Hiroshima was moral
I’m sure this will want a new thread, but I don’t know how to do that properly, but maybe this will be really quick. Can you give me your rationale for that, I’m intruiged.
The killing of civilians is morally necessary in times of war. If we hadn’t dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, countless American lives would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. The blood of the innocent was on the Emperor’s hands, not America’s.
I don’t think it is really appropriate to call Japanese citizens innocent. They were powering the Japanese war machine, and would have fought directly themselves if we had invaded the mainland.
But, certainly, in a city of over 100,000 people, there were some who were truly innocent. Children, for example. The bombing was still moral, but I don’t doubt that some people who were killed were innocent. I’m just saying that the blood of those people was on the Emperor’s hands, not America’s.
The question of Hiroshima’s bombing sort of begs the question, by assuming that morality is relevant in the first place. Morality pertains to free choices, rational decisions that are made in order to live: morality is not a purposeless abstraction. When coersion is applied, questions of morality have to be understood with full recognition that man’s nature (his rationality) has been denied, so it makes not exactly a lot of sense to ask “So in the context where man cannot act according to his nature, how can man act according to his nature?”.
That said, it would be wrong to use nukes to stop a bank robber, smugly consoling yourself (as the bomb-dropper) that the deaths of thousands of innocents is the fault of the bank robber. Vastly less destructive means of stopping the robber are still guaranteed to stop him. So the proper question on the Hiroshima matter is, in the context of what was known at the time, was there any alternative course of action that would have ended the war, without killing more Allied troops. There is no reason whatsover to believe that such an alternative existed. For that reason, the decision to end the war quickly was moral.
“Morality pertains to free choices, rational decisions that are made in order to live: morality is not a purposeless abstraction. When coersion is applied, questions of morality have to be understood with full recognition that man’s nature (his rationality) has been denied, so it makes not exactly a lot of sense to ask “So in the context where man cannot act according to his nature, how can man act according to his nature?”.”
Am I incorrect in thinking that you are saying that if one is under coercion then one’s actions are not subject to ethical evaluation?
Am I incorrect in thinking that you are saying that if one is under coercion then one’s actions are not subject to ethical evaluation?
I have a rule about answering questions with negatives. In answer to the question “Are you saying that actions undertaken under coersion cannot be evaluated”, I must say “no”. They can (and thus must) be evaluated, but the standards are different. Under coersion, the standard is basically that there is no rational understanding of the situation that supports the conclusion that the action is life-supporting. Tomorrow I may figure out if you were correct or incorrect in what you were thinking, given what I believe (which I hope I’ve made clear).
“They can (and thus must) be evaluated, but the standards are different.”
That is eminently reasonable.
But this is not clear to me:
“Under coersion, the standard is basically that there is no rational understanding of the situation that supports the conclusion that the action is life-supporting.”
In this context, if rational understanding is impossible, then how is rational ethical judgment possible? Also, is ‘life supporting action’ different from ‘ethical action’?
If a person is under coercion, then his actions cannot be judged as if he weren’t under coercion. But his actions can still be judged by standards of ethical action in situations of coercion, which are different standards than those of ethical action in uncoerced situations. Right?
But do you agree that there are degrees of coerciveness? A gun pointed at my head is more coercive than a fraud against me for the value of a penny. So a good ethical theory would take that into account when evaluating standards to be applied in different situations of coercion. Unless the coerced subject had no possible exercise of will, then exercises of will, even under coercion will be evaluated, but, as we agree, under a different standard. And standards have to reflect the degrees of coercion.
Why do you say that there is no rational understanding of such situations? The situations exist, and we agree that ethical evaluations apply, so I would think that these are rational ethical evaluations.
“[…] it makes not exactly a lot of sense to ask “So in the context where man cannot act according to his nature, how can man act according to his nature?”.”
Only if every single exercise of will were blocked would one’s freedom be completely absent, so even in situations in which one’s freedom is severely denied, one’s actions are subject to ethical review. For example, if I’ve been unjustly imprisoned, then my actions in prison (e.g., how I treat other prisoners, some of them also having been unjustly imprisoned) are subject to ethical judgment. And these judments are not irrational. Even in terms of denial of nature, one can under coercion choose to do certain things that are more life-enhancing or less life-enhancing, more ethically selfish or less ethically selfish, or more ethical or less ethical no matter what the fundamental ethical principle.
“Vastly less destructive means of stopping the robber [than dropping a bomb on a city] are still guaranteed to stop him.”
But if there were no such means, then it would still be wrong to drop the bomb instead of letting the robber escape. Even less unrealistic: Suppose the only way to stop a robber (even someone who just murdered) were to take shots into a crowd that have a good chance of striking bystanders. It would be unethical to take the shots. Further, though one might disagree, unless there is possible harm in the immediate situation, it is probably a prevalent view that it is unethical to shoot even the escaping robber himself (murder suspect, though, is different, and depends on many particulars).
But, certainly, in a city of over 100,000 people, there were some who were truly innocent. Children, for example. The bombing was still moral, but I don’t doubt that some people who were killed were innocent. I’m just saying that the blood of those people was on the Emperor’s hands, not America’s.
Can you make that argument from an Objectivist perspective? Because these quotes from Rand give me confidence in my pre-Objectivist belief that many acts of war, including Hiroshima and (especially) Nagasaki were/are immoral.
A: “In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.”[1]
B: “Let no man of good will take it upon his conscience to advocate the rule of force - outside or inside his own country.”[2]
C: “Remember that private citizens - whether rich or poor, whether businessmen or workers - have no power to start a war. That power is the exclusive prerogative of a government.”[2]
C says that the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have no power to start (initiate) a war. A says that force may only be used against those that initiate its use. B makes it clear that Rand does not accept that internal and external to one’s country is a contextual difference regarding the morality of the rule of force.
[1] The Nature of Government, The Virtual of Selfishness.
[2] The Roots of War, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Also thanks to softwareNerd for starting this thread for me, but the thread title I would have chosen would have made no distinction on the type of weapon used. Nuclear bomb or club, killing is killing. It is the indiscriminateness of these particular bombings that inarguably killed many innocent civillians that interests me in talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not their nuclearness.
As a side note, assuming someone can convince me of the morality of the Hiroshima bombing, then I’m also interested in the morality of the subsequent Nagasaki bombing.
But this is not clear to me:
“Under coersion, the standard is basically that there is no rational understanding of the situation that supports the conclusion that the action is life-supporting.”
In this context, if rational understanding is impossible, then how is rational ethical judgment possible? Also, is ‘life supporting action’ different from ‘ethical action’?
A brief response, to clear up one point, and I’ll come back to the other points pater. My answer wasn’t clear: what I mean is that in evaluating a person’s choice when they are being coerced, the burden of proof is significantly changed. You make choices based on your knowledge, and that context very much influences the morality of the decision. If you are buying a non-functioning violin from me, and I come to realise that you do not understand that this is a non-functioning violin, then it would be immoral for me to procede with the sale without alerting you. So moral evaluation requires an element of inference: did I know that you were ignorant of the nature of the violin? If so, I should be morally disvalued. What we do not want to engage in is automatic rationalization, where immoral acts are excluded by inventing arbitrary excuses.
In the situation where a person is being coerced, you should grant much wider latitude in the implicit knowledge context. Thus a person who has a bit of martial arts training might still not know with absolute certainty that he can defend himself against an attack with less than deadly force. In deciding “Should he have used his fists, or the gun?”, you must grant lenity to the man using the gun, because it is reasonable to assume that the fists would be ineffective. Given a choice between an H-bomb vs. a shotgun as a means of stopping a bank-robber (and here I’m not speaking of some mythical super-bank robber with a force field to protect him, I mean the standard guy with a ski mask), it is not rational to presume that the shotgun might be ineffective (thus compelling the use of the H-bomb). It would be nothing better than pure rationalism to say “The only way to stop the robber is with an H-bomb: the moral fault for the tens of thousands of deaths lies with the robber”. Indeed, some moral blame lies with the robber, but in a case where there unquestionably is a less-deadly but equally certain choice, it is not rational to say that the most deadly choice is required.
Can you make that argument from an Objectivist perspective? Because these quotes from Rand give me confidence in my pre-Objectivist belief that many acts of war, including Hiroshima and (especially) Nagasaki were/are immoral.
Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, saved millions of Japanese lives along with thousands of American lives. Think about what would have happened if the big bombs had not been dropped, the islands would have been blockaded by US naval ships, leading to mass starvation of the Japanese population. A larger overal tonnage of “TNT” would have been dropped on heavier populated areas (e.g. thousands of smaller bombs over Tokyo), not to mention all the lives lost when US soldiers finally invaded on foot.
Dropping the atomic bombs destroyed the Japanese will to fight, the necessary condition of winning a war. You can’t judge the morality of war in the same context as peacetime. The only moral way to wage war is to end it as quickly and efficiently as possible, sparing as many lives on your own side as you possibly can.
Can you make that argument from an Objectivist perspective? Because these quotes from Rand give me confidence in my pre-Objectivist belief that many acts of war, including Hiroshima and (especially) Nagasaki were/are immoral.
A: “In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.”[1]
Read Moose’s statement again. The blood of the innocent was on the Emperor’s hands, meaning that it was the Japanese government that was initiating force on the 6th and 9th of August. To suggest that America was morally responsible for those deaths, when she was engaging in self-defense (and her only alternative was to sacrifice thousands of her own troops), is a terrible example of blame-the-victim.
Too many amateurs (myself included) have taken one of Ayn Rand’s quotes and applied it literally and without context. Taking into consideration the circumstances, the ARI position follows that rule you quoted to the letter.
A: “In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.”
Japan was not a civilized society.
B: “Let no man of good will take it upon his conscience to advocate the rule of force - outside or inside his own country.”
It was Japan that was advancing the rule of force. The U.S. was stopping the war.
C: “Remember that private citizens - whether rich or poor, whether businessmen or workers - have no power to start a war. That power is the exclusive prerogative of a government.”
C says that the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have no power to start (initiate) a war.
That is correct, but most of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and the rest of Japan) had contributed to the culture that led to the war and sustained it–the culture in which the Kamikaze pilots thought they were performing a noble and heroic act when they killed themselves and many innocent American troops.
The killing of civilians is morally necessary in times of war. If we hadn’t dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, countless American lives would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. The blood of the innocent was on the Emperor’s hands, not America’s.
What makes American innocents any better than Japanese innocents? Could it be the arbitrary borders that are drawn on maps?
What makes American innocents any better than Japanese innocents? Could it be the arbitrary borders that are drawn on maps?
??? Both the American innocents and the Japanese innocents are the Emperor’s liability.
I am in support of ending a war by any means necessary, but my hesitation in supporting nuclear arms proliferations is that unlike “normal” bombs, nuclear bombs have incredible after effects. Examples include nuclear winter, radiation, mutations etc. which affect citizens long after the war is complete. People who had nothing directly to do with WWII were harmed by it. Those people are innocents, they weren’t even born yet.
What makes American innocents any better than Japanese innocents? Could it be the arbitrary borders that are drawn on maps?
It is the duty of the American government to protect the individual rights of American citizens.
??? Both the American innocents and the Japanese innocents are the Emperor’s liability.
I agree with this, but in the case of American innocents, they are only the Emperor’s liability if they were directly killed by the Japanese. It certainly doesn’t give our government the liberty to kill Americans and declare that someone else was responsible for it. The end goal of our government should always be to protect the individual rights of Americans.
Don’t you see what Moose is saying? Any Americans who suffer from nuclear winter, radiation, mutations etc. are the Emperor’s liability! They can sue him and collect a king’s ransom.
Exactly how many Americans suffered from the effects of a hydrogen bomb exploding seven thousand miles away?
The context of the situation is also very important. The Japanese forces had made it very clear in the battle of Okinawa that they intended to fight to the very last man. There were more lives lost on Okinawa than at Hiroshima, but there are very few people who have even heard of it. Indeed, the argument can be made that Okinawans were less responsible for the war than the people of Hiroshima. Okinawa was taken over by Japan and it lacked the mainland’s militaristic attitude and culture.
However, even under these circumstances, the battle for Okinawa was moral. There were around 150,000 civilian casualties. However, their blood is on the the hands of Japanese militarists. Americans did not invade the island to kill civilians, they invaded to protect themselves and their country from Japan.
The same goes for Hiroshima. If the battle for Okinawa was any indication, the casualties during an invasion of Japan would have been atrocious. Okinawa was the first (and last) invasion of a Japanese home island. One out of every seven American naval deaths in WWII occured there. There were about 15,000 American deaths. One out of every three Okinawan civilians was killed. Project these numbers to an invasion of highly populated Japan and it’s easy to see the catastrophe it would have been.
edited to break it up into paragraphs for easier reading
America would not have a nuclear weapons program if it hadn’t been for the Nazis trying to get one first. So if anyone should ever get injured by nuclear weapons production or use, he can just sue the Nazis! Next question?
I already put this ridiculous deduction to rest. In case you didn’t read what I said, here it is again: It certainly doesn’t give our government the liberty to kill Americans and declare that someone else was responsible for it. The end goal of our government should always be to protect the individual rights of Americans.