Tuukka Korpinen’s thesis examines how armed forces can be ethically organized. Rather than treating military recruitment as a purely practical question, the paper analyzes conscription, professional armies, private military organizations, and hybrid models through the lenses of just war theory, distributive justice, soldiers’ consent, and James Pattison’s cumulative moderate instrumentalism. Korpinen argues that the ethical legitimacy of armed forces depends not only on whether the wars they fight are just, but also on how military burdens are distributed, whether soldiers’ participation is genuinely voluntary, and whether the armed forces are effective enough to serve justified defensive purposes.

Korpinen conducts some interesting applications of the forms of organising armed forces to the major currents of military philosophical thought.

Firstly, he applies the mode of organisation of armed forces to the just war theory framework and postulates that:

“The following dependence relations may hold between organization and the justification of war:

1. Armed forces are organized justifiably only if the war is fought in a justified manner in bello.
2. A war is justified ad bellum [just justification of war] only if the armed forces are justified.
3. A war is justified in bello [just conduct of war] only if the armed forces are justified.
4. Armed forces are organized justifiably only if the war they fight is justified ad bellum.

(…) According to the second dependence condition, the armed forces must be assembled in a justified way in order for them to be able to fight in a justified way. (…) If the conditions were correct, just war theories would have to take the question of organization into account more ambitiously.”

He also applies the issue of conscription to theories of distributive justice, since there are considerable questions of resource allocation in military service. In the case of luck egalitarianism no one should be placed in an unequal position on the basis of brute luck. And so:

“Semi-voluntary and voluntary ways of organizing armed forces are largely based on option luck, and would therefore create an acceptable basis for treating civilians and soldiers differently. (…) Universal conscription also appears at first sight to be fairly compatible with luck egalitarianism, because conscription would apply to all members of society. From the perspective of luck egalitarianism, however, this solution has a few central problems. Members of society have not chosen to belong to a society that requires conscription, which means that the citizens of one country are in an unequal position in relation to the citizens of other countries. Secondly, it can be questioned whether treating members of society in the same way regardless of their preferences is genuinely luck egalitarian. Some citizens may enjoy military work, whereas for others it is especially unpleasant. The problem corresponds to the controversial problem of expensive tastes in luck egalitarianism. (…) luck egalitarianism can clearly justify certain exemptions from conscription as compensation for inequality caused by brute luck.”

This is of course all good and well in the case of abstract concept of universal conscription. Yet in practice forced military service is severy unjust even under such theories of justice. It is deeply unequal: it concentrates the burden of national defence on a narrow slice of society, typically young men, who are compelled to make a disproportionate sacrifice for everyone else, often without fair compensation. A more equitable approach is to pay service members properly and fund defence through broad-based taxation, so the costs are shared by society as a whole.

In most conscription systems, half the population is excluded on the basis of gender, and many others are excused through a mix of legitimate and illegitimate exemptions or uneven enforcement. The result is not “shared duty,” but selective coercion, which hits the hardest those who are the most powerless. This counter is of course presciently foreseen by Korpinen in the part where he distinguish theories of distributive justice from so-called formal equality.

Another philosophical framework Korpinen analyses is Nathan’s Stout consent argument.

“According to Stout, the wrongness of the situation results from disregarding the morally valuable autonomy of individuals. In defense of autonomy, Stout formulates the consent argument, according to which armed forces should, as a starting point, have the consent of their members in order to be justified. If armed forces lack the consent of their members, they have generally not been organized in a morally justified way (Stout 2016, 2–3).

The consent argument:

(P1) It is prima facie unjust to place another person in a life-threatening situation without their consent.

(P2) If a state participates in war, it endangers the lives of the members of its armed forces.

(P3) If the members of a state’s armed forces do not consent to the war, the armed forces endanger the lives of their members without consent.

(C4) Therefore, it is prima facie unjust for a state to participate in war without the consent of the members of its armed forces.

(…) The consent argument therefore requires at least the following of organization:

Principles of consent:

1. It is prima facie unjust to organize armed forces without the consent of their soldiers.
2. The quality of soldiers’ consent and the conditions under which consent is given have moral significance.
3. Society has a prima facie duty to seek to organize armed forces consensually.

Lastly Korpinen undertakes the theory of cumulative moderate instrumentalism, which can be used to evaluate the moral justification of armed forces.

“According to the theory, armed forces are organized justifiably if their mode of organization contains a sufficient number of valuable factors. (…) These are: 1. the effectiveness of armed forces, 2. democratic control, 3. the proper treatment of members of the armed forces, and 4. the effect of organization on relations between citizens. (…) According to Pattison, the moral foundation of the justification of armed forces is their instrumental value in protecting people’s basic rights. Human rights, in turn, are the morally intrinsically valuable thing that armed forces defend.”

Kropinen then assesses each model according to each philosophical doctrine.

Finnish and Danish selective conscription is then clearly unjust on the basis of the first principle of egalitarianism, as they are organized on the basis of brute luck. Conscripts are treated unequally based on gender or lottery luck. He also finds that the models do not satisfy the second principle of egalitarianism, not producing or maintaining oppressive social hierarchies.

“Both models treat people unequally on the basis of gender, and thereby maintain a non-egalitarian sexist ideology. The financial circumstances of Finnish conscripts may also possibly be regarded as an oppressive hierarchy.”

Just as unjust are both models, under the consent argument, although the Danish model tries to foster a voluntary component.

The entire thesis is available in Finnish below:

Korpinen, Tuukka. “Asevoimien järjestäminen: Eettisesti oikeutetut asevoimat” [Organizing the Armed Forces: Ethically Justified Armed Forces]. Master’s thesis, Tampere University, 2026. https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/237901/KorpinenTuukka_PDFA.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

Abstract: “In this thesis, I examine the question of how armed forces should be organized from the perspectives of just war theory, distributive justice, soldiers’ consent, and cumulative moderate instrumentalism. Cumulative moderate instrumentalism is a comprehensive theory of the justification of military organization introduced by James Pattison in his 2014 book The Morality of Private War: The Challenge of Private Military and Security Companies.

In my thesis, I argue that just war theory has a significant impact on the question of military organization. By contrast, the question of organization can affect the justification of war only to a limited extent. I also present four dependency conditions concerning the justification of war and military organization, which make it possible to classify different ways of understanding the relationship between military organization and the justification of war.

In addition, I argue that forms of organization based on choice luck involve fewer ethical problems than forms of organization based on brute luck. I claim that voluntary forms of organization are, as a starting point, more egalitarian than coercive forms of organization. However, voluntary forms of organization also have shortcomings that must be addressed, such as the abandonment problem, the problem of genuine consent, and insufficient effectiveness.

According to my thesis, the most justified form of organization is the Nordic-style conscription model developed by Mathias Saghdal. Nordic-style conscription is, in principle, a voluntary way of organizing the armed forces, which increases the use of coercive measures if the quota of volunteers is not met. In certain situations, however, Nordic-style conscription must make an ethically difficult choice between using a lottery and obligating the most capable individuals”