Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in a press conference on October 3, announced that he would be prepared to fight an election over the issue of Canada’s military deployment to Afghanistan. During that press conference, he cited as justification for the ongoing policy a moral obligation: “We have the responsibility to honour and respect their sacrifices,” he said, “they” being the 71 Canadian soldiers who have been killed in Afghanistan thus far.

But do we? As moral obligations go, honouring the sacrifices of soldiers by perpetuating the war they died in is no A-list obligation on the level of “Don’t murder” and “Don’t steal.” It is by no means a self-evident moral obligation humans are born with either, such as “Honour your parents” might be. Also, it contains an imperative, whether implied or stated explicitly, to support a particular and by no means unarguable political point of view to support a war about which there is a real choice not to.

Is there a choice?

Other moral obligations don’t specify a particular political choice that is favoured by their observance. “Avoid hurting others” is a moral obligation, for example, that doesn’t call for a particular policy among a range of political choices. That is, there is no valid political choice that calls on people to hurt others by intent. But “Honour the sacrifice of your fallen soldiers” undeniably means “Politically support the continuation of the war in which those soldiers have died,” and this imperative is in reality a choice. One may entertain a perfectly valid political point of view that calls for ending a war, and since the imperative to support the war is so closely tied to the stated moral obligation to honour the fallen soldiers, it becomes therefore a perfectly valid point of view to call on people to not honour the fallen soldiers. Since there is choice in the matter, “Honour our fallen soldiers,” far from being an A-list moral obligation, is no moral obligation at all.

It is therefore possible to choose not to honour our fallen soldiers and still maintain moral standing. Even conscripted soldiers grabbed off the street, stuffed in a uniform and shoved out into the front on pain of being shot for retreating are not necessarily due any honour for their sacrifice. Here, the question has to do with whether or not there was a genuine sacrifice. In this case, it wasn’t the conscripted soldiers’ sacrifice, it was their superiors’ sacrifice. To sacrifice oneself for a cause is to choose to serve that cause without regard for one’s own interests. A father chooses to sacrifice his Saturday morning for his child’s soccer game, or a hero chooses to jump into a river to rescue a car driver who is sinking to their death. But if there is no choice, the individual cannot be sacrificing anything. A person killed through no choice of their own is a person murdered. The sacrifice is that of the person with the choice, and in the case of a conscript killed in war, it is the first person going up the chain of command who actually had a choice—the conscript’s commander, or the general, or whoever further up it us.

What is a sacrifice?

Choice as an integral part of sacrifice is no small matter. The point has been argued for centuries in Christian ecclesiastical circles because of the confusion over whether the figure of Jesus actually had a choice between the time capital punishment appeared as a real possibility for him, and his actual nailing to the cross. If he had no choice—if the whole passion was the handiwork of God—then his crucifixion could not be characterized as a sacrifice by Jesus himself, only a sacrifice by God of his son. But if Jesus had a choice, that would mean God’s will could be overridden, and that would mean Jesus must have been at least partly human, since any internal debate within his head about a choice to make would mean less than wholehearted endorsement of God’s will expressed through him. This point, however, would throw into suspicion the entire role of the bureaucratic Church in the matter of man’s relationship to the divine.

Does the volunteer soldier, by contrast, deserve honour, then, for his sacrifice? The word “volunteer” in the context of armies doesn’t mean what it means in most other contexts: it’s not that the soldier isn’t paid (volunteer soldiers are all paid professionals), it only means that they weren’t conscripted, and thus had a choice about joining the army. On first glance then, it might seem the volunteer soldier does deserve honour, much the way the hero who chooses to jump in the river to save a drowning person does. But there is an obscene result if we accord honour to a volunteer soldier that we withhold from a conscripted soldier, who is by far the more tragic case.

But here again, a closer look at the details of what a volunteer soldier is sacrificing clears up the contradiction. The typical volunteer soldier does not intend to die on the field, and by no means has in mind to risk his life. He isn’t even intending to sacrifice his time: he is paid, after all, and whether or not he is paid enough is a matter for him to decide the same way all of us decide on whether to accept a certain level of recompense for any job we consider taking that asks of us our time and expertise. In the field and under fire, our Canadian soldiers’ first task is to protect the lives of each other. If they can avoid undue risk of death to themselves and their brothers-in-arms, they will.

The real hero

This is distinctly unlike the hero who jumps in the river to save a person drowning. Here, the hero has chosen to expose himself to greater risk than he would experience if he stayed on shore. The only event that is similar for the volunteer soldier is when a brother-in-arms is at risk of imminent death and the soldier engages in a heroic act in the field to save him. But of course this is part and parcel of the soldiers’ job description. In this apparently heroic act, he in fact has no choice. Failing to act to save a brother-in-arms at risk of death carries a potentially serious penalty. A genuine sacrifice requires that there be a real choice in the matter, that the person doing the sacrificing was in a position to choose to do so. Otherwise, the sacrifice is not that of the person doing the act, who is only a victim, but belongs to his superiors who made choices to put the soldiers in a position of risk with rules stipulating they must rescue each other from imminent death that may result.

So the dead volunteer soldier has sacrificed nothing, he is only the unwilling victim of a mistake or a tragedy. This is a harsh truth, too harsh for any political leader or mainstream media commentator to speak about since the family of the fallen soldier would naturally prefer to grieve the honourable sacrifice of their heroic son rather than the meaningless tragic death of their victimized son. But, however hard it might be for parents of fallen soldiers to accept this, this is by far the majority experience for all parents who outlive their children. Hardly no one else who watches their own child die is offered the option of grieving the passing as an honourable sacrifice, so why are we compelled to extend the courtesy, the lie really, to parents of volunteer soldiers killed in action? Does the Prime Minister go out of his way to reassure the parents of a motorcycle accident victim that their son, despite appearances, sacrificed himself honourably against the light post along the highway? No, of course not. Death is tragic and there is no way around that. But death alone does not speak of honour and sacrifice. Nor does anyone’s death by itself burden us all with the responsibility of a moral obligation stemming from it.

Who had the choice?

Since sacrifice requires choice, in any death, we must go back through the causal chain to find where genuine choices lay that lead to the death in question. In the case of deaths of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, the only person with choice in the matter is the Prime Minister himself. And so those deaths are his sacrifice. When he says, “We have the responsibility to honour and respect their sacrifices,” it is his own choices that he is commanding us to honour and respect, for the only person who continues to genuinely sacrifice the blood of Canadians in Afghanistan is him.

There surely is no moral obligation to honour and respect the political choices of a partisan Prime Minister. In a democracy, the moral obligation of citizens is in fact exactly the opposite: we have a moral obligation to question and test the policies of a Prime Minister, and in fact we do grave disservice to our moral compass by blindly honouring and respecting them.

Naturally the Prime Minister would find responsibility for the deaths of all Canadian soldiers too much to bear alone. This is why he seeks to share the burden with us all by perpetuating the myth that all Canadians share his moral obligation, as he tried to argue in his press conference earlier this month. But we don’t. He wears all the blood himself alone because he is the only one who has the choice.