience was only self-witnessing, and as such unreliable, yet it maintained the old connotation of witnessing to a fact, and the inviolability that goes along with knowledge that is shared and verifiable. Hobbes suggested that the term opinion was more appropriate to such subjective positions (Andrew 2001: 69).
And last of all, men, vehemently in love with their own new opinions, though never so absurd, and obstinately bent to maintain them, gave those opinions also that reverenced the name of conscience as if they would have it seem unlawful, to change or speak against them; and so pretend to know that they are true, when they know at most, but that they think so … for one man calleth wisdom, what another calleth fear; and one cruelty, what another justice. (Hobbes 1985: 53, 29)
This detachment of individual conscience from collective ethical norms has remained an issue ever since and infuses current human rights claims of freedom of conscience. In many ways, the demise of the public, factual nature of conscience and the eventual dominance of inspirational authority over verifiable evidence is fundamental to the conflict surrounding conscientious objection in Israel today. For one, claims of conscientious objection face evidentiary challenges in the social realm of law. Though conscience is articulated as an utterly personal phenomenon (which cannot be judged by others), such an expectation is socially futile. Policy cannot be structured without normative cultural limits. So, even with the concerted efforts of the Israeli state to offer protection of conscience, those seeking to refuse military service must still convince Israeli society that their refusal is a legitimate matter of conscience. But how can one prove one’s conscience to society? This is the question faced by Israeli pacifists who apply for exemption from military service through the Israeli military Conscience Committee. Departure from ethical norms raises questions about the limits of conscientious claims, which are still subject to social negotiation despite the relativist discourse of conscience. Emile Durkheim recognized that the moral is social, and that the construction of moral orders is mediated by collectives and by individuals engaged in their social worlds. As such, the private and public meanings of conscience are always mutually implicated. As one Israeli military prosecutor told me regarding cases of conscientious objection, “No one wants to give rights to a truly perverse conscience.” In their
