XV explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Individual Natural Rights

  The chapter asserts the primacy of individual conscience and judgment over government commands, arguing that a soldier cannot morally surrender his right to decide on the justice of killing.

• Constitution as Dead Contract

  The argument that the United States is not a legitimate corporation or nation implies that the constitutional compact is void, and thus oaths to it are meaningless.

Characters to notice

• a man

  The soldier who takes the oath, whose judgment and conscience are overridden by the command to kill.

• Unknown

  The speaker or authorial voice presenting the argument against the legitimacy of oaths.

Key passages

• “Independently of the criminality of an oath, that, for a given number of years, he will kill all whom he may be commanded to kill, without exercising his own judgment or conscience as to the justice or necessity of such killing, there is this further reason why a soldier’s oath is of no obligation, viz. that, like all the other oaths that have now been mentioned, it is given to nobody.”

  Beyond the inherent wrongness of swearing to kill on command without moral reflection, a soldier's oath is void because it is made to a non-existent entity.

  The core argument: oaths to an illegitimate government are contracts with no counterparty.