Ontology and Conditions of Operability of Conscientious Objection

Abstract

This essay aims to investigate, analyze, and consider the way of being and the conditions of operability of conscientious objection, whose importance lies in the conflict—sometimes very dramatic—between the legal normativity that imposes an action and the ethical or moral normativity that opposes precisely that action, not to mention a certain institutional incontinence of political power, which, in recent times, has invaded numerous border fields of human conscience, imposing values that do not always align with the normative demands proper and essential to human nature, when not directly contradicting them.

In the following lines, we will outline the history and concept of conscientious objection, as well as the most elementary categories involved—political power, conscience, freedom, ethics, practical truth, democracy, pluralism, legality, and the common good—and, from them, seek to clarify the horizons of knowledge on the subject of the importance of the right to conscientious objection, to bring forth the tensions between the political and personal spheres, to raise the limits of the action of one and the other, and, finally, to unveil the cooperative bonds between such existential spheres, in favor of the pursuit of the conditions of operability of conscientious objection.