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What Have I Learned From The Internet

Due to some recent disagreements between contributors and commenters here at What’s Wrong with the World, I was reflecting on internet discourse in general and on my own experience of coming across arguments that have made me uncomfortable and which I was inclined to dismiss or disagree with when I first read them. Generally speaking, these arguments came from fellow conservatives, because I can only spend so much time on liberal websites before I start pulling my hair out or finding too many errors of fact or omission to make it worth my while to keep reading.

I thought it might be instructive to highlight a specific example of a blog argument that has actually helped me change my mind about an issue, with the caveat that this argument probably wouldn’t have had the same effect on me if I hadn’t already returned to the Christian faith. Nevertheless, even as a Christian I remain with respect to foreign policy something of a hawk and someone who generally falls within what might be considered the mainstream Republican consensus of “a strong national defense” or a “willingness to project American power abroad.” Historically speaking, looking just at the 20th Century, I’m also someone who would defend our involvement in both World Wars, Korea (I wanted MacArthur to keep going), and Vietnam. So with that as background, it should not be surprising that I’m someone who never thought much or very hard about our decision to drop the two atomic bombs on Japan. Like Paul Fussell, who famously wrote the definitive justification for using those terrible weapons, I was content to say with him “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” and leave it at that. After all, didn’t these bombs save American lives and lead to Japan’s surrender and defeat?

Then I funny thing happened to me. I started reading, on the internet, folks who wrote about moral ethics from a non-consequentialist point of view. In other words, folks for whom the ends do not justify the means. And as I read these folks, most of whom either currently write for this site or previously wrote for the site, I found myself convinced by their arguments. In particular, I found the short, to the point, pithy arguments of Zippy Catholic totally and completely convincing – I realized that contrary arguments were basically elaborate ways in which to justify barbarism on behalf of the “good guys”. As much as I love the “good guys” (i.e. America and the Anglo-speaking Allies in WWII, not so much the Soviets), and as much as I wanted us to defeat Imperial Japan, I now realize that we should have come up with some alternative way to win the war versus incinerating thousands of innocent Japanese (and yes, that goes for firebombing Japanese and German cities as well). I also found it interesting that when other conservatives who support the consequentialist case would debate Paul, or Bill, or Lydia or Zippy they would usually resort to hyperbole, mischaracterization, straw-men arguments, etc. in their increasingly desperate attempts to avoid the straightforward case for avoiding consequentialism.

Now I don’t really want this post to be another long debate on the ethics of the atomic bomb, but I guess if after you’ve read the posts I link to above you think you’ve got something particularly new and insightful to say, then by all means go ahead and do so. Instead, I’m just kind of amazed at how hostile I was to the very idea that what we (the Americans) did during WWII could have been wrong and how by slowly working my way through all those blog posts and comments I came to understand the error of my ways. I wonder if our readers have had similar experiences with other arguments they’ve come across on the internet?

Sometimes the internet works – I had position X on one of the great issues of the day and now I have position Y. Chalk it up to the persuasive powers of those folks who I linked to, their moral reasoning, or the goodness of the natural moral law shining through in the end. So while not every Catholic is as familiar with consequentialist thinking, at least this one has been persuaded by good arguments and will do his best to persuade others in the future.

Comments (229)

Glad to hear that you've changed your mind on this particular issue. Myself, I'm not a pacifist, but I am a pessimist. There's a bit of a difference. In short, I no longer have confidence that our military will a) Make wise decisions about which wars are and aren't worth launching in the first place and b) Carry out the wars they do choose to launch speedily and efficiently, with minimal cost of life and resources. For one thing, our obsession with nation-building has proven rather disastrous. I wouldn't mind the wars so much if we knew how to finish them. As it is, our guys just end up being over there... and over there... and over there.

As for Vietnam, I'd be inclined to say it was a mistake simply on the grounds that you should never start a land war in Asia.

I did a similar post about war in general last year:
http://contraniche.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-become-anti-war.html
I don't consider myself a pacifist either, but war seems to have little to do with self-defense, nor does the U.S. ever achieve its objectives- so how can we even justify the means via the ends, assuming we want to?
Zippy had a similar impression on me with regard to torture. I hadn't really thought about it before and assumed under conditions where some lives might be saved it could be permissible. Zippy set me straight on that and later I realized if you give the G-men an inch on torture, they will take the mile, torture everyone, and piously claim the reason the TSA treated your grandmother so badly was because she really could have brought down the plane with her colostomy bag.

August,

Thanks for the comment and link. However, I will have to respectfully disagree with your reasoning on torture -- to me it smacks of consequentialist thinking. Even if we could imagine a scenario in which G-men were carefully monitored and the torture was carried out in a measured and limited way (actually, we don't have to imagine -- this is basically how our torture program, known as "enhanced interrogation" worked), it would still be wrong. Why? Because we cannot do evil so that good may come of it. Period, end of discussion. So we shouldn't start using consequentialist arguments to defeat the consequentialists! We should always ask ourselves is the action I'm about to take moral or not.

TME,

I have to admit, as someone who was generally on board with our recent wars, I'm coming around to your position mainly because of (b). If you read enough history you know that under the right conditions imperialism can work -- unfortunately, I don't think the American people (and by extension our military) have the stomach for fighting imperial wars and so it might be better if we don't get involved in the first place. The only issue I have with this idea of "retreat to fortress America" is that I don't think the threats to our security will go away. But this is a topic for another post and I don't want to debate American foreign policy in the combox of this post.

My views have changed a lot as a result of the Internet. My shift to the "paleo" right was conditioned by my living in Israel, but was articulated by articles on sites like VDARE. It also occurs to me just now, when I think about it, that my views are most often changed by those who share my initial views. When I see my own views stated by people who are really stupid or repulsive or both, over time it sometimes makes me question my views. This has been my experience from reading certain contributors and commenters on political sites, such as View From the Right, Chronicles, and Alternative Right (I'm not including Richard Spencer here, whose intelligence I respect greatly). I've moved a teensy little bit towards the center over the last few years, and I attribute that to some of the more obnoxious and/or stupid right-wing sites on the Internet.

The other way the Internet has changed my views is by leading me to books, those things that are printed in ink on paper. Somehow, I don't remember how, the Internet led me to read some stuff by Walter Benjamin; I think this was indirectly from Carl Schmitt through Giorgio Agamben. Anyway, I was pretty impressed, and I was also extremely impressed by the introduction written by the collection's editor, Hannah Arendt. Some of her thoughts seemed even more insightful than the thoughts by Benjamin that she was commenting on. That was the first thing I'd read by her. Now I'm on a Hannah Arendt reading spree, and I can feel my political views getting re-thought even now. So if I start using incomprehensible terminology in my comments here, just look it up in Hannah Arendt. On the Internet.

Jeffrey,
I do believe torture is wrong period- that is what Zippy persuaded me of.
But let me point out that realizing the fact that via war we have never achieved our ends went a long way towards me simply evaluating the means without regard to the ends and seeing it as evil.
We aren't actually very logical. We are doing some version of pattern matching, not marching down some linear path of thought, so the two points don't negate each other.

I do believe torture is wrong period- that is what Zippy persuaded me of.

Did he tell you what torture was? No. My problem with the "anti-torture" debate is that it obscures the real issues. It obscures the real and important distinctions, the important moral lines, that decent people won't cross by importing mere force into it and destroying the lines regarding human respect and dignity. The "anti-torture" debate since 9/11 has destroyed the debate. It is the logical equivalent of the "how can you be pro-life and support the death penalty" non-debate. Accept the premises and the real debate is over.

Jeff,

I’m sorry to see you go from the frying pan of consequentialism into the fire of pacifism.

Are you prepared to call the men of the Enola Gay murderers? Well, if you say that they intentionally killed innocent women and children, that’s exactly what they would be. On the other hand, if you say that that was not their intention, where is the intrinsic evil of the act?

Moreover, the same (so-called) moral principles by which amateur theologians such as Bill Luse and Zippy condemn the bomb would have to condemn all invasive military action whatsoever, if they were applied consistently. For example, would it be intrinsically evil for a leader to launch an invasion of a country, if he knew that about a million innocents in that country would be killed as a result? If you say, “No, that would not be intrinsically evil,” on what grounds could you say that? For the invading army would be to that leader just as the bomb was to the men who decided to drop it: neither the invading army was launched nor was the bomb dropped IN ORDER that innocents would be killed, but both are done with full knowledge that that would be the result. If you condemn one action, you must condemn the other.

The semi-pacifists don’t like to admit that the two scenarios are essentially alike, because that would expose them as the leftist, limp-wristed, pacifist-types that they are.

Hope this helps.

The atom bomb is an evil weapon of war.

However, the society that treats its citizens as ammunition and its women as ammunition factories for an eternal war against the Other, where peace is but a temporary strategem, the pity and indulgence of greater countries and universal honesty is a despised weakness...

THAT, friends, is an abomination I wouldn't trade all the drones in the world for.

We in the European West can both contruct and command our arsenal of destructive weapons precisely because we maintain enough respect for the truth and the law to govern their useage according to universal principles. The great sin is not that we create them, it's that we put them in the hands of cultures which could have never made them on their own, thus granting them power unready and glory unearned, the sin of Satan.

May I die in a ditch before admitting that those whose highest social life follows the low arts of drug-taking, casual pederasty, and social proof over objective truth could ever tempt my imagination! There is more objective beauty, wonder, civilization, versimilitude, and understanding in a single Japanese city today then in any land where Mohammed set foot.

In summation, if you're more offended by a JDAM than a Janissary, you are lost in the idolatry of the merely visible, thinking barely higher than beasts driven by demons.

Aaron,

Thanks for that comment -- very interesting perspective.

August,

Well, actually when you think about WWII and the atomic bombs, it seems to me that they were a perfect test case of getting exactly what we wanted from war -- Japanese unconditional surrender and the pacification of their country. So I don't think your analogy plays out in the real world -- sometimes war can be very effective (otherwise countries wouldn't keep resorting to it).

Mark,

I confess I'm not sure what you are talking about.

George R.,

I suggest you go back and read all those posts I linked to carefully. The two scenarios you present are not "essentially alike" in their particulars or in their cause and effect. As for the pilots of the Enola Gay, yes of course they were murderers. Just like the woman who aborts her baby is a murderer. Saying this doesn't negate the sympathy or compassion I might have for either the pilots or the mother seeking an abortion or say anything about what I feel about Truman and his decision. But from a moral perspective, yes, Truman ordered murder and the pilots carried out the order.

In summation, if you're more offended by a JDAM than a Janissary, you are lost in the idolatry of the merely visible, thinking barely higher than beasts driven by demons.

Translation: If you don't agree with me you're sub-human.

Wrong thread mate. Here you go.

Howdy Mr Culbreath - to answer your question, "I wonder if our readers...", I've taken the same path on the same issue. On a related issue, this report by Fr Patrick Henry Reardon put me on the right side of the Syrian conflict: http://www.antiochian.org/reardon-syria-delegation-2011

Mr Assad's government isn't perfect, but it has provided a peaceful life for Syrian Christians who, upon his defeat, will be driven out or slaughtered with enthusiastic American help. What does one do when one's government instigates an unjust war and joins the wrong side?

As for the pilots of the Enola Gay, yes of course they were murderers. Just like the woman who aborts her baby is a murderer.

On this view, swat team members and other law enforcement personnel would also be murders in many situations. We're all murderers now.

Jeff now realizes that the principle of double-effect, lesser of two evils, and other traditional Christian understandings of morality were always wrong. Moralism at its finest by those the most insulated from violence and evil actors.

On this view, swat team members and other law enforcement personnel would also be murders in many situations.

Hardly, Mark. Unless a policeman deliberately targets an innocent, he is not a murderer. Simple.

There is no more "traditional Christian understanding of morality" than that we may not deliberately take innocent life. Ever. Full stop. Meanwhile, you crown sophistry with cheap insults with your last sentence.

I suggest you go back and read all those posts I linked to carefully.

Jeff, believe me, I already know all of Zippy's arguments like the back of my hand. Please, don't make me read them again.

Mr. White,

I can only wish that my blog posts someday reach the quality and standards set by Jeff Culbreath; but alas, he and I are different people!

Nevertheless, I think your example of Christians in the Middle-East is a good one -- I once did not realize how precarious their position was w/r/t their Islamic neighbors and how their safety and security often depended (still depends?) on the support of otherwise odious dictators. I think the best policy for us in these situations would have been to cultivate more moderate elements in the militaries of these dictatorships and encouraged coups by these liberalizing dictators -- in other words, a less corrupt and hostile version of Mubarak or Assad. As it is, we can only pray for the Christian communities in Syria and hope that if they do need help their religious brethren in Lebannon might be able to extend a helping hand.

This post by Francis Porretto throws a different light on the subject worth thinking about:
http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-most-awful-day.html

It looks at post-Enlightenment establishment of rules of war and how they were breached by Germany at the start of WW I, which led to the subsequent breach in WW II.

(Of course, Lincoln breached them in the War of Northern Aggression, too).

Part of the point being, that when one side breaks the rules, it will follow out of necessity that the other side will break them, too. If Japan or Germany had the Bomb, is there any doubt they would have used it against a civilian population?

If we have rules of war, all sides must abide with them. If not, then total war follows and that's how it is and hand wringing about it is meaningless, especially ex post facto.

If Japan or Germany had the Bomb, is there any doubt they would have used it against a civilian population?

None.

Part of the point being, that when one side breaks the rules, it will follow out of necessity that the other side will break them, too.

As an ironclad certainty of prediction, I am dubious. As a strong probability, I am am quite convinced.

Neither point, of course, matters a lick when it comes to the question of whether the deliberate slaughter of innocents can be justified. It cannot.

I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about who is most morally culpable in the Hiroshima bombing, and my conclusion is that it ultimately comes down to the administration who gave the order. While the pilots of the Enola Gay (as well as the scientists who built the bomb, for that matter) are certainly morally implicated, I think more blame should rest with Truman and Co.

Mark, you aren't completely pro-life if you are for the death penalty, especially if you are suggesting we should let the idiots in charge do the killing. Waterboarding is torture. If you are thinking that you should make someone uncomfortable in order to extract information from him, you are starting down the wrong road. It is uncomfortable enough being imprisoned. SWAT teams murder people- they initiate violence against people in their homes- people who have the right to self-defense. They get the wrong house sometimes, you know. These military tactics provide nothing the work of policing and do put these men in situations where they murder. There isn't any other way to describe it. They get the wrong house sometimes too.
Aaron,
The beginning of our fight with Japan was pretty much legit; we defended our land from attack, but it did not take long for that threat to be over. Unconditional surrender was part of the progressive psychosis infecting this land. There were some politicians who wanted it, but the people of America didn't need it. So I still think we didn't get what we wanted- you want to pay a monstrous amount more than what is necessary so some politicians can screw up the world? If someone provided you with this kind of service in the private sector you'd be screaming about fraud the second you found out about it. Then there are all the dead Japanese...

August: "Mark, you aren't completely pro-life if you are for the death penalty, especially if you are suggesting we should let the idiots in charge do the killing."

"We" already "let the idiots in charge do the killing"--in war. Are non-pacifists not "completely pro-life" on account of their not being pacifists?

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/08/happy-consequentialism-day.html

This post was originally posted at W4 also, but it has for the most part disappeared. The main thing I remember about the comments was I called a former military instructor a potential war criminal. Good times.

I wonder if our readers have had similar experiences with other arguments they’ve come across on the internet?

I would say that reading some arguments has led to an appreciation of the complexity, and in that sense, the fragility of moral certainty about specific things. For the most part I think we are hard-wired for confirmation bias, so it is difficult to get over that and truly grant the premise of opposing arguments, because all of our knowledge feeds into the belief system we already have and resists contrasting data.

"You aren't completely pro-life if you are for the death penalty..."

I'm sorry August, but you won't last long around here if that's the most enlightening, cogent "argument" you can bring to the table. Just sayin'.

I now realize that we should have come up with some alternative way to win the war versus incinerating thousands of innocent Japanese
There is no more "traditional Christian understanding of morality" than that we may not deliberately take innocent life.
Neither point, of course, matters a lick when it comes to the question of whether the deliberate slaughter of innocents can be justified. It cannot.

My opinion is that we were wrong to use the Bomb the way we did. I agree with Paul and Jeff and Lydia on that.

Now: define "innocent" in the above context. Please pay attention to the difference between, say, the A group of German psuedo-soldiers who faked a Polish invasion by killing German soldiers, to those B group of German soldiers under attack who killed other Germans (in disguise) and then went on to kill Poles who they thought were attacking Germany, and who were themselves (by that time) being attacjed by Poles. Were the B-group of soldiers committing murder?

I have rarely seen anyone undertake a rigorous analysis of what we mean by innocent in national war, and I think that this has undermined general attempts to defend the (true) principle that you can't intentionally kill innocent people, even in war.

As far as I can tell, no army in any war in history that fought by entering the opponent's territory did so without a reasonable certainty that innocent civilians were going to get in the way and be killed. And yet most just war analysis leaves open the possibility (even probability) that just war includes cases of entering the opponent's territory. I have seen some, in zealousness for defending the above principle in favor of innocents, decry ANY military maneuvers that are reasonably certain to end up including civilians in the fatal effects. I have seen others, less concerned with the principle, argue that if the cause of war is just, it is irrelevant if civilians get it in prosecuting the war. I don't agree with either.

If war cannot be prosecuted even in the presence of civilians, then war is wrong. That should be easy to see: one side or the other is always to be found very near civilians, and civilians themselves will often "help out". The entire just war tradition, in that case, would be at best a bunch of fiddling with deck chairs on the Titanic - no actual just wars regardless of the theory. So I reject that. But in no way does that simply open the door wide to "anything it takes" either.

I'm one who has learned a lot from the internet. My journey began on ID websites, where I would go to debate atheists and argue for veiled Christianity (with the pretext of being "all about science"). I eventually grew disillusioned with the constant refrain "it doesn't have to be 'God' just some form of intelligence". I felt like I was disowning God whenever I would say that. That frustration eventually led me to websites that dealt with philosophy and metaphysics. From those, especially Ed Feser's blog, I came to appreciate Thomism and the beauty of the Five Ways - which provided strong proofs of GOD (not a god) from simple things such as motion and change. Needless to say, I've abandoned much of what I held dear about ID.

In the meantime, I was evolving politically as well. I began my political internet journey as a died-in-wool, never-voted-for-a-Democrat-in-my-life, Reagan Republican. I was a full on neo-con - strong national defense, interventionism, kill our enemies before they kill us - a complete chicken-hawk. Then, at the beginning of this election cycle, on a whim, I decided that I was going to look into Ron Paul because I felt that he was probably the only one who was really serious about actually cutting spending. I had a lot of reservations because of all the negative things I'd heard about him - I remember booing him in 2008 when he made some anti-Iraq war comments, and I didn't know where he stood on abortion. So I did a bit of research. I figured that, even if he was mildly objectionable in some areas, it would be worth it just to have someone who would veto any budget that increased spending - my one deal-breaker being that he must be pro-life (he is). In short, I was tired of Republican promises and was looking for some action. Well, I'm a total Paulite now so a lot has changed! I went to YouTube and listened to his speeches, I went to news sites and read all the comments from all the different candidates' supporters - and I started to get it. I began to see the wisdom of non-interventionism, sound money, Austrian economics, liberty and freedom. I began to see how I had been hood-winked into supporting at least one unnecessary war (and maybe two). I actually felt betrayed by the Republican party and all the conservative commentators I had unflinchingly supported all those years. (I could go on, but that's enough.)

So, yes, I've learned a thing or two on the internet.

Meanwhile, you crown sophistry with cheap insults with your last sentence.

You're right Paul that I was insulting in the last part. I apologize Tony for such a cheap shot. And thank you Paul for pointing this out.

Hardly, Mark. Unless a policeman deliberately targets an innocent, he is not a murderer. Simple.

I don't think it is simple at all, unless Tony treats the atomic bomb example specially, and it seems to me he isn't. Because without the principle of double-effect, you'd still be a murderer if you know innocents will be killed. In hostage situations and such, it is traditionally not been required for moral permissibility to think that none will be killed. You can know that at least some will be killed unless you are extremely lucky, and it may still be morally permissible if the circumstances warrant in the judgement of the actors. What grants moral permissibility to cause these deaths?

But like I said, Jeff could say he's only talking about Hiroshima and the examples wouldn't be problems. But otherwise it is, and it isn't as simple as saying "it wasn't deliberate" when deliberate action was taken knowing it would result in death of innocents.

Tony,

I think we should hold off on a detailed discussion of just war theory for another post, although I think you do raise an interesting broader question related to waging war (how to prosecute a war in the best way so as not to kill the innocent). As for the Germans, Group B is not guilty of murder -- they can't be guilty of a crime while being deceived.

Chucky,

I never thought I'd say this, but I really enjoyed your comment. That is one fascinating intellectual journey. I'm glad you found Ed, and while you and I will have to agree to disagree about Ron Paul, I've become very interested in Austrian economics myself. You might want to check out this website when you have a minute:

http://www.freebanking.org/

In hostage situations and such, it is traditionally not been required for moral permissibility to think that none will be killed....

and it isn't as simple as saying "it wasn't deliberate" when deliberate action was taken knowing it would result in death of innocents.

Mark, I agree that the principle of double effect is immensely important in these discussions. But your example is the type of situation that doesn't really illustrate it with clarity. The problem is that in between the SWAT team acting, and the hostages being killed, is another moral agent, the hostage takers. And the motive for the hostage takers doing the killing isn't somehow due to the SWAT team acting on them in such a way that the hostage takers are acting in complicity with and in ordination to the SWAT team's desires. The killing of the hostages is in spite of the SWAT team's actions, in opposition to their wills, which means that the SWAT guys are not morally responsible for those killings, only the hostage takers are. (Yes, the SWAT team should still do a calculus of probable costs-benefits, but I don't think that it is the analysis of the PDE. I think that the "evil effect" that is in the PDE calculation has to be an evil that results directly from your own action, or (at most) if not directly, then indirectly from you through the agency of someone who is in compliance with your willed action.)

The problem is that in between the SWAT team acting, and the hostages being killed, is another moral agent, the hostage takers.

But Jeff, "the hostage takers [are] doing the killing"? The SWAT team is present because of their actions, but not necessarily doing any killing. The SWAT team may do all the killing.

As far as the SWAT team doesn't wish to kill anyone, that's fine. But as I said, if you were only talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that'd be one thing, because you can take a stand against war against cities and that'd be fine. But I thought from what you said you were going the full zippy route, and if so the examples I raised are problematic for that view. On that view choosing between the lesser of two evils is "consequentialist," and wrong, and sins of omission are demoted.

I think that the "evil effect" that is in the PDE calculation has to be an evil that results directly from your own action, or (at most) if not directly, then indirectly from you through the agency of someone who is in compliance with your willed action.)

But the key thing about PDE is that it is permissible to act such that you know that evil things will happen, you forsee them, but you don't intend them. In other words, you'd avoid the evil if you could but you can't, and not acting isn't morally permissible. That is PDE.

The irony of the moralism on the WWII examples, is that the lesson was learned. Our entire war fighting forces have since been retooled so that it wouldn't be necessary to force civilians to demand capitulation of a government. And our soldiers are now expected to sacrifice their lives for innocents in urban and irregular warfare. Calculations are made for how many soldiers may be lost erring on the side of caution. And the only ones in danger of getting nuked are ourselves, while the biggest debate in war policy right now is on what is morally permissible in denying a state nuclear weapons if they declare intents to use them against innocents.

Jeff, do you understand zippy's point when he said "it is not morally licit to do evil in order to avoid slavery."? I don't understand that.

Oops. I must be dyslexic. Nevermind. It was as I expected after all.

Your story about coming around on the atomic bomb is almost EXACTLY the same as mine, and it was because I read Dr. Feser.

I discovered Dr. Feser on the Internet and he led me to learn about the natural law and is also the reason I am against gay marriage. I don't think I've ever disagreed with him on a major issue, actually.

These were two issues, keep in mind, that I was dead-set in, particularly the dropping of the bombs. But after learning of natural law theory I was basically forced to either drop my convictions of the truth of the theory or drop my convictions of the morality of the dropping of the bombs.

I chose to drop my convictions on the dropping of the bombs. This was harder position for me to "come over to" than gay marriage because my also very conservative family DEFINITELY disagrees with me.

Being for gay marriage and changing my mind and opposing it? I was falling in with the family values.

Being for the bomb and changing my mind and opposing it? I was going AGAINST the consensus of my family, so this was not an easy barrier to break down.

I had been having a debate with Tony on another thread over the question whether a conquest of a long-settled national territory by another nation is ever just.

Tony, if I do not mistake him, says it would be wrong per se.

I, in the view of Universal Destination of Goods, that gives the the earth and its resources to man in common, say that this doctrine requires a way so that the land might be shuffled among the nations.

1) Nations exist. I think that the explicit wording of Love Thy Neighbor instead of some general command of to Love Others implies that mankind would be nationally organized.

2) Property exists in National Territories and is defended by National Laws.

3) So an initial acquisition of landed property would be indefinite in time if the National Territories were to be permanent and there was no way to shuffle territories.

4) Thus the justification for Conquests. Note that a Conquest is not a Theft. People glory in their Conquests but not in Thefts.

There is no more "traditional Christian understanding of morality" than that we may not deliberately take innocent life. Ever. Full stop.

Paul, your statement has to do with self-sacrifice instead of taking innocent life. That's a "full stop." But life is more complicated than this. In situations where it comes to our sacrificing the lives of others, there is no virtue in that. Sometimes non-involvement just predetermines that the weaker side will suffer and die. There is no virtue in this, and this understanding is also part of the Christian view, at least the one that isn't quietist.

The idea of sacrificing others for our own purposes is the root of a familiar black humor: "The Mullahs in Tehran are really adamant about this issue, they're prepared to fight to the last Palestinian."

Jeff S., your link to Fussell's essay doesn't work. Also, I think you're misreading August. He's on your side.

I would like you to convey to George R. how mortally wounded I am at being called by him an amateur theologian. I don't dispute the characterization but, oh, it hurts. Zippy also sends word of the despair into which he has fallen.

Mark, I hope you do not mistake me or anyone else for a pacifist. The context of Jeff's post (not Tony's, whose names you appear to have used interchangeably at times) was indeed the atomic bombings, and may perhaps be generalized (he mentioned German cities too) to indiscriminate aerial bombardment.

Gian, what makes you think that this is the right place for that discussion? Jeff didn't introduce anything dealing with territory or wars of conquest, or land. C'mon, you're just topic hopping.

Jeff, ok, my bad. I won't run this into just war theory and all that.

The Japanese fought to the last man in the islands as we were headed for the mainland. The military estimated that 1,000,000 soldiers lives would be lost in the invasion and decided that would be too great a sacrifice. The bombs were dropped and 100,000 Japanese were sacrificed for the cause of the Japanese foolish attack on America. Now, how many Americans are you folks willing to sacrifice to avoid civilian deaths? I think one American life is too much and this discussion shows how far down the leftist path we have come. When it comes to civilizational war and survival, we must use those advantages we have to continue our culture. 1,000,000 American soldiers for 100,000 Japanese civilians is not a trade off in any war.

The SWAT team is present because of their actions, but not necessarily doing any killing. The SWAT team may do all the killing.

Mark, sorry, we seem to be talking about different scenarios. The one I had in mind is when the SWAT team goes into the building and starts shooting, and the kidnappers start killing the hostages in response. You seem to be thinking of where the SWAT team goes in and accidentally kills some of the hostages themselves. As you note, even in the second scenario, there is no intention of killing the hostages. It is my understanding that SWAT teams train extensively to reduce the likelihood that they will (even accidentally) be the direct cause of a hostage's death, but of course it can happen through odd circumstances. The PDE analysis of weighing "the evil anticipated to come about through your action" is attenuated by the fact that the SWAT team has a very good prospect of NOT actually causing the death of any hostage by their own actions - normally the SWAT team's procedure doesn't result in the commander thinking "well, there's a pretty good chance we'll end up killing one or two, but that's worth getting the other 20 out." He reasonably anticipates the SWAT guys not killing ANY hostages by their own use of force. In which case, the moral address of dealing with the evils reasonably anticipated coming about through SWAT actions need not incorporate the prospect of their killing hostages.

Anyway, Jeff wasn't talking about the SWAT team, I was.

Marc Anthony, welcome to the ranks of thinking carefully about things that others just assume. It's more work. But it's worth it.

SWAT teams murder people- they initiate violence against people in their homes- people who have the right to self-defense. They get the wrong house sometimes, you know. These military tactics provide nothing the work of policing and do put these men in situations where they murder. There isn't any other way to describe it. They get the wrong house sometimes too.

This is one area where I think most of the conservatives here are speaking from a position of ignorance. SWAT is not a defensive, law enforcement function. Rather, the established wisdom within law enforcement circles is that SWAT is supposed to bring such a level of overwhelming violence and force to a situation that the criminal immediately surrenders or is gunned down. Mere observation of most reports of SWAT deployments would bear this out; 99% of the time they end with unconditional surrender or the bullet-riddled corpse of the criminal/suspect(s).

Thus the deployment of SWAT to a home without proper intelligence gathering and proportionality would constitute an act of murder in many cases. You simply cannot send SWAT to someone's house for less than either a serious, violent felony in progress or a pattern of behavior by the target that shows that they are irredeemably violent. Anything else is tantamount to saying that you find the disproportionate level of force and its consequences to be acceptable.

In the scenario that Tony is talking about, SWAT is being used more or less correctly. In the vast majority of situations where it exists, it's no better than keeping a rabid dog on the police force.

Mark, I hope you do not mistake me or anyone else for a pacifist. The context of Jeff's post (not Tony's, whose names you appear to have used interchangeably at times) was indeed the atomic bombings, and may perhaps be generalized (he mentioned German cities too) to indiscriminate aerial bombardment.

You hope correctly. I do not assume that, and in fact assume your aren't. I understand the context of his WWII example, but the context of the overall post includes Jeff's describing a conversion on meta-ethics. The full context was provided by Jeff, not the WWII scenario of bombing civilian population centers. He never said clearly how far the meta-ethical conversion has gone, and whether it involves the rejection of the lesser evils understanding generally so I wasn't sure. Jeff, can you clear this up? I'm sorry if I've missed it already.

. . . normally the SWAT team's procedure doesn't result in the commander thinking "well, there's a pretty good chance we'll end up killing one or two, but that's worth getting the other 20 out."

If Jeff comes out and says he supports the classic "lesser of two evils" understanding of moral action the SWAT team example is unnecessary. But if not it will matter. And it doesn't matter what "normally" happens. It happens sometimes, and the question is whether it is morally permissible when it does. Israel in theory considers all citizens soldiers to take away the advantage of others in using their virtue against them. Is it morally licit for them to consider a grandmother a soldier?

Mike T: I agree with your qualms about SWAT teams in may circumstances. There are issues there as you point out. But I thought that easiest way to convey a group of law enforcement officers making difficult decisions. As opposed to waiting outside for superiors to arrive and give orders as they hear shots fired in a high school as happened at Columbine.

But I think you misuse the term "murder" when you say "without proper intelligence gathering and proportionality [it] would constitute an act of murder in many cases." Murder involves intent. I'm not a lawyer but I think "negligent homicide" or some such may be what you're thinking of.

As opposed to waiting outside for superiors to arrive and give orders as they hear shots fired in a high school as happened at Columbine.

That actually was a SWAT team. Same thing with the VA Tech shooting. The idea of SWAT hard charging in during the fight and stopping it is more myth than reality. SWAT tend to be almost cowardly compared to their regular uniformed counterparts; if it shoots back, they tend to wait until it runs out of ammo. Note that the Sikh Temple shooter was stopped by a normal cop (same with Fort Hood and others).

But I think you misuse the term "murder" when you say "without proper intelligence gathering and proportionality [it] would constitute an act of murder in many cases." Murder involves intent.

Not true. At the very least, felony murder requires no intent to kill at all. The mere loss of life during the commission of a felony against the deceased is sufficient to invoke felony murder. As it should be. The state needs the flexibility to punish those criminals whose felonious actions cause far more serious harm to their victims than intended.

In most jurisdictions, the use of non-self-defensive force with "callous disregard for life" is sufficient to invoke some class of intentional murder. IMO, the use of a SWAT unit against a non-violent offender, even one who "might be dangerous because he owns guns" should legally qualify. Certainly, sending a SWAT unit to a drug user's house over their habit is callous toward human life knowing what most cops know is the true purpose of SWAT.

The great difficulty in this discussion would appear to be the definition of the word "innocent." Specifically, whenever you say the word "innocent civilian" you're also implying "innocent civilization." This is foolish, ahistorical, and theologically blind. A tribe of nomadic bandits can become a distinct culture, civilization, and race based on refinements of force and fraud...entirely through the natural and repeatable process of their victims not having the time, numbers, will, fortune, or inclination to go after them.

That doesn't mean the victimized, non-lawless civilization isn't fully justified in wiping them out wholesale, as has been done in diverse times and places throughout history, as part of settled human civilized peacetime life. It's as natural and routine as taking out the trash. The reason we can discuss the killing of civilians in actual civilized nations like Germany and Japan with real weight and human concern is precisely because their civilizations were largely innocent apart from the regime which had taken over, and could be thus reasonably expected to harbor innocents held against their will by the exigencies of war. The Roman Empire was corrupt, and its rulers increasingly totalitarian as its collapse trundled on, but it remained wedded to some form of public law and order up until the very end.

One would not look askance at a Christian centurion who wiped out a barbarian hill tribe to protect some outlying polis. One would not imitate Job's comforters to harangue the Puritans for wiping out the Pequots. One does not mourn the loss of the Aztec empire to Catholic conquistadors, nor the inimitable loss of mankind's potential brought by the destruction of the Thuggee cult by Victorian Englishmen.

One does not, for that matter, spare Haman's wife the punishment afforded her husband. (Who would marry her? Do you keep a stable of callow, unattached men ready to physically, mentally, sexually, and spiritually lead and dominate the women and children of sworn enemies of order? Do they exist in the same space where the infinite public officials and functionaries ready to implement public policy dwell? Are they infinitely incorruptible?)

The point of being a conservative is NOT in keeping history dark, lest you see yesterday's solutions and implement them today. Without such context, your ability to enforce, amend, extend, contract, and repeal today's laws is cut off at the grave.

One does

Not true. At the very least, felony murder requires no intent to kill at all.

I stand corrected. But would felony murder apply to law enforcement officers? Seems to me it still comes down to negligence in the scenario you described.

The reason we can discuss the killing of civilians in actual civilized nations like Germany and Japan with real weight and human concern is precisely because their civilizations were largely innocent apart from the regime which had taken over . . .

This is exactly the problem we face today. No sane person thinks anything more than a tiny number of the citizens in the despotic regimes supporting terrorism share any real guilt in what their leaders have done. Therefore libs that used to say "oh they would never give nukes to a terrorist organization because they know we'd just nuke them" are dreaming. We wouldn't.

No sane person thinks anything more than a tiny number of the citizens in the despotic regimes supporting terrorism share any real guilt in what their leaders have done.

I would be cautious there, Mark. Maybe true of Japan. Less true of Germany, since they did actually vote Hitler in. It's really unclear in some place like Afghanistan, where it appears that maybe around 10% actively encourage terrorists, but another 30% to 60% are willing bystanders in the sense that they don't mind seeing the terrorists succeeding, and they wouldn't even bother to cross the street if that's all it took to keep a westerner safe from an attack. Citizens can share in guilt in a variety of imperfect or incomplete ways.

Mark & Masked Elephant

There isn't an argument, there is a definition. A pro-death penalty stance is not a pro-life one. Therefore you are not completely pro-life, for which you may or may not be able to provide a robust defense.
We do not have to be pacifists. We have a legitimate right to defend ourselves and those we are responsible for, but what we are seeing in war, with torture, and even in the courts is the state's use of this as pretext. A violent invasion into someone's home is recast as somehow providing us with protection, much as a violent invasion of multiple countries is spun as keeping us safe. I don't think the ends you seek are being met via these means. I think this comes down to bureaucrats trying to justify their existence by creating more conflict and then telling us we need them to resolve the conflict.

Okay fine then. Call it a "pro-life-worth-preserving" position. Vile criminals do not equal life worth preserving.

I stand corrected. But would felony murder apply to law enforcement officers? Seems to me it still comes down to negligence in the scenario you described.

A tough-minded prosecutor could probably make mincemeat of the qualified immunity before a grand jury.

Bill Luse,

I fixed that link. I also fixed a link in one of Mark's comments that wasn't working. As for August, I stand by my comments to him.

Mark Anthony,

Your comment was delightful. I too have been persuaded quite a bit by Ed Feser, and have even started dipping into his books -- I guess he's turned me into a Thomist by now ;-) I also thought your comments about your family was interesting -- I too have had some push-back from my family due to my evolving conservative views (on the subject of Catholic moral theology, I guess it hasn't really come up much over dinner conversations!) But I do think it is interesting how our family values and upbringing shape our subsequent search for the truth.

Mark,

Quite frankly, I've kind of lost the thread of your argument w/r/t P.D.E. I think Tony did a good job of laying out the moral culpability of a typical SWAT raid, despite what Mike T. might think (I should note that to the extent that Mike T is right, the problem goes deeper than individual SWAT officers -- we have to think about their training, the leaders and politicians who send them into inappropriate situations, etc. I suppose there will always be bad apples but I'm not onboard Mike's crusade to condemn all cops or SWAT teams as thugs who just want to shoot up innocent civilians). In other words, if you try and get the bad guys but accidentally kill an innocent civilian, that seems like a case of the P.D.E. in action and you aren't doing evil so that good can come of it.

Mark, et. al. -- what have you learned from the internet?

Masked Elephant,

So, your means- the death penalty, somehow achieves your ends- the eradication of vile criminals, and only your ends- i.e. nobody who isn't a vile criminal is ever murdered?
Courts should be primarily concerned with restitution. It may require the death of the perpetrator to satisfy restitution, but it would be far better for the court to declare his life forfeit and let individuals within its jurisdiction determine whether or not they kill him as he tries to leave the jurisdiction.
I've just realized that, in order to explain this, I probably need to write a very long essay that will totally digress from what this comment thread is about.

There isn't an argument, there is a definition. A pro-death penalty stance is not a pro-life one. Therefore you are not completely pro-life, for which you may or may not be able to provide a robust defense.

August, it's good that you want to establish what you think is a definition, that helps clarify things. But it is even better to check and see if your definition actually matches up with the way the term is used in the culture at large, and if possible in the culture of the people with whom you are discussing. That's one of the things the internet has taught me - to CHECK my initial ideas, and search out the facts to show how the ideas are, or are not, actually supported by facts. I have learned that both from conservatives like Lydia, who did a smash-bang investigative reporting job last year, and liberals like our sometime commenter al, who is pretty good at ferreting out facts even when he cannot discern the meaning of them.

(A) Some people are so darn "pro-life" that they refuse to kill animals - even bugs and rodents (some Hindus come to mind). Of course, they don't seem to mind killing plants. (B) Others are willing to kill irritating animals like insects and rodents, but object to killing animals for food or fur - they are in favor of life too. (C) Some "pro-lifers" don't care in the least whether you kill plants and animals, but object mightily when you kill humans - EVEN in self defense. Quakers are like that. (D) Lots of liberals are in favor of killing for strict self defense (at the moment of attack), but reject the notion of killing the aggressor after he has been disarmed (i.e. as execution following a just trial). They think that's just cold-blooded "murder" and wrong. (E) Others are OK with killing convicted criminals, but only if they cannot be safely imprisoned. (F) Still other pro-lifers object to the killing of innocent human beings, but are fine generally with killing convicted criminals who deserve death.

All of these are different versions of being in favor of life and against the taking of life. I hope you can see that - absent a specific conventional usage that applies distinctly to the term "pro-life" that does not apply simply to "pro" and "life" alone - it is totally arbitrary of you to decide that the "definition" makes it so that "pro-life" lands specifically between (D) and (E) without any notice of A, B, or C, or F. In reality, the theories behind all of these existed long before the name "pro-life" came about, and what triggered the specific term was the abortion approval starting in 1973. So it is pretty unreasonable to arbitrarily claim that pro-life separates those who are OK with self defense but not executions, from those who are OK with executing criminals, when the purpose of the term was to self-identify those opposed to abortion.

Quite frankly, I've kind of lost the thread of your argument w/r/t P.D.E. I think Tony did a good job of laying out the moral culpability of a typical SWAT raid, despite what Mike T. might think (I should note that to the extent that Mike T is right, the problem goes deeper than individual SWAT officers -- we have to think about their training, the leaders and politicians who send them into inappropriate situations, etc. I suppose there will always be bad apples but I'm not onboard Mike's crusade to condemn all cops or SWAT teams as thugs who just want to shoot up innocent civilians). In other words, if you try and get the bad guys but accidentally kill an innocent civilian, that seems like a case of the P.D.E. in action and you aren't doing evil so that good can come of it.

Jeff, this is an abjectly ludicrous reading of what I wrote. The definitive reason for SWAT is to bring overwhelming force against a target so it is subdued or eliminated as quickly as possible. This is mainstream law enforcement opinion on the subject, not mine. When used for the situations for which it was created, such as high stakes hostage situations, that "dead or alive" level of force is morally acceptable. When used for what SWAT often is used for, it is morally unacceptable. Case closed. If you believe that the Enola Gay pilots are morally culpable for murder, but don't believe a SWAT officer who participates in a raid on a target for whom SWAT is disproportionate, you're just engaging in hypocrisy.

It's really unclear in some place like Afghanistan, where it appears that maybe around 10% actively encourage terrorists, but another 30% to 60% are willing bystanders in the sense that they don't mind seeing the terrorists succeeding, and they wouldn't even bother to cross the street if that's all it took to keep a westerner safe from an attack. Citizens can share in guilt in a variety of imperfect or incomplete ways.

Yes I know Tony, but I adhere to the classic understanding of political legitimacy. There are degrees of legitimacy of course. Who speaks for the population of an illegitimate regime? And I understand that silence in the face of evil is evil, but as I've said, in honor cultures there is a level of coercion most of the time. Order is the goal, and even non-state actors dominate some regions. You help and you're attacked next. But you're right, at some level acceptance does rise to the level of guilt, though it is very difficult to know the depth and what it means.

When it comes to civilizational war and survival, we must use those advantages we have to continue our culture.

I'm disinclined to read arguments that entertain the possibility of us not winning, much less not surviving, the war against Japan. Pearl Harbor was one of the worst strategic military mistakes in world history. So in terms of military options for ending the war feel free to make an argument for your preferred tactic, but any suggestion that American civilization was in jeopardy from the Japanese is delusional.

When used for the situations for which it was created, such as high stakes hostage situations, that "dead or alive" level of force is morally acceptable. When used for what SWAT often is used for, it is morally unacceptable.

I have to agree with you Mike. I didn't intend to introduce what you've raised by using SWAT example and only wanted to use the example of law enforcement teams acting according to legitimate and proportionate purposes for my purpose. But you're right if they don't you certainly can't pass off blame for innocent death onto the criminals. That's why I'm skeptical generally of basing moral rules on uniquely military examples, rather than force and violence generally. Doing so sneaks in politics and makes the issue look simpler than they really are. Force and violence, necessary in all societies, are are not as morally unproblematic as people suppose. It is just easier to ignore. You can pick easy civil cases (cop aims at bad guy and hits grandma by accident) and difficult military ones (how to attain goals in a just war where innocent death can't be avoided), but it distorts the debate entirely. And do you realize how many armed federal forces we have now, and what they do?

Along the SWAT lines, if you've never read this story, read it and weep. They shot first and denied him medical care to make sure he was dead before doing anything else. God help us all.

Out here in CA we have cases where people are shot for not following orders exactly, when it isn't clear that was reasonable to expect. The explanation runs: "He turned around and faced me with something in his hand I thought he was a threat." Oh ok. So drunk and disorderly conduct even in safe neighborhoods gets you killed sometimes now. No one wants to say that a cop should be prepared to sacrifice his life if he's wrong, but at some point you have to ask yourself if such risk-averse people should be police officers in the first place. Easy for me to say though.

To put it another way, one could argue that Jeff has only changed the "good guys" from military-political actors to domestic ones. Now the police are the "good guys" and their actions that might offend the sensibilities of armchair warriors eating chicken mcnuggets are ignored in the "good guy" glow. But it doesn't solve anything real.

Mike T. and Mark,

I'll say one more thing about SWAT and then I'm going to table the discussion. To the extent that a SWAT team member knows that the target his superiors have selected is not dangerous and the team is not the appropriate force level needed, then this team member should obviously speak out and/or be willing to disobey a direct order to avoid committing an immoral act. I'm suggesting that when Mike T. confidently says that he knows SWAT teams are "often" used for purposes other than which SWAT was originally created, I'm skeptical (because I know Mike T. has a bee in his bonnet in general about the police, just like my buddy Vox Day, who I also don't trust on the subject matter), and therefore I don't think most SWAT team members face such a moral dilemma. But I will say this -- if you'd like to point me to a study or to data that has looked at this question of SWAT teams and their misuse, I'd be happy to review the literature.

Who knows, this could be another example of "what I've learned from the internet"...

But you're right if they don't you certainly can't pass off blame for innocent death onto the criminals. That's why I'm skeptical generally of basing moral rules on uniquely military examples, rather than force and violence generally. Doing so sneaks in politics and makes the issue look simpler than they really are. Force and violence, necessary in all societies, are are not as morally unproblematic as people suppose.

I think SWAT is actually a good example of how you can scale the problem down to a level that is more likely to affect the average American than something like the nuclear bombing of Japan. Most of us can agree that it is immoral to use a weapon like a nuclear bomb on a city in a nation that refuses unconditional surrender. It is grossly disproportionate and unreasonable. Likewise, it is grossly disproportionate and unreasonable to use a SWAT unit on anything less than someone who is suspected to either be in the act of committing a serious, violent felony or is a fugitive wanted for having committed at least one such offense. It is the law enforcement equivalent of nuclear bombing a city in a country asking for terms of surrender because you find conditional peace offensive.

That's why I said of Jeff that if you can call the Enola Gay pilots murderers, but not call murderers SWAT officers who raid someone's house over a trivial offense (worse yet, with minimal intelligence to even know if you have the right address) and kill one or more of the occupants, you're engaging in hypocrisy. Unreasonable, disproportionate force is wrong whether it is a SWAT raid on a small time drug user (or now federal student loan evaders...) or the waging total war on a country that refuses unconditional surrender.

Here is a lesser evils depiction in art for the video junkies. You know who you are. Unfortunately the context is omitted. The captain's actions were advised against because the mast was too weak, but he heads around the horn anyway and ends up crushed because he had to cut the ropes and cause a man's death (perhaps who warned him) to save the ship, as well as his agony afterwards for his actions.

But I will say this -- if you'd like to point me to a study or to data that has looked at this question of SWAT teams and their misuse, I'd be happy to review the literature.

Start reading Radley Balko's work. Overkill is a formal academic work of his that covers it, but his blog has tons of posts on the subject.

Mark, et. al. -- what have you learned from the internet?

Oh I couldn't begin to tell you. I know it probably sounds bad, but my most important theological influences in adulthood have not usually been local. Right now I follow an amazing preacher's online sermons, who was my former pastor for a time, and he keeps me sane. I've never known anyone who is willing to risk it all and trust God the way he has, or doesn't rely on idealism or anything but good old-fashioned theology. He has a workmanlike theological outlook and preaches as if he actually expects you to act on it, and warns you about pitfalls and stumbling blocks along the way you may encounter.

But at the end in terms of intellectual pursuits, it is still books for me. They have the most depth. As far as discovery, nothing can compare to the footnotes of a great book. You just have to find them. I can get about any book loaned to me in two days from a western library for free, so maybe I'm lucky, or maybe that isn't unusual now. Good books lead to other good books in a web of connections. The Internet fits in there somewhere.

Jeff, I still don't know how to distinguish between your meta-ethical conversion and the case against the atomic bomb in Japan. So I'll just state my view of your post as I see it based on your acknowledged influences, and why it raises some concerns in my opinion.

The main thing to see is that no change in meta-ethical view is required to make a case against the morality of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Douglass MacArthur was against it, and many others at the time. All you have to do to oppose it is come up with alternate scenarios where it is the greater evil than not. Because that is all it takes for it to be morally objectionable within the lesser evil understanding. Or you could state some other objection for any reason. Say you don't think population centers should be targeted at all, or at least not if we can't discriminate better than by high altitude dumb bombs. You're done. Nothing else you need to do. No need to throw the baby out with the bath. So that's why all the introspection on the process and what you were influenced by is so interesting.

1) I see what one does with the lesser evil principle as critical to a person's moral life generally. The issue isn't war, nor killing, nor violence. We need it for mediating between options when there is moral conflict of any sort. Moral conflict is a large part of life. If doing nothing is a decent moral option, then there is no need for lesser evil evaluations, or PDE for that matter. Why do anything? Problem solved. But you've got to deprecate sins of omission that way.

2) Most human actions aren't good without qualification. Often we can only evaluate things by relative comparisons. This is better than that. Is is good? Well, its better than that is all we even need to say sometimes because that's all we can be sure of. Many deprecate the lesser evil understanding by equivocating between relative evil and intrinsic evil (and always wrong.) Thomas à Kempis, famously wrote in The Imitation of Christ: "Of two evils, the less is always to be chosen." If that is so, surely the term "lesser evil" or "necessary evil" in the common-sense understanding of "less bad of two undesirables in the face of an unavoidable choice is also valid. It presumes conflict. Or for that matter Humanae Vitae: "In truth, if it is sometimes licit to tolerate a lesser evil in order to avoid a greater evil or to promote a greater good, it is not licit, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil so that good may follow therefrom;" Or Evangelium Vitae I believe too.

3) Regarding the sins of omission, it is often overlooked that choosing to do nothing is a deliberate choice as much as a choice to act. In fact it is an act, and is not morally unproblematic for its inaction if inaction is not justifiable. But people want to critique action, and tend to give a pass to non-action.

4) In part an emphasis of '1', but to restate the idea that classic key principles such as "lesser evil" are by NO means about war, death, or even violence, is the understanding that none of these three dramatic issues are necessary. As I said, the necessary element in "lesser evil" isn't evil, but conflict. Perceived conflict in the day to day cases. Perceived conflict can often be avoided very easily. How do we act in a world where even simple choices are either conflicting, or are seen to be conflicting by others. Doing really good works has never been uncontroversial. Jesus didn't mention whether the Samaritan's community or family gave him any grief for spending time and money on someone he had no blood or legal claims upon him, but it is hard to believe they wouldn't. It wouldn't have been such an issue then, but today we'd have to ask what if the Samaritan's wife disagreed with his decision and never let him hear the end for spending money that could have been used for his family? What is the lesser evil? The nagging of his wife over doing this type of action outside the family, or the knowledge that he was showing Christ's love to a neighbor? How would you resolve that conflict?

So at the end of the day Jeff, you're post raises more questions than answers, and there are reason for concern in arguing from mass warfare to meta-ethics. As I've said, our culture has already decided by its actions that it does not wish to go down that road again. Now I could make some trouble for those who declare mass civilian casualties could never be justified under any circumstances, but difficult global circumstances are really a separate question as I'm saying. To make that case now would be to confusing the two, and that is what I think you've fallen into. I hope that doesn't sound harsh or judgmental. It isn't intended. You've raised some thorny (and good!) questions.

Likewise, it is grossly disproportionate and unreasonable to use a SWAT unit on anything less than someone who is suspected to either be in the act of committing a serious, violent felony or is a fugitive wanted for having committed at least one such offense.

I would say a nuclear strike is more like setting their house on fire and smoking them out, "them" being the military and political leaders of Japan. However, I agree with your more general point that domestic law enforcement has become much too militarized and heavy handed.

Regarding the sins of omission, it is often overlooked that choosing to do nothing is a deliberate choice as much as a choice to act.

Who here has suggested doing nothing?

Who here has suggested doing nothing?

Well, strictly speaking it isn't possible to do nothing, as I said later. But there are those who say it isn't morally licit to choose either of the lesser of two evils, whatever that means one must choose if not nothing you tell me. This denial of the lesser evils (and equivocation on the term "evil" as intrinsic as opposed to relative) is fairly common among Catholics I believe, but someone may correct me if that is wrong.

Mark, I don't claim to have read every one of your comments in the thread (in fact, I've only read, I think, the last two or three), but I think the category that is being left out of what you're saying is the category of an intrinsically evil act. Call that a Catholic category if you wish, but I find it extremely useful as a Protestant. (I usually get called a "Kantian" when I bring it up, which is funny, as I've read scarcely any Kant.) Now, the idea is that it is *never* justifiable to commit an intrinsically evil act, and a corollary is that we can tell in an uncomfortable number of cases that what is being asked is that we commit or countenance an intrinsically evil act.

Your attempt to deny the distinction between action and inaction has some _extremely_ troubling conclusions. There is an ethicist whose essay I haven't time to look up right now who has a pretty famous philosophy essay in which he starts by denying that distinction and ends up, by plausible steps, by arguing that it's legitimate to choose a person by lottery to be forcibly murdered and to have his organs taken to save two other people. And that if he resists he's trying to kill the other two people. And that doctors who don't go along with it are murderers, because for them to fail to save the people who need the organs is just the same as for them to kill someone actively. Crazy? Sure. But it starts from denying that there's any difference between failing to act and acting, and it goes from there. Indeed, if you deny that distinction, it's very difficult even to hold on to the notion that there are intrinsically evil acts that must never be done, because someone can always come up with some scenario in which the only way you can save some larger number of people is by deliberately killing just one four-year-old, or some such consequentialist example. I'm sure you're familiar with them. So I think you might want to grab back hold of the action-inaction distinction and hang on tight.

Lydia, I think Mark was saying that it is impossible to not make a moral choice when confronted with a situation imposed on you. Even when the act chosen is to not act, that's still a choice. If the choice is to continue dithering and avoiding choosing, THAT's a choice also. As a human act, such choice is always subject to moral rule. You can only morally remain in the dithering state of choosing not to select one of the positive choices if the decisio to not choose any of the positive choices is a lesser evil than choosing any of the positive choices.

It wouldn't have been such an issue then, but today we'd have to ask what if the Samaritan's wife disagreed with his decision and never let him hear the end for spending money that could have been used for his family? What is the lesser evil? The nagging of his wife over doing this type of action outside the family, or the knowledge that he was showing Christ's love to a neighbor? How would you resolve that conflict?

Mark, I maybe I am just quibbling about semantics, but I don't think of the alternatives (of action) as being in conflict so much as being either in opposition or in tension. If you have a choice that can result in evil A or evil B (depending on which way you choose), A and B are not fighting each other to "win" your choice or something. A and B rest in opposed avenues of effects from your potential action choices, that's all. Actions that lead to A are not fighting with actions that lead to B, except metaphorically - they are each vying for your consent, if you want to antropomorphize the possible action options.

That said, your example is perfectly sound as an illustration of a reasonable consideration. If the evil Sam forecasts from taking care of the beaten guy (nagging wife, no food for the kids, coming home late and completely missing the bar-mitzvah of the kid who thinks "Dad never cares about me") are high enough in evil, then he has to consider not taking care of the victim as potentially following the course of the lesser evil.

Jeffrey S: Thanks for this.

Bill: I haven't fallen into anything.

Jeffrey S: Thanks for the nice comment and the link!

On the atom bomb debate: I recently watched the movie "Why We Fight" on TV and one of the persons interviewed in that movie (I don't remember which) said that Japan had been trying to surrender for months before we dropped the bombs and that Truman would not accept their surrender. Now I've never heard anything like that before and I'm wondering if anyone here has? (And please don't tell me that the movie is 'leftist propaganda' or something. I'd prefer to concentrate on the truthfulness of the statement itself rather than the political bent of the movie-makers. Thanks!)

I think the category that is being left out of what you're saying is the category of an intrinsically evil act. Call that a Catholic category if you wish, but I find it extremely useful as a Protestant.

I left it out because I have not the slightest quibble with anyone here on the point. I accept that intrinsically evil acts are never permissible. Full stop. Nothing I've said contradicts this.

Your attempt to deny the distinction between action and inaction has some _extremely_ troubling conclusions.

Not so. Tony get's my point exactly. I can't improve upon what he said I said. The reason for the point I made and he restated well is merely a pushback for some of the reasoning by those Jeff is referring to (in my opinion) that present moral choices in such terms that only certain people in the know can really navigate it all. I find it can be manipulatory. The best moral reasoners aren't necessarily the most sophisticated, and intellectualism isn't any better than anti-intellectualism, and we have some of the former that is manipulatory and not in line with common sense in my view. I am trying to restore balance as I see it.

If you're afraid that if people aren't nervous enough about acting such that they'll act with impudence, I'd say that it is a perspective that needs to be balanced by the fairly well accepted truth in ethics (seen historically or otherwise) that to err on the side of courage is wise. Frankly, it a man's perspective, and the former is a mom's view. There needs to be a balance between the two. This is my personal experience in life FWIW, and not just a judgement in the abstract.

I think that judgment is actually backed up by people who train executives and officers: there are times when the worst option to take is to delay choice. Even if between 3 or 4 courses of action you cannot decide whether 3 is worse than 4, you can still be sure that both 3 and 4 are better than "none of the above, sit on your hands", so you go ahead and select one without ever being sure that 3 was worse than 4. Such occasions, though, are almost always under pressure of some extreme time constraint, something not chosen at leisure. (Is that why men are called on to deal with emergencies more than women are? I hesitate to say so, but maybe its an example of psychological make-up falling in with the physical capacity.)

that present moral choices in such terms that only certain people in the know can really navigate it all. I find it can be manipulatory.

I find that obscure. I'll give you an example: In the movie "Clear and Present Danger" (I think it is--which isn't a very good movie, so I'm not recommending it) there's a scene where a soldier is supposed to shoot some kind of "thingy" that will provide a target or something that will then guarantee that this whole house belonging to a drug lord gets blown up. I don't understand the technology of it, but the bottom line is that if he shoots this gun-like thing, which isn't really a gun, all the people in this house are going to get smooshed, and he knows that. But this is just a private house, and there are all kinds of people in it. At the last minute, when the sharpshooter is aiming, he notices a little child or a couple of little children running around playing outside, and he realizes that this house is a fully occupied civilian target. He pauses and says, "Uh, sir..." to his commanding officer. And the commanding officer says something like, "Hurry up, shoot!" So he does, and that's it. The house gets smooshed, and later people are pretty uncomfortable about the children's bodies being brought out of the wreckage on the television news.

Did it require intellectualism for that soldier to be "in the know" and realize that there was a problem with what he was being told to do? No way. It was pure human and humane instinct. That, "Uh, sir..." was a completely instinctive reaction against killing those kids.

So I don't know who is being manipulative and requiring that people be specially in the know. Maybe I'm missing this because I haven't read the whole thread, but so far, if I'm understanding the context correctly, I'm not seeing it.

The part about action/inaction I was responding to was this:


Regarding the sins of omission, it is often overlooked that choosing to do nothing is a deliberate choice as much as a choice to act. In fact it is an act, and is not morally unproblematic for its inaction if inaction is not justifiable. But people want to critique action, and tend to give a pass to non-action.

Well, yes, that's right. I do. I do want to "give a pass to non-action" in many, many cases. Are there cases where action is mandatory? Sure. As in giving your baby his food. Rescuing the little girl from drowning when you're an Olympic swimmer passing by where she is drowning.

But actually, the cases where action is *totally and unequivocally mandatory* are a heck of a lot fewer than the cases where *refraining* from some action is totally and unequivocally mandatory. And I'm sorry, but the rhetoric of "giving a pass to inaction" definitely gives aid and comfort to the people writing the consequentialist scenarios: "But if you don't do this, it's really just as though you're _killing_ that much larger number of innocent people. Inaction! Harrumph! Don't give me that. Inaction is really action too," and so on and so forth. Inaction isn't really action, and I think we have to keep that always firmly in mind.

This has nothing to do with a mom's vs. a man's perspective or "acting with imprudence." This is an important philosophical distinction.

I question the limits and demarcations of torture. I know that parents will spank children, and if the matter is serious enough some welts and bruises can sometimes result. Is that morally illegitimate? I do not think so. How can it therefore be immoral to use non lethal physical pain on a member of the Taliban? It can also be considered a form of punishment.

And of COURSE that scene from CAPD was done as an anti-American thing. "Yep, we're just evil and this is how we roll."

I had a look at the _Master and Commander_ clip, and it seems that the choice is between abandoning a man who's fallen overboard by cutting themselves loose from the sea anchor and thereby letting it be swept in the opposite direction, or staying put while he tries to swim towards them with the danger that the entire ship will sink. The assumption seems to be that it's impossible for anyone else to swim out and help him since the sea is so stormy.

I think this situation is a bit knottier than a straightforward "chieftain in the woods" scenario, but naturally I remain skeptical that the captain made the most moral choice.

Mark, I maybe I am just quibbling about semantics, but I don't think of the alternatives (of action) as being in conflict so much as being either in opposition or in tension.

Tony, you are really on today. We seem to be on the same wavelength. I wish I could buy you a drink. Someday maybe. Exactly right. A tension. But I do think it is conflict of a type. Once you understand it is a natural tension between poles in God's world you don't need to see it as conflict, but I would say for those that don't they see a conflict. Recall I mentioned perceived conflict. There are circumstances I know of that you intend to as God directs and defend the fatherless, and I can assure you you'll be opposed by all the forces the womenfolk can muster. This is where C. S. Lewis comes in handy, rather than your local pastor. Thank God for old books and all that, and old folks if you can find them.

That said, your example is perfectly sound as an illustration of a reasonable consideration. If the evil Sam forecasts from taking care of the beaten guy (nagging wife, no food for the kids, coming home late and completely missing the bar-mitzvah of the kid who thinks "Dad never cares about me") are high enough in evil, then he has to consider not taking care of the victim as potentially following the course of the lesser evil.

Yes, absolutely true. Theology matters here. If God has really called me to do something, or at least if I am persuing good works correctly within his plan, there must be a harmony. There can't be a conflict between what is good for my family and what is good for others. You are absolutely correct that as you presented the case above the greater evil is taking care of the beaten guy.

But there is another possibility. It may be that the Samaritan's family doesn't recognize that there is actually an excess of money to take care of them, and plenty of time to care for them, all in God's providence, and that makes it ok for one to reach beyond the family (with neighbor love) and also take care of the beaten guy. So they might take it as a given that taking care of someone without blood or legal claims is ipso facto in conflict with their own good, regardless of any effect. A perceived threat, rather than a real one. And the neighbors talk you know. The issue you brought up is well understood within the Church in my opinion, and the latter not so much. People swing from one extreme to the other. On the former, I've heard Christian communities go on an on about it ever since I've been a Christian. I am constantly regaled with stories of missionaries, pastors, etc. who've neglected their families because of the reasons you mention. But we must steer between two poles, as always. If I've heard the phrase "family first" once I've heard it a thousand times since I've been a Christian. They serve as conversation stoppers, theological-reasoning enders, and "good luck with that" happy-talk. We must steer between two poles, and there is a tension between them. So in the contrasting case I've raised, it may be the lesser of two evils is taking care of the beaten guy. When you stand before God to give an account, will it help to say "But my wife really gave me the business, and the neighbors talk you know. My pastor was no help because he taught that I shouldn't do anything that my wife didn't agree with." I doubt it. But like I said, it all comes down to theology. It is critically important, and most communities have imported a lot of things into it that don't belong.

This has nothing to do with a mom's vs. a man's perspective or "acting with imprudence." This is an important philosophical distinction.

So restate it in clear philosophical terms Lydia, and let's have at it. The movie you mentioned I remember vividly, and that because who can forget Willem Dafoe and his "uh-oh" moment because of its nonsense. Pure Hollywood. Who sees that and says "yeah that could really happen by non-idiots"? Why that is a good example against anything I've said I don't see.

I did. Many, many acts are intrinsically evil. Only in a very narrow set of cases can we even begin to call a failure to act intrinsically evil. The distinction is between acting and not acting. Not acting, even when it results in the deaths of many innocent, may very well be morally _required_. Acting so as directly and deliberately to bring about the deaths of innocent people is always wrong. How much more exposition does that require? Therefore, it is merely confusing matters to say,

it is often overlooked that choosing to do nothing is a deliberate choice as much as a choice to act. In fact it is an act, and is not morally unproblematic for its inaction if inaction is not justifiable. But people want to critique action, and tend to give a pass to non-action.

Moreover, since you claim to support the position that intrinsically evil acts should never be done, period, why even say all of that? Who is just talking about "being imprudent"? Nobody. The main post was about dropping the bomb on whole cities. So where's the beef?

And I asked _you_ a question which you haven't answered: What in the world are you talking about when you refer to "pushback for some of the reasoning by those Jeff is referring to (in my opinion) that present moral choices in such terms that only certain people in the know can really navigate it all"? Maybe I'm asking this partly since, in the main post, I'm one of the people Jeff is referring to, so this made me wonder what you had in mind.

But actually, the cases where action is *totally and unequivocally mandatory* are a heck of a lot fewer than the cases where *refraining* from some action is totally and unequivocally mandatory. And I'm sorry, but the rhetoric of "giving a pass to inaction" definitely gives aid and comfort to the people writing the consequentialist scenarios: "But if you don't do this, it's really just as though you're _killing_ that much larger number of innocent people. Inaction!

Lest you doubt Lydia's accuracy about what people say, this is exactly what Sir Bors is required to deal with in Le Morte D'Arthur: "if you don't sleep with these women, I will kill them. When he declines to so act, he is accused of "wanting to kill the women."

Sir Bors is no more required to sin and save the women than he is required to kill himself. He can refuse.

But Lydia, there IS a small moral defect in that story, that Mark's point gets to: There is absolutely no reason for Bors to accept the predicament placed in front of him. He is a knight - he can go after the murderer who is threatening the women, he can attempt to rescue them, he can go off and try to raise some help. He can dissemble that he "can think about it" while he gets in a position to do more. He isn't required to simply do nothing in order to avoid committing fornication. He has options of action that are good and worthy choices. Why is it, so often, that the list of "here's your choice" is so truncated? Is it that people want to be constrained into extremely narrow options? Where is their creativity? Their capacity to reason about the true scope of the problem - "these women are being threatened with murder, how shall I help them defeat the murderer?"

I agree wholeheartedly that there are times when non-action is a licit, even the best option. And it certainly is not morally equivalent to the lesser (or greater) evil of the options to do a positive act. Sir Bors choosing not to act is not the same as choosing to murder the women. There are times in my family where I know there is nothing I can say that will improve the situation, so I say nothing. (But I don't necessarily do nothing: I can pray that God in his grace and power fix the problem. That's not "nothing".)

I did. Many, many acts are intrinsically evil. Only in a very narrow set of cases can we even begin to call a failure to act intrinsically evil. The distinction is between acting and not acting. Not acting, even when it results in the deaths of many innocent, may very well be morally _required_. Acting so as directly and deliberately to bring about the deaths of innocent people is always wrong. How much more exposition does that require?

I have no problem with this, as I've already said. I fully agree with you. There is nothing to disagree upon.

Moreover, since you claim to support the position that intrinsically evil acts should never be done, period, why even say all of that? Who is just talking about "being imprudent"? Nobody. The main post was about dropping the bomb on whole cities. So where's the beef?

As I explained to Paul, Jeff has confused the matter by not limiting the context to dropping the bomb. And I've asked him repeatedly to say what is his position on "lesser evil" generally, or to agree or not with me that dropping the bomb may be considered morally objectionable on grounds entirely different from those who he says influenced him would say. He's declined. The beef, as I've said already, is that he argued from Hiroshima to some not clearly stated epiphany on meta-ethics. What is the connection? I'd like to know, because the stakes comprise our moral viewpoint generally as I've tried to show.

And I asked _you_ a question which you haven't answered: What in the world are you talking about when you refer to "pushback for some of the reasoning by those Jeff is referring to (in my opinion) that present moral choices in such terms that only certain people in the know can really navigate it all"? Maybe I'm asking this partly since, in the main post, I'm one of the people Jeff is referring to, so this made me wonder what you had in mind.

Well, Jeff provided a link to zippy's blog and claimed a strong influence, and I read about an hour of the torturous logic I've come to expect, and the puzzlement of others as to the source of it. But generally, for example, the usual suspects use Just War Theory only in the negative sense such that it distorts. "You think you've got a just war? Well, you don't and here's why . . . Is that a part of JWT? Well it should be! Ok." And ditto with "lesser evil." "The lesser evil is still evil dontcha know." Those who don't feel constrained to cite anyone that shares their view no matter how ideosyncratic, and boy are you a consequentialist if you don't agree. I wasn't thinking of you Lydia, not that it should matter or that I ought to care because it was no insult. But you've challenged me to answer and I've done the best to do it.

Sweet Holy Moly! Tony, Le Morte D'Arthur???? Man, you rule! Can you recommend a translation? Or is there a standard one? Or did you read it in Middle English or whatever? I must have one.

Well I'm out. I'm headed out early morning to a nearby uninhabited island to do some kayaking. Not much more I can say on this anyway. Tony, I'll check back and see what you recommend for the book Sunday night.

What in the world are you talking about when you refer to "pushback for some of the reasoning by those Jeff is referring to (in my opinion) that present moral choices in such terms that only certain people in the know can really navigate it all"?

Ok, here's another way to say what I meant before I call it a night by way of example only with JWT. The type of folks I had in mind have a curious trait when it comes to that. They'll yammer on about it and analyze it as long as you want, which is fine, but just ask them what in their opinion are historical examples of wars that were just and . . . . bzzzzt. After a stunned silence they sometimes stammer out WWII, and sometimes nothing. To some people it is primarily a theory for negative use. That is a curious fact, and revealing. In this sense it used as it wasn't intended, because when it was theorized the ability of sovereigns to act in their interests was presumed.

Another characteristic is the tendency to see ordinary people as incapable of correct moral reasoning and defacto consequentialists because of it. That is preposterous. Even Jeff above plainly said "conservatives who support the consequentialist case . . . usually resort to hyperbole, mischaracterization, straw-men arguments, etc. in their increasingly desperate attempts to avoid the straightforward case for avoiding consequentialism."

See what I mean? There are those with the special knowledge, and those without. There is no commonsense presumption of good moral judgement by good people. That's a problem.

Oops, Tony--This is seriously not meant as snark, but I believe you have the scenario wrong. The ladies are all threatening to *commit suicide* if he won't sleep with one of them. And it's a whole bunch of them. Even if you want to say he could grab one of them and pull her back from the edge or whatever, he wasn't going to be able to save the lot of them.

And I've asked him repeatedly to say what is his position on "lesser evil" generally, or to agree or not with me that dropping the bomb may be considered morally objectionable on grounds entirely different from those who he says influenced him would say.

Mark, don't you think, "What is your position on the lesser evil generally" is darned vague? I mean, why should any blogger answer such a question? I wouldn't. I'd ask you to give a specific scenario where you had some reason to think from what I'd said that I would come to the wrong conclusion, and then see what conclusion I came to. And maybe tell me why, from what I'd said, you think I might come to what you would consider to be the wrong conclusion in the example.

As for the latter, I would also share Jeff's hesitation to oppose dropping the bomb on purely consequentialist grounds, because in that particular context, the more important thing is to get people to stop thinking like consequentialists.

Another characteristic is the tendency to see ordinary people as incapable of correct moral reasoning and defacto consequentialists because of it. That is preposterous. Even Jeff above plainly said "conservatives who support the consequentialist case . . . usually resort to hyperbole, mischaracterization, straw-men arguments, etc. in their increasingly desperate attempts to avoid the straightforward case for avoiding consequentialism."

Well, that's a preposterous interpretation of what he said. He wasn't deprecating ordinary people's ability to come to correct moral conclusions _generally_. He was saying that on this particular case people's thinking has been confused, and that that includes conservatives, and that they fall into de facto consequentialism to defend it. That is _undeniably_ true concerning the bomb and WWII. Now, in our schools generally utilitarianism is all the rage, so kids are being taught it too. This is the "elite" poisoning the ordinary people, so whatever effects it has on ordinary people in the end, it needn't be an indictment of ordinary people's moral intuitions nor advocacy of "intellectualism." If anything, it's the intellectuals who dream up these stupid would-be moral dilemmas and force-feed them to young people who still retain some shreds of moral absolutism when they get to a college "ethics" class.

Frankly, Zippy or anybody else wouldn't have to write reams of what you find torturous if people would just use their basic moral sense and say, "Yeah, I guess incinerating an entire city full of men, women, children, and infants is always wrong. I see that now."

Hi everyone,

There seems to be an unspoken assumption that dropping the atomic bomb constituted an act of direct killing. I'm not so sure. The relevant question is: what were President Truman's intentions? (I'm focusing on President Truman, because as he himself memorably put it, "The buck stops here.") It's hard to say what his true intentions, of course, because politicians often lie. What we can discuss are his stated intentions.

Here are some excerpts from President Truman's radio report to the American people on the Potsdam conference, dated August 9, 1945:

"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction....

"Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.

"We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us."

Japan surrendered a few days later.

Judging purely from President Truman's words, he did not intend the loss of civilian life that the atomic bombs caused, as an end. Nor did he intend it as a means; his stated aim was to shatter Japan's ability to make war by destroying its war industries.

After the war, Truman declared that "it was my responsibility to force the Japanese warlords to come to terms as quickly as possible with the minimum loss of lives."

It is certainly possible to challenge President Truman's veracity, however, and we now know that Truman was aware of Japanese peace overtures a month before the end of the war, and rebuffed them. On the other hand, he may have honestly believed that these overtures were not genuine. For more details, see the online article, "Was Hiroshima Necessary?" in "Time" magazine (September 5, 1960).

Readers may also be unaware of the fact that during World War II, the Allies frequently airdropped leaflets on target cities, urging civilians to flee. Before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the U.S. had previously dropped leaflets warning civilians of air raids on 35 Japanese cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Let me add that I've visited the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, as well as the Peace Memorial Museum. One thing that I was surprised to learn when I visited the museum was just how heavily involved Hiroshima was in the Japanese war effort, as an industrial and naval center, used by the military. Speaking of which, readers may not be aware that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 10,000 Japanese troops.

Hmmm. Not so black and white after all, is it?

Having said that, I wonder what would have happened if America had given a little demonstration of the atom bomb's awesome capacities before dropping it.

Wrong on two counts; Korea, if Macarthur couldn't handle the Cinese when they did cross the Yalu, how would he have accomplished an invasion. BTW, he was a terribly overrated general and only Ridgeway's leadership turned things around, Mac even at one point admitted his failure, not the first either.
The A bombing of Japan, phenomenal comment there above. I assume the commentator would have lead the beach assault, one of many that would have been required, but would he also have been one of the estimated one million allied casualties? In the name of humanity of course. Estimates based on earlier campaigns. Even after the A bombs there was resistance to surrender at general staff, the emperor broke a deadlock and insisted on it.

Vince, thanks for commenting. The issues you raise have, of course, been hashed out in great detail at Zippy's blog and elsewhere. I'm going to state this idea in my own words, because I know how Zippy hates having words put in his mouth, even by allies, but my response would be that you can't un-intend things by fiat when you know that your direct and deliberate act is going to cause them instantly as an effect. "Didn't intend this" isn't the same thing as "wish it didn't happen" or "wish it weren't necessary." Now, I think (though I think Zippy is uncomfortable with this approach) that probability has to come in here. If, without the intervention of some other evil person, my *own* act is going to cause the death of a real innocent in some fairly direct way, and I know this with probability approaching 1, then I can't un-intend it. Claims of double effect can only apply when some aspect of this is not the case. E.g., where the probability is substantially less, or where the causal chain is messy and indirect (which, come to think of it, will affect probabilities), or where the deaths will actually be caused by someone else's evil acts, or something like that.

The leafletting is not irrelevant, in my opinion, but only if they had good reason to think it would work to remove innocents from the city. If they knew quite clearly that it wouldn't work, and presumably they _did_ know that it wouldn't work, then destroying the city was not licit.

I have no sympathy for willing human shields. I'm quite happy to consider them combatants. Babies, for example, are a different matter.

By the way, I've learned a lot from the Internet, to get back to Jeff's question. Unfortunately, I'd prefer not to list here some of the things I've learned, because they are so incendiary. For example, if I've learned that author A and B are crazy, and that's likely to bring down hordes of supporters of A and B in wrath on the thread, I won't name A and B. But for the record, there are people--and here I'm thinking not of bloggers but of public figures and one book author--that I was previously inclined to think quite well of and even support, and the sheer amount of information available on the Internet has enabled me to learn better.

I also have not changed my mind on Islam but have learned a lot more information about the reasons that Islam is incompatible with modern life and that it really does matter what religion immigrants espouse. I would say that ten years ago I could have ended up going either direction on that question. Again, the information on the Internet has been relevant to what I have concluded.

I've become less sympathetic to the unqualified use of slogans like "equality of rights" and "free speech," though I don't condemn these slogans absolutely. But I've come to realize more clearly, as a result of Internet discussions, the reasons why they need to be handled with care.

I've come to realize that there are some arguments, aside from human rights violations of other countries, that can be given against free trade, though I'm still in general pro-free trade. But I think I can do a much better job now of showing both sides of the argument.

I was previously much more inclined to be bitter about America's foreign policy and even to argue that the life issues are so important and our record on them so dismal that we have, as it were, "no right to talk" to Muslim countries about their human life record. By hammering these things out on the Internet I've developed my own idea which I call "incommensurable evils," and now I resist "We should make common cause with X because Y is worse" positions in either direction. And while I retain real sympathy for what many would consider an "isolationist" foreign policy, I've recognized, from watching others, the very real dangers of that deep bitterness and anti-Americanism that can come along with those sympathies.

So I would say I've definitely shifted in my thinking and am not the same political person that I was before interacting in the blogosphere. But it's not so cut and dried as, "I used to think p and now I think ~p."

Now wait, Mark. This might be a matter of general impression, but surely you don't want to equate the commonsense presumption of good moral judgement by good people with the general judgment of X large (even majority) group of people at X time, as a matter of form. The most that Jeff's initial posting suggests, I think, is that there are times and places where the general consensus of the majority is not morally reliable, neither with respect to conclusions nor with respect to principles and reasoning. We have lots of examples to use to show that: in 1995, the majority of the population in the US wanted abortion available during the 1st and 2nd trimester without significant limits. Back in the year 400 or something, even the majority of legalists and writers in the Roman Empire were apparently hard pressed to state fundamental moral reasons to oppose using pain to extract confession of crimes.

The correct moral analysis for a complex situation has always been a matter of difficulty, even for people of good will. It's one of the reasons why civil war is so morally dangerous: even when it is warranted, there are usually men of good will who cannot agree that it is warranted for sure, and then "ordinary folk" who are used to looking up to men of good will, learning, and high repute are confused by the different stances held by opposed groups of such men. It was thousands of years into human history before the PDE was stated in a clear manner - before that people surely understood it innately, but they probably understood it imperfectly and applied it imperfectly a lot of the time. Most people today are not in a vastly different position.

I do agree that there is a strong tendency to use JWT to create such a stance about war that effectively all wars have been unjust. I think that those who do so are mistaken about the meaning of such concepts as "reasonably certain" and so on. But even apart from war, many, many people (including those of good will) find it difficult to rightly account for their sense that X action is justifiable by PDE. They might be right about the action, but still not be able to express it appropriately. It is not easy, for example, to state the object of an act without erring and discussing the end of the act. Most people (including those who are not consequentialists) don't even grasp that there is a difference. I don't think that we should be ready to either dismiss PDE itself as a way of analyzing difficult moral situations, NOR give way to these erroneous accounts of why an act is justified merely because they come from men of good will doing their best. Yes, we should want our conclusions to be in accord with the judgment of men of good will, but not blindly so.

Vincent, great comment.

I'm glad to see that someone else understands what the word "intention" means. That's a rare talent 'round these parts.

"Philosophy triumphs over past and future evils, but present evils triumph over it."
-- la Rochefoucauld

Tony,

With regard to the definition of 'pro-life', you would do well to consider what your opponents think of the term. If you pay close attention, they remove it as much as possible and use the term anti-abortion instead.
A robust defense of life, whether against the state and it's myriad ways of destroying us, or against a woman and the permission she's been given under this regime to be a petite tyrant, is the only way. A consensus about what the term means is meaningless, especially since the largest group that uses it is currently part of the lobbying industry that has grown up around lobbying about abortion, but never actually ending it.

I suppose the main thing I've changed my mind on, due mainly to information from the internet, is climate change. I don't understand the science nearly as fully as I would like, but I accept its reality for the same reason I accept that Tasmania is a real place: Honest, informed and reliable people tell me so. I was politically inclined to be dismissive of global warming. The image of failed socialist wackademic revolucionarios re-inventing themselves as environmental activists, seeking to shut down the means of production that they failed to win state ownership of, fits my mental template of the Left pretty snugly. I tend to trust the power of aggregate knowledge. When researchers in widely separate fields find evidence pointing to the same phenomenon, that's not to be cried down as a conspiracy, human nature doesn't work that way. The much ballyhooed corrections to this or that observation, which are seized upon as evidence of AGW's falsity? They all come from climate scientists, engaging in normal scientific self-scrutiny--not from deniers.

they remove it as much as possible and use the term anti-abortion instead.

Let 'em. I'll gladly sign on for that label.

Good God, Jeff writes a post confessing that certain people on the internet have convinced him that where once he was right he now knows he was wrong (a fairly humble thing to do, and so rare that he ought to fall under the EPA's protection), invites others to do the same, and Mark blows a resentful cloud of ancillary smoke.

In the spirit of the post, I will confess that Zippy convinced me that the Iraq War was unjust; Lydia made me think harder about certain moral matters (such as reputedly licit methods for dealing with ectopic pregnancy); Paul Cella has taught me to have hope for the generations behind me (it ain't easy though), an appreciation for the history of our republic, and to re-evaluate the role of usury in our economics (Zippy too, here); I have been stunned by the contrast in sensibility between good Christian women and their feminist counterparts, have decided that I'd make a good polygamist, and can only hope that their role as a redemptive leaven in a society that values them less and less is a phenomenon not yet fully risen.

And then there is George R., who has taught me that some things never change.

What can I say, Bill? I just keep telling the truth on the off-chance that somebody someday will listen.


Stranger things have happened.

I just keep telling the truth on the off-chance that somebody someday will listen.

George R., I must admonish you for making this pitiful joke of questionable taste. That's my territory.

Judging purely from President Truman's words, he did not intend the loss of civilian life that the atomic bombs caused, as an end. Nor did he intend it as a means;

Vincent, I have read literature that included excerpts of discussions of the bombings before the Bomb was used. Included in it was the knowledge that a firestorm would occur, (which had already happened in Dresden and a few other cities, probably in the first instances by "accident" in the sense that we didn't realize that would happen). In addition, the accounts include references to the effect on civilians in terms of horror and fear following such firestorm. I don't know if this literature was accurate in the cited material, and I don't know if this part of the thought-process was brought to Truman's attention. But in the absence of certainty, I think it slightly more likely that he was. If not directly, then at least by reliance on advisers who DID know about the effects, and most likely DID include that in their calculus of deciding where to drop the Bomb to get the most certain effect of ending the war. At least with respect to an adviser who had thought about this, one would have suspect that he thought the civilian deaths in that manner would help the war effort by helping to increase the Japanese revulsion of continued effort at the highest levels (which it did).

In order to establish more certainly that the deaths of the civilians was not an added facet of the overall plan, you would have to establish that there we NO significant military facilities - without 80,000 civilians around - to attack. More than that, you would have to establish that there were no OBJECTS to attack that could have demonstrated the power and destructive force without killing all those people. I would love to see some evidence from war records of a discussion in which the planners looked for such sites and simply had to reject one after another after another because they wouldn't demonstrate the destructive power. I have asked probably 10 times on the internet, looking for someone willing to stand for the proposition that there were simply no useful sites free of 10s of thousands of civilians, and I have yet to find one. So, I conclude (tentatively) that there were such other sites, and that the deaths of the civilians was indeed a part of the object at least on the part of the advisers and planners. Whether they passed that facet of things on to Truman, and whether he asked the right pointed questions about the plans, I have no idea. But "the buck stops here."

Which is all by way of observing that I don't it is necessary to treat the result of killing some civilians at Hiroshima as intrinsically evil (and therefore not amenable to the PDE methodology) in order to find that the bombing was still immoral: it can be considered to fail PDE standards even apart from the prior question.

Here's another thing I have learned (more thoroughly) from the internet, Jeff: intelligent people who are striving mightily to be good and are listening carefully to the Church can still disagree about how the moral rules apply. I take this to be part and parcel of the "clouding of the intellect" brought about by original sin. Even when we are doing our utmost to be good, our thinking still can fall short of God's ways of thinking. Our warped wills can also occlude truth from us. For that reason, it helps to be able to fall back on the help of men who are both of the highest caliber in intellect and wisdom, but also of highest possible repute in holiness: the apostles and Church Fathers. For such men, we can be confident that their wills were not warping their intellects in such a way as to drive them into grievous error.

Hi Tony,

I've been doing some more digging, after reading your post. Re the decision to bomb Hiroshima, the following links might be of interest (if you haven't already seen them):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Choice_of_targets
http://www.dannen.com/decision/targets.html

It seems that "psychological factors" played a critical role in the choice of targets. The intention was to drop the bomb in a location where it would do as much damage as possible, and selecting a military target in an isolated area ran the risk of causing little damage if the bomb were nor precisely targeted. At the second meeting of the Target Committee held at Los Alamos on 10-11 May 1945, "It was agreed that for the initial use of the weapon any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb."

Damage, however, is not the same thing as loss of civilian life (which is one reason why I hate the term, "collateral damage"). One could argue that the intention was to destroy buildings, not people.

Re alternatives to bombing cities like Hiroshima, you might find this online discussion on why the U.S. didn't bomb Mt. Fuji helpful:

http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/archive/index.php/t-236171.html

Key factors: the U.S. only had two atomic bombs at the time, and it was not known if they would even work. Bombing Fuji would have been a waste of a scarce weapon, and it would probably not have induced the Japanese leaders to surrender.

On the other hand, there is evidence from the minutes of the meeting at Los Alamos that Kyoto was selected as a target partly because of its large population:

"This target is an urban industrial area with a population of 1,000,000. It is the former capital of Japan and many people and industries are now being moved there as other areas are being destroyed. From the psychological point of view there is the advantage that Kyoto is an intellectual center for Japan and the people there are more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget. (Classified as an AA Target)"

Any why didn't Kyoto get picked? You can thank Secretary of War Henry Stimson for that. He and his wife had honeymooned there decades earlier, and still had fond memories of the place.

Lydia,

Re the definition of intention: I agree that you can't wish bad effects away. But the mere certainty of a bad effect occurring doesn't make it intentional. One has to aim at it in order to intend it.

In philosophical jargon: I would agree that if A logically entails B then if you intend A then you intend B. For instance, if you intend to blow a man to bits then you certainly intend to kill him. In any case, civilian casualties in war aren't equivalent to blowing a target that one is aiming at to bits. Foresight and intent are not the same thing. If one does not desire civilian deaths and has made some effort to avoid them, then it is fair to say that they are not intended.

On the other hand, there is such a crime as reckless homicide, and I think Hiroshima would certainly fall under that category. Much more could have been done to minimize the loss of life - for example, a warning of the graphic effects of the atomic bomb.

Mark, don't you think, "What is your position on the lesser evil generally" is darned vague? I mean, why should any blogger answer such a question?

Fair point. But nothing is as vague and sweeping as the charges here against "consequentialists" and "consequentialism," and I'm attempting to grapple with it. The definitions given here are entirely ideosyncratic.

Restricted to the WWII case of justification of atomic bombing on "lesser evil" considerations (the objection being it is "consequentialist" thinking) is has problems. But if it turns out that this supposed moral principle is not generalizable it questions whole grounds for the objection.

What good is some trumpeting a supposed moral rule that cannot be generalized? In other words, would anyone here advocate changing the phrase commonly used in teaching children from "consider the consequences of your actions!" to "don't consider the consequences of your actions!"? Of course not. That's crazy talk. The point is that moral reasoning involves considering the results of actions as one input among many. That single input does not trump the others, and may be ignored entirely in the presence of more important inputs that trump it. But the idea that considering this one input constitutes "consequentialism" is an entirely ideosyncratic understanding of moral decision making generally. That is a massive problem for this view of ethics. Can anyone cite any classic source for such an anti-realist view?

As I, Tony, and you have pointed out, one can obviously object on other grounds! So how it passes as good reasoning to link the issue of the legitimacy of "lesser evil" issues brought in by the ideosyncratic and incoherent understanding of consequentialism to Hiroshima I do not see.

So you can try to limit the context of zippy's brand of "consequentialism" to the WWII case vis-a-vis Jeff's claimed understanding of it all you want, but it only highlights the problem. Why is this supposed better way of moral reasoning not generalizable?

So as I've been saying all along, the linkage of these issues is misguided, and revealing. As in the case of JWT's common use by the usual suspect these days, the use of this form of "consequentialism" is entirely negative. It can't be used for any positive purposes, nor can it be generalized. There are things that happen that nothing can justify. Full stop. Nothing. This is not new. But it is crazy talk to say that this fact should make us change these classic meta-ethical understandings, and in fact not even zippy actually does unless you've ever heard him favor teaching children NOT to consider the consequences of their actions.

Now wait, Mark. This might be a matter of general impression, but surely you don't want to equate the commonsense presumption of good moral judgement by good people with the general judgment of X large (even majority) group of people at X time, as a matter of form. The most that Jeff's initial posting suggests, I think, is that there are times and places where the general consensus of the majority is not morally reliable, neither with respect to conclusions nor with respect to principles and reasoning.

Quite right Tony. Surely I don't mean that. We know the social nature of the matter. Groups of people can be terribly misguided in their opinions to say the least. I get all that. Still, anything good that people do depends on a common sense reasoning capability that can't be taught in the way abstract things can in what we call "education."

So I was talking about something different. We must remind ourselves that morality isn't a matter of abstract education --not a matter of education so-called at all. A child's moral training isn't abstract as other forms of education. It is learned by other ways. If you try to make good people by abstract teaching of people not raised with good moral character you'll just make more clever cheats and liars. Aristotle knew this. My point was not that your average Joe was a latent St. Benedict, but that looking to meta-ethics as a method for making people better moral reasoners is dubious. It could only serve as a limiter to what people can do in a negative sense, and in fact I just argued above that that is all it is used for. Bottom line is that it is certainly fair to appeal to people's sense of justice, sympathy, etc. in arguing for one's view of Hiroshima. But it is not a fair move to try to rejigger meta-ethics ad-hoc to rule out some actions and not others. Either you're dealing with a moral rule or you're not.

Mark, I guess you just aren't familiar with the term "consequentialist," then. Are you seriously implying that Zippy and Jeff and some little handful of us *made up* the use of the term being made here? I mean, heck, I think any philosopher would know what we were talking about. Allegedly, according to you, you are _not_ a consequentialist because you believe in absolute prohibitions against intrinsically wrong actions. Congratulations. You supposedly agree with us.

There is nothing strange or odd about bringing in the issue of consequentialism in connection with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing. It has a goodly pedigree going back at least to G.E.M. Anscombe, who was no fuzzy-head. And aside from pedigree, most of us know perfectly well what we are talking about: That is--some of us think bombing the cities was intrinsically wrong, while others think that it wasn't, and the others try to argue their point by pointing to the "greater life lost" had they invaded, etc., etc., which is simply to beg the question against those who think it was intrinsically wrong! If you think the issue of moral absolutes and intrinsically wrong acts is irrelevant here, then either you're very inexperienced in such debates or you're very confused.

Is an anti-consequentialist position "generalizable"? What in the world do you mean by "generalizable"? In one sense, of course. There are tons of intrinsically wrong acts out there that can't be justified by consequences, but the world is fully of people trying to do so. Take your pick. So it's an extremely widespread and highly relevant problem and issue.

Frankly, I can't for the life of me figure out why a person who claims to believe that there are intrinsically wrong acts has any problem whatsoever with the main post. You should be congratulating Jeff, and instead you're vaguely carping. I'm afraid--sorry, but I know how tough you are and that you can take it--it does rather tend to confirm the image some of my colleagues have had of you as a person who just wants to make a nuisance of himself because he is rather full of himself.

Mark, I guess you just aren't familiar with the term "consequentialist," then. Are you seriously implying that Zippy and Jeff and some little handful of us *made up* the use of the term being made here? I mean, heck, I think any philosopher would know what we were talking about. Allegedly, according to you, you are _not_ a consequentialist because you believe in absolute prohibitions against intrinsically wrong actions. Congratulations. You supposedly agree with us.

Lydia, of course I never said anyone here made up the term. I said the meaning of the term has been changed by zippy, and whether endorsed by Jeff or not is unclear. But if I'm wrong about that, then I'm wrong and that's that. We've had past discussions on matters such as trolley problems, PDE, and such in the past that were highly contentious and exposed a great deal of separation. Once in the past I commented that I thought the issue was that some of us didn't really accept PDE, and you agreed. All of this is perfectly fine with me --perfectly fine-- but that is one of the parts of my understanding when things are discussed along these lines. As long as assumptions are stated there is no problem whatever to me.

Frankly, I can't for the life of me figure out why a person who claims to believe that there are intrinsically wrong acts has any problem whatsoever with the main post. You should be congratulating Jeff, and instead you're vaguely carping. I'm afraid--sorry, but I know how tough you are and that you can take it--it does rather tend to confirm the image some of my colleagues have had of you as a person who just wants to make a nuisance of himself because he is rather full of himself.

So I should endorse arriving at a conclusion not justified by the stated reasons? That would be because the ends justifies the means? And I never said I believed that the bombing of Hiroshima was an *intrinsically* evil act. I said it could have been wrong on other grounds, but we're not having that discussion now and I've not taken a position on it here. I would have said I think it was reasonable to consider it justified at the time though, if anyone had asked. I'm always willing to put all cards on the table.

And whether it is easy or not to handle your opinion of my character that you suppose has added force by citing your colleagues, I can assure you that one factor that could help me is the way a few of them have ended their association here by disagreements over substance that were imputed to character issues of others, including you. I wish you didn't have a foot headed down that road. For all my faults, real and imagined, I can assure you I've learned from philosophy that it is unwise to speculate publicly on the supposed character flaws of others, and certainly not as the explanation for their expressed views. At the end of the day, we aren't entitled to be annoyed when people don't please us. That is not to say one can't speculate over a few beers with a buddy sometimes as a coping mechanism, but even then in my experience the two of us invariably talk ourselves out of this folly in so doing so.

Okay, well, Jeff S. became convinced that the bombing destruction of the cities *was* intrinsically wrong. And once something is intrinsically wrong, then consequences don't matter, and it's a waste of time to discuss them. A true consequentialist doesn't really hold that possibility open. However I suppose it's possible to be a "partial consequentialist," where one acknowledges the bare possibility of intrinsically wrong actions but where one doesn't recognize paradigm cases thereof.

However I suppose it's possible to be a "partial consequentialist," where one acknowledges the bare possibility of intrinsically wrong actions but where one doesn't recognize paradigm cases thereof.

As far as I can tell, Mark's beef is that he doesn't accept the moral reason offered for why the bombings were intrinsically wrong. He agrees that there are some intrinsically wrong acts (yet won't tell us what they are), but this isn't one of them. He also has an aversion to the notion of inaction which I happen to share. Fortunately, I think the cases where inaction is the only option are extremely rare, virtually nonexistent.

Okay, well, Jeff S. became convinced that the bombing destruction of the cities *was* intrinsically wrong. And once something is intrinsically wrong, then consequences don't matter, and it's a waste of time to discuss them.

And yet Jeff noted the role of "non-consequentialist" moral ethics in his change of view. And my asking what he takes it to be is a waste of time, because we all know what the classic term "consequentialism" means. Got it.

He agrees that there are some intrinsically wrong acts (yet won't tell us what they are),

step2, really? Really? I have everything from the gory and uncomfortable to the subtle. I have a litany of historical examples, and I also have a vivid imagination.

This thread has the stench of death about it. Even I can smell it now.

Oh step2, I wasn't dissing you at all, or even referring to your comment. I just mean it is played out, over. Nothing to do with you. I just mean the fat lady is singing on this one, and you raise some good points but its too late for this one.

Just catching up...

All,

One of Vincent Torley's comments got held up (it had too many links) so I just released it for everyone's enjoyment. Mark might be right that this thread is dying a slow death, but I thought I owed him a chance to get his points across.

Lydia,

Thanks much for trying to make clear what I thought was my rather straight-forward position. But part of the problem, I guess, is that if someone rejects the reasoning provided by Zippy, Paul, Bill and you concerning these matters, then they won't find my "conversion" story all that compelling. So be it. There might be something to be said for George R.'s approach after all ;-)

The Sanity Inspector,

Thanks for sharing. Ironically, I would say that I have come to the opposite conclusion w/r/t to AGW, although I'm not a die-hard skeptic -- I could still be convinced. I website I frequent a lot is "Watts Up With That?" which is probably the best skeptical source of information available to the layman on the internet.

Bill Luse,

You've learned a lot and thanks for sharing!

This evening, I used the internet to watch the highlights of our Olympic closing ceremony. Unfortunately, this is British popular culture at its best. This is what secularism does to a nation.

Can I please take the opportunity to apologise my country, its entertainers and its politicians? The inane bouncing fool next to our Prime Minister is Boris Johnson, the closest thing we have to a conservative in political leadership. He is a philandering nincompoop. He will, very likely, be our next Prime Minister.

No matter how bad things get for conservatives in the States, they are worse here.

Graham

On a more constructive note, Michael Burleigh's Moral Combat and Richard Overy's Why the Allies Won both give a helpful historical context to Truman's decision. For example, a demonstration of the bomb's effects to the world was not an option, as the US had barely enough material for the two bombs that were used.
FWIW - The deeper evil was the area bombing carried out by the RAF and USAF. It is a rather complex and delicate issue; for example, many of the pilots believed that they were attacking legitimate military targets. They were deceived into thinking that "precision bombing" worked, while their commanders knew that "area bombing" was the goal, and that the target was the German workforce and their families.
Yet these pilots showed extreme courage, and did hasten the end of the war by hastening the end of the Luftwaffe. Can we honor these men while condemning the immediate results of their actions?

Graham

Yet these pilots showed extreme courage, and did hasten the end of the war by hastening the end of the Luftwaffe. Can we honor these men while condemning the immediate results of their actions?

Not if we're moral absolutists Graham. But don't even mention other past evils for any reason because you'll be stirring up trouble here if you do. This current matter and water-boarding are the token self-flagellation methods used here. Maybe we all need a cathartic release of moral condemnation of one sort or another now and again, and the safer the issue the better. An absolutist would never find your comparisons to England to be of any comfort, but thanks just the same. It was a noble effort in any case.

I have a litany of historical examples, and I also have a vivid imagination.

Unfortunately those don’t exist where we can tell what those examples are, or if they can be tied to a moral principle.

Maybe we all need a cathartic release of moral condemnation of one sort or another now and again, and the safer the issue the better.

Maybe we shouldn't condone policies that make our claim to be "the good guys" an elaborate pretense. Btw, thanks for reanimating the thread, we are now officially in zombie land.

This current matter and water-boarding are the token self-flagellation methods used here....Maybe we all need a cathartic release of moral condemnation of one sort or another now and again, and the safer the issue the better.

Mark, for crying out loud! It's Jeff's thread, but honestly. You want us all to be nice to you and give you the benefit of the doubt and what-not, and then you indulge in this sort of snark.

Graham (and Zombie Mark),

I can't resist. In coming to the conclusion I did about whether or not dropping the atomic bomb was moral I'm not trying to do so in a spirit of high condemnation. Yes, I think we can learn from our mistakes and yes, I think it is appropriate to publicly state Truman was wrong and "here are the reasons why". But at the same time we can, from our safe and comfortable vantage point here in the future, extend sympathy to the WWII decision makers, including LeMay and Truman and appreciate the pressure they were under to defeat a terrible enemy. In Paul's original post he said, "I do not dare to judge the men upon whose shoulders these grim decisions rested." I would perhaps go further and say we need to judge these men, again so that future decisions can be made morally. But I think the spirit of Paul's words is correct -- these were difficult and terrible decisions that needed to be made back in the early 40s and we should make our moral judgements with charity and sympathy for those who, we realize now made the wrong decision (although some back then also counseled against the killing of innocents).

P.S. I'll honor British pilots any day of the week -- the Battle of Britain alone proved you Brits can fight in the air with the best of them!

While I appreciate your arguments, your concern for innocent human life, and your fidelity to the Church's moral teaching, the simple fact is that sometimes a good person finds himself in a situation where no moral choice exists. Sometimes we are left with the choice of doing evil that good may come of it or permitting a greater evil to occur.

I don't know why the Almighty permits such dilemmmas to come to pass, and I hope you never find yourself facing such a choice, but I can tell you from personal experience that situations do sometimes arise in which there is no morally licit way out.

My personal view is that in such situations a good man must choose to do evil that good may come of it, and then accept full responsibility for committing an evil act. This includes accepting the punishment prescribed by God and by Caesar for such acts, if any.

In the case of Japan, there was no moral choice. The only choice was between a) roasting innocent Japanese people with bombs or b) slowly starving them to death. I would have chosen to roast them, and I would have been willing to face moral and legal consequences of doing so.

A personal note: My beloved aunt, who is a Japanese-American, was a little girl living in Fukuoka at the close of World War II. This is significant because Fukuoka was never a target of the firebomb raids. It was spared for the same reason Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura, and Kyoto were spared: to provide a "virgin" urban target from which atomic bomb-effects damage assessments could be made.

Fukuoka was the next city on the A-bomb target list after Nagasaki. If the atomic bombings had not ended the war, my aunt would not be here today.

For this purely selfish reason, I thank God for the atomic bomb.

Mark, for crying out loud! It's Jeff's thread, but honestly. You want us all to be nice to you and give you the benefit of the doubt and what-not, and then you indulge in this sort of snark.

Where did I ask for people to be nice to me Lydia? Where? Where did I plead for this? You must be projecting. I don't require or ask for the benefit of the doubt. I go other places for self-affirmation. If I could ever really grasp the unstated ownership ideas I know you hold about threads I might at least try to respect it. And you make sarcasm sound like a bad thing. Maybe a Brit knows better?

the simple fact is that sometimes a good person finds himself in a situation where no moral choice exists.

I'd be extremely surprised if the Roman Catholic Church teaches or even allows any such "simple fact."

Bah! Gundge and grippe. You can't do anything useful with attacks that are more about the nature of the arguer than about the argument.

Unfortunately those don’t exist where we can tell what those examples are, or if they can be tied to a moral principle.

I'm puzzled by this step2. Not sure if this helps, but do you realize that though intrinsic moral evil is a sufficient condition for immoral action, it is not a necessary one for immoral action? Meaning that the even if something isn't an intrinsic moral evil it doesn't mean it is permissible in any way. In no way would it help to say "No, you're wrong, this isn't an intrinsic evil so that means it is not immoral." It isn't necessary for it to be an intrinsic evil to be wrong, so that would be a failed attempt at rationalization, and I can't think of anyone so lacking in common-sense so as to be fooled by this. So I'm not sure what you mean by "if they can be tied to a moral principle."

So Tony & Lydia,

Are you sure that when B. Lewis said "the simple fact is that sometimes a good person finds himself in a situation where no moral choice exists." he wasn't just expressing in non-philosophical terms what was said by Thomas à Kempis, the Pope in Humanae Vitae or Evangelicum Vitae? That's what I would have thought.

Kempis: "Of two evils, the less is always to be chosen."

HV: "In truth, if it is sometimes licit to tolerate a lesser evil in order to avoid a greater evil or to promote a greater good, it is not licit, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil so that good may follow therefrom;"

EV: Look it up yourself if you're still interested.

"I do not dare to judge the men upon whose shoulders these grim decisions rested." I would perhaps go further and say we need to judge these men, again so that future decisions can be made morally. But I think the spirit of Paul's words is correct -- these were difficult and terrible decisions that needed to be made back in the early 40s and we should make our moral judgements with charity and sympathy for those who, we realize now made the wrong decision (although some back then also counseled against the killing of innocents).

While I generally agree that the nuclear bombings were wrong, there was no "obvious" right answer. If Japan's peace overtures were a ruse, the cost to both sides would have been far worse. It is also likely that if our troops had encountered the predicted level of resistance that their way of dealing with it would have been far more brutal than the nuclear bombs. Troops facing that sort of civilian uprising are likely to say "f#$% it" and adopt an attitude of shooting dead anything that appears more than vaguely threatening.

I think what Mark is dealing with is the realization that philosophers sit in ivory towers where they won't have the command authority to make these decisions that can consign actual living people, in the millions, to horrific fates. I suspect that if Zippy, Paul and you were in Truman's shoes you would have felt the wait of those millions of Japanese civilians and allied soldiers' lives a lot more heavily than any moral obligation to the few hundred thousand who would die in the bombings.

While I reject consequentialism, I think you are more likely to end up afoul of God if you have a heart that can so coldly condemn those millions of lives on both sides because of an abstract philosophical idea. It is not natural for mortal man to have to make such decisions. Truman was asked to play God in choosing which set of lives he valued more.

"An abstract philosophical idea"? Okedoke.

So I'm not sure what you mean by "if they can be tied to a moral principle."

You were the one who agreed that there are intrinsically evil acts and you can cite many examples of such (which you continually fail to do). Are you now suggesting those acts don't violate a moral principle? What makes it intrinsically wrong if it isn't a moral principle?

step2, I don't feel the need to cite any examples. If you really think this would be challenging, then we can't be thinking of the same types of evil. There is no shortage of it.

The Japanese plan for the end of the war was called "One Hundred Million Die Together". It was, essentially, a plan to turn the entire population of the Japanese archipelago, every man, woman, and child, into a kamikaze. Besides the hundreds of suicide planes, subs, and boats that would have been used against the invader, the civilian population was formed into suicide squads equipped with whatever tools were handy. Small children, being more difficult to see from the vision block of a tank, were given satchel charges. Their job was to run underneath the tanks and explode the charges. Old men and boys were to fight the Americans with shovels, hoes, and pitchforks. Women and girls were formed into combat squads and armed with sharpened bamboo staves. Their task was to kill one American soldier by stabbing him in the guts with the stick before dying.

My aunt in Fukuoka (then age 9) would have been given the bamboo stick.

Of course, almost all of these civilian kamikaze would have been blown to rags by machine guns and other weapons before even getting close to our troops. I fail to see how choosing to machine-gun civilians armed with bamboo sticks is in any way morally superior to roasting them with an atom bomb.

I don't mean to insult anyone, and, again, I appreciate the sincere desire to obey the teachings of the Church, but in real life moral choice is not always cut and dried. I think it's all too easy to sit here from our lofty viewpoint in 2012, our moral hymens primly intact, and pass judgment on the crew of the Enola Gay, or upon the America that the Enola Gay represented. Yes, killing people is murder. But dead is dead. Atom bomb, machine gun bullet, bayonet, or bamboo stick in the guts -- it's irrelevant.

War is horrible. When it comes, it is best gotten over with quickly. The only way to get it over with quickly is to kill the enemy until he either cannot fight any more or loses the will to resist. That's what we (the America of 1945) did.

My aunt told me how she and her little friends ran through the tall grass catching locusts to eat, and how delicious those bugs were when roasted. The sad fact is that there was no food in Japan at war's end; our submarines sank every Japan-bound food transport they could find a part of Operation STARVATION (yes, that was its actual name). I can picture an alternate universe in which we're all on the Internet arguing about the morality of starving fifty million Japanese people (mostly civilians) to death. "We had an atom bomb!" somebody would say "We could have ended the war six months earlier if we'd dropped it, and all those people would have lived!"

If I have offended anyone with these comments, I apologize.

While I reject consequentialism, I think you are more likely to end up afoul of God if you have a heart that can so coldly condemn those millions of lives on both sides because of an abstract philosophical idea. It is not natural for mortal man to have to make such decisions. Truman was asked to play God in choosing which set of lives he valued more.

Not a bad way to put it. I'm going to take a lot of grief for saying something, but that's never stopped me before. What you said reminds me of a quote.

"There is a tinge of inhuman in the humanitarianism of those who believe that the perception of social need easily overrides all other considerations." -William F. May

Who has the social need to condemn what happened even though no one is arguing that it ought to be repeated, and our military pioneered expensive smart weaponry to eliminate the chances that mass bombing would even be contemplated in populated areas? The talk of "good guys" is somewhat amusing. Who is trying to be "the good guys," even if in an army of one, by feeling the need to condemn an action seventy years later?

In a comical note, wikileaks noted that in 2009 the Obama administration wanted to apologize for the atomic bombing, but Japan's Vice Foreign Minister told the U.S. ambassador "the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a 'nonstarter'." You can't make this stuff up.

Are you sure that when B. Lewis said "the simple fact is that sometimes a good person finds himself in a situation where no moral choice exists." he wasn't just expressing in non-philosophical terms what was said by Thomas à Kempis, the Pope in Humanae Vitae or Evangelicum Vitae?

Yes. Absolutely. 100% sure. Completely. Without a doubt. No question. He wasn't expressing what the Pope was saying.

Now, if he had said "a good person finds himself in a situation where no GOOD choice exists", where "good" is used in the sense that is opposite to the sense of evil in "lesser of two evils", then that would be different. If a person cannot start seeing the difference between an option that is, by itself a moral evil choice, and an option that is a choice for an evil that is not a moral evil, then he won't begin to make any sense of the Pope's expression that you quote. And that's what B. Lewis is failing at. There are times when a person's choices consists of choices that include evils. But there is always a choice that doesn't consist of a moral evil.

Everything changes when we start to talk about people who are armed and trying to kill you. If a woman intends to stab you in the guts with a bamboo stick, she's a combatant. At that point you're protecting yourself.

This is not complicated.

Yes, but dropping a nuclear bomb on her head might be considered a little disproportionate...
in other words, this isn't simple.

I would perhaps go further and say we need to judge these men, again so that future decisions can be made morally
Absolutely - a point made by Antony Beevor in "The Second World War". Popular culture has tended to present WWII as a "good war" (as opposed to Vietnam or WWI). It is far more complicated than that.

The decision to drop the A-Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is complicated by the fact that the Japanese government intended to use the civilian population as a military force. (But, of course, infants were not included in the militia...)
Allied experience in Italy, France and Germany taught US commanders that artillery barrages were necessary to take a heavily defended town (again, see Beevor's "Second World War" and "D-Day"). So, had there been a military invasion of the Japanese homeland, civilian homes would have become military targets. The liberation of the Philippines demonstrated that the consequences would have been horrific; yet they would have been justified under just war doctrine.
Okinawa taught American commanders that Japanese civilians were so terrified of US troops that they would commit suicide in their thousands before surrendering. So to save hundreds of thousands of civilian lives it was essential to persuade the High Command to surrender.
So it is possible to imagine Truman arguing that Japanese "civilians" and Japanese homes were already military targets - they were factored into plans for an invasion by conventional forces. They presented a threat to US troops. But, so far as I can tell, no one was debating just war theory when they decided to drop the bomb. (Burleigh describes the process in Moral Combat)
In effect, just war theory had been abandoned when the allies decided to bomb German cities. That prior decision was "political"; it kept Stalin in the war. It also followed from British strategic doctrine, which taught that a continental enemy should be weakened by blockade and diplomacy before any invasion. Churchill also committed the RAF to area bombing by his rhetoric in the Blitz ("we'll deal to them the measure, and more than the measure.")
And it was also a result of the RAF's claim to be an independent wing of the British Armed forces, like the Army and the Navy. After the Battle of Britain had secure air supremacy over the British Isles, what was the RAF for? "Bomber Harris" argued that it existed to defeat the enemy through Strategic Bombing. He refused to accept any evidence that his attacks were not hastening the end of the war. (In fact, it was the USAF's decision to destroy the Luftwaffe that was decisive.) Human pride has terrible consequences.
Once the industrial complex of the Manhattan project was in place, backed by massive bureaucratic machine, there was huge economic pressure to use the bomb. What was all that effort for if the bombs were just going to be mothballed? And why the reluctance to use "the Bomb" when we had reduced Dresden and Hamburg to ashes?
Who knows what went on in Truman's heart when he decided to use this weapon. It certainly disturbed him - he advocated giving control of nuclear technology to the United Nations! He bears responsibilty for his decisions. But it is worth noting that a huge bureaucratic, secular regime - a government which consulted op-eds and newspaper columns, but never theologians or pastors - bears responsibility too. Worth bearing in mind when Dawkins spouts his risible nonsense about religion being the "root of all evil", or the chief cause of conflict throughout history. Utter twaddle.

Graham

Just in case I sound like an armchair general, I should note that I'm interested in WWII because I'm interested in answering Dawkins' accusations. And, as an aside, I became interested in Truman's decision to use the Bomb when studying the Conquest of Canaan. In what circumstances can a soldiers legitimately kill a civilian? After all, according to the Torah, Hebrew "soldiers" were morally justified in killing "innocents". No matter how rhetorical the language, this was not a just war, and civilians certainly died in the burning of Hazor.

Who has the social need to condemn what happened even though no one is arguing that it ought to be repeated

What you apparently seem to miss is that the reasoning in favor of dropping the bomb is very alive and well - consequentialism. Dropping the bomb may not be repeated, but the reasoning behind it has been employed to support torture and other evils.

I understand there is a luxury of detachment in the ivory tower where the "weight" of a decision may not be immediately felt, but that is precisely the point: The weight often clouds our judgment in the heat of the moment. Therefore, as resentful as we might be to those ivory tower idealist for not having to deal with a real world situation, there is a need for them. If they couldn't get it right from their high perch, what chance would anyone have?

I wasn't proposing to drop a nuclear bomb on the head of the woman trying to stab you. I was referring to B Lewis's scenario about what soldiers invading Japan would have faced if we had pursued the alternative operation. He was implying that defending yourself with a gun against somebody trying to kill you is morally equivalent to our dropping the A-bomb. I was disagreeing.

Graham,

Thanks very much for those additional thoughts. I do think we need to be careful when analogizing from the story of Canaan, which I know Dawkins likes to do (e.g. he supposedly refuses to debate Dr. Craig because Craig thinks what the Jews did in Canaan was morally justified). The main reason is that there is a big difference between getting a direct command from God and everything else.

All of your other points, especially about all the little events that led up to the bomb are quite good. What I find amusing, which is also something Zippy has pointed out repeatedly, is how everyone who defends the bomb is so sure of what would have happened in the alternative scenarios they play out. All these time travelers...who knew! Mr. Lewis up above (whose comments do not offend but I think are a good example of this phenomenon) is quite sure millions of Japanese would have starved under a blockade. But what if we maintained a blockade and shipped in food aid? The Japanese could have refused the aid, but then they would be morally culpable for what they did to their people, not us. I'm not saying this would have worked or would have been the best solution to the end of WWII, but I am saying that we can't really know with any degree of certainty what would have happened had our leaders decided to consult priests and theologians as they conducted the war and tried to avoid morally evil actions.

I think it's worth noting that there's a difference between a "just war" and just things done in the war.

This doesn't necessarily prove that WWII WAS a just war but pointing out all of the immoral things the allies did in the war doesn't make the war unjust in principle.

You almost certainly all knew this but it seems like a good time to bring this up at this point in the discussion.

A perfectly fair distinction, Marc Anthony. I believe most emphatically that WWII was a just war; I only add that, like all wars, it was often fought by unjust means. That said, by and large Americans conducted themselves justly in that terrible war. There a few high profile lapses, and no doubt many thousands of individual soldiers committing crimes, but on the whole Americans may rightly take pride in the justice with which that war was conducted.

Are you sure that when B. Lewis said "the simple fact is that sometimes a good person finds himself in a situation where no moral choice exists." he wasn't just expressing in non-philosophical terms what was said by Thomas à Kempis, the Pope in Humanae Vitae or Evangelicum Vitae? That's what I would have thought.

Yes. Absolutely. 100% sure. Completely. Without a doubt. No question. He wasn't expressing what the Pope was saying.

Now, if he had said "a good person finds himself in a situation where no GOOD choice exists", where "good" is used in the sense that is opposite to the sense of evil in "lesser of two evils", then that would be different.

Tony, you shouldn't be as sure as that about B. Lewis. Non-philosophers use the term "moral" very differently. I wouldn't be so confident you know he didn't mean what is a common thing to say. I hear this all the time on simple matters. Do you really think that when he mentioned his personal experience that he was admitting committing what we'd think was an an evil act? Really?

Now he did say "choose to do evil," but again, you shouldn't assume he's a technician like we are. I have a co-worker that is a Christian and about the finest man I know. I'd trust my life to him in a heartbeat, but if you ask him about this sort of thing (lying for example) he'll say you're sinning to lie to save the Jews in the basement, but that you should do it anyway. It is incoherent, but you'd be surprised the number of Christians who actually recommend "doing evil" on that basis. I can't talk him out of it. It has to do with ideas about the concept of grace. I work among thousands of Christians and I wish the were more philosophically astute, but they aren't. We're not all philosophers Tony. Surely you've met good people like this. But the fact is their commonsense understanding of choosing the least bad option is the same as mine, and I recognize our commonality on this. If you don't believe it try to convince the good people I work among every day of this. Good luck. Whethe B. Lewis is a Christian or not I don't know, but this is our community Tony, let's not throw rocks at it because of a technical misunderstanding.

Mark, Tony's saying that B. Lewis is confused about something (your co-worker is too, by the way) and that we have no reason from Humanae Vitae to believe that the Pope was similarly confused. In fact, I've be very surprised if the Pope were confused on that point. HV should not be used to endorse, enable, or cement this type of confusion to the effect that "sometimes you are forced to do one morally evil thing rather than another." It's a particularly important confusion, so it is only fair to make it clear that HV should _not_ be used to support it.

What I find amusing, which is also something Zippy has pointed out repeatedly, is how everyone who defends the bomb is so sure of what would have happened in the alternative scenarios they play out. All these time travelers...who knew!

Well, I'm amused at the mileage he gets out of that without anyone even calling him on it. I've already said it favors inaction, and I've shown that inaction isn't necessary sinful, or even wise or safe. But there is no substitute for prudence. The prudent man sees the possible consequences of various responses to life's circumstances, considers the risks and consequences of possible actions, including inaction, and acts accordingly. Prudence includes an ability to foresee.

But about that mocking tone he takes about forseeing things, unless you accept zippy's understanding of "consequentialism" and the deprecation of sins of commission, there is no reason to think those who condemn as immoral the dropping of the atomic bomb are depending any less a vision of the future that those who don't. No reason I can think of unless you'd like to offer one. Now zippy's meta-ethical view that most people are de facto consequentialists on his definition of it serves the purpose of insulating him from giving his account of the future without the event. He uses the "consequentialist" line of attack so he won't have to answer such things. But the fact is that if you don't buy the idiosyncratic "consequentialist" line he takes, you'd see that zippy also has a view on the future if the bomb wasn't dropped. He can't avoid having one, and his logic if it worked shields him from having to declare what he thinks would happen if the event hadn't transpired. But he has a view on it and depends on it just as much as those he mocks. I'm surprised you don't see that Jeff.

Patrick Buchanan wrote a book arguing that the US shouldn't have gone to war with Germany. Now I disagree with him on that, though I respect the argument, but the point is that everything turns on proposed versions of the future if it can't be ruled out by a principle that trumps it. zippy uses the aforementioned hand-waving to claim that trump card so he can say he doesn't need to forsee anything on his account and mock his opponents. But the fact is he does have a view on the future, and he implies it is better than the other guys vision without saying it.

Jeffrey S. writes:

Mr. Lewis up above (whose comments do not offend but I think are a good example of this phenomenon) is quite sure millions of Japanese would have starved under a blockade. But what if we maintained a blockade and shipped in food aid? The Japanese could have refused the aid, but then they would be morally culpable for what they did to their people, not us.

Let me ask you, Jeff, do you think that blockading or cutting off supplies to a city in order to starve it into submission, with full knowledge that many women and children will die of starvation as a result, is intrinsically evil?

Zombie Mark,
Maybe you should get off your inexplicably secretive high horse and provide a moral framework that can be pinned down, so that your criticisms against intellectual manipulators and elites overruling common sense will have some credibility instead of being an indictment against your own pose. You claim you have a moral view that errs on the side of courage (paraphrasing your earlier statement), so have the courage to describe it openly. You seem to be fundamentally lost at sea in being puzzled that intrinsic evils are tied to violations of moral principles, a basic concept involved in this type of argument.

As if that wasn't enough, you also question the motives of those who are critical of a momentous decision made seventy years ago. Do you understand this is a conservative blog? On any given day you will see people condemn the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal, and on and on. But hey, Mark doesn't want to make moral judgments about historical figures, yet somehow we are magically supposed to trust that certain acts will not be repeated in the future despite having no justification for saying they were wrong.

P.S. If I have offended anyone besides Mark with these comments, I apologize.

there is no reason to think those who condemn as immoral the dropping of the atomic bomb are depending any less a vision of the future that those who don't.

Mark: The reason is that we think this was intrinsically immoral. The only vision of the future one needs is, y'know, the city being incinerated and the direct killing *by the bomb* of all those civilians. How hard is this?

Marc Anthony and Paul,

I have actually been thinking about that same distinction and was going to make a comment along those same lines, but Mr. Anthony beat me to it. One thing that I think is worth thinking about is that during war the military recognizes that there are some things soldiers do to the enemy (and innocent civilians) that are in fact crimes and those soldiers are prosecuted using military courts and sometimes even punished with death. So even while we have always fought tough wars against determined foes throughout our history, there has also been the moral sense that some actions were 'out of bounds' (even against the enemy -- for example shooting an enemy soldier who surrenders in the back) and should rightly be condemned and punished. All we are doing here is drawing different lines around which actions fall into the condemned category and which ones fall into the morally O.K. category.


George R.,

I really shouldn't do this but you've been a good sport and at this point, what the heck. To answer your specific question, yes of course that would be intrinsically evil to starve innocent human beings living in a city during wartime. On the other hand, that's not what I proposed. I suggested instead a naval blockade of Japan in which we allowed only food and medicine into the islands, with the eventual goal of getting the Japanese government to agree to our terms of surrender. Impossible? I don't think so, but I'm also not possessed of a time machine like many of my consequentialist critics, so perhaps you can talk to one of them and let me know...


Step2,

You've been positively delightful lately -- keep up the good work.

Sorry "Masked C" - my bad.

Jeff S

I certainly wouldn't want to draw moral lessons from the Conquest. (Although I do wonder if the story is compatible with moral absolutism.) Basically I wondered if it was possible to argue (very roughly) this way. If there are plausible justifications for the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, then there could be plausible justifications for the destruction of Hazor and Ai.

But the decision to bomb Hiroshima should not be taken out of historical context. This decision was taken in the context of total war, area bombing, and the demand for unconditional surrender. Truman's "decision" was a forgone conclusion, really. If he was concerned about civilian casualties he would have ended area bombing. Most of the moral anxiety concerned the implications for the future. What would these bombs mean for the human race?
So we can debate the morality of Hiroshima. But even if we can think reasons that would justify the bombing of Hiroshima - a big "if" - I think we do have to condemn the Allied decision. The allies killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and justified that decision with a crude consequentialism. Our enemies were so evil in WWII that we have tended to interpret the war in
manichaean terms. That isn't healthy.

Graham

The blockade depended heavily on submarines, BTW. I don't think that it was possible to let food and medicine in, and everything else out. There were over 1million Japanese troops in Manchuria, and the allies would not want these soldiers reinforcing the home islands.

GV

Actually, there was no way for the Allies to defeat Japan without bombing cities, towns and villages. This took place in every theatre of combat. The Philippines and Okinawa illustrate how terrible a land invasion would have been.
The alternatives, then, are the atom bomb or conditional surrender. That is, Imperial Japan would remain undefeated.
Just to be clear - in a land invasion, it would have been necessary to use artillery on towns and cities. So even if the US had cancelled area bombing, thousands of tonnes of high explosive would have rained down on civilian homes. There would have been terrible casualties.
So should the USA have accepted the conditional surrender of the Japanese? That seems to be the only option left on the table.

Graham

Mark: The reason is that we think this was intrinsically immoral. The only vision of the future one needs is, y'know, the city being incinerated and the direct killing *by the bomb* of all those civilians. How hard is this?

Not too hard Lydia, which is why I described it as the "trump card," showing I have the same understanding as you on that. If the trump card is valid it darn well trumps. But the comment you are replying to was confused and misguided though, and that's my fault.

The question is why don't zippy and Jeff don't have the confidence of the trump card they're playing? The bunch of text I typed didn't quite get it out though. All these time travelers...who knew!

P.S. If I have offended anyone besides Mark with these comments, I apologize.

step2 Jeff's right. You are positively delightful, and I'm not offended. :)

Let me ask you, Jeff, do you think that blockading or cutting off supplies to a city in order to starve it into submission, with full knowledge that many women and children will die of starvation as a result, is intrinsically evil?

George, I am curious as to how you posed this. When you phrase it as "full knowledge that many women and children will die of starvation as a result", you are using the exact kind of construction that is used to deal with a PDE analysis - you "know full well" that an evil will result. The knowing, and the evil, are not what decides whether the PDE conditions are met.

The difference, usually, is whether the evil is actually part of what is intended, or at least is an essential element of what causes what is intended.

In the case of the A-bombing, it appears from the criteria posed when they discussed targets that the heavy emphasis on destruction, without discriminating between destruction of buildings and war-making capacity from destruction of people, allows one to suggest that the intention was formally "indiscriminate bombing." To choose to destroy without concern for whether the destroyed thing houses innocent children is to be reckless with life. And because of their specific intention to cause a greater psychological impact including within it the knowledge that the deaths of 10s of thousands of civilians would help along that goal, that intention for the targeting seems to _include_ the deaths of the civilians. Intentionally targeting an innocent person is an example of an intrinsically evil act. (Even if it were not intrinsically evil, attempting to get to the good goal through the use of the evil foreseen makes the evil not an unintended by-product but intentional, and that fails the PDE requirements for morality.)

Skipping over to the blockade: The use of blockade to obstruct inflow of goods (including food) is intended to reduce the capacity to resist militarily, and is not formally ordered toward the killing of women and children. The women and children are not intentionally targeted, they happen to be stuck with the same conditions as the enemy military that is resisting. (Unless the formal intention is to create the blockade so that the deaths of civilians will itself be the impetus toward surrender, which is not necessary for blockading and therefore need not be discussed). I can see saying that a blockade, including blocking food, would have been a terrible choice. I am having trouble seeing why it should be called intrinsically immoral. Being morally evil is not the same as being intrinsically morally evil.

What Tony said.

Let it be noted that the framework does not preclude, absolutely, the use of atomic weapons. If an enemy's army were concentrated such that mass incineration could be achieved without intended and designed civilian death, I fail to see anything intrinsically evil in that. It's not the scale of the explosion, so to speak, that matters, strictly speaking.

Paul
There could be a problem with the non-discriminatory effects of a nuclear explosion. They continue for some time and over a vast area.

Just to clarify what I've tried to say: Jeff S is correct, in my opinion. We need to morally evaluate the actions of historical figures. When we evaluate the decisions of Truman or Neville Chamberlain, we should not treat each act in isolation, but rather keep the historical context in mind.
The decision to bomb Hiroshima was not taken in isolation from other policies. The decision to bomb Hamburg, and later Dresden, set precedents for later actions. The decision to begin the Manhattan Project meant that there would be pressure to use a bomb created at such effort and expense.

While I think the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not justified - it was an outcome of wicked policies - I am not convinced that a moral case cannot be made for the incineration of a city in extreme circumstances. There are unqualified absolutes - "never torture a human for fun or profit" - however, and the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of non-comabatants surely sounds like something we should never do. It is hardly unreasonable to argue that it was wrong! And there might be something inhumane in not even considering the possibility that it was evil...

The conditional surrender of Japan was an option. If it is open to pacifists to argue that we should not have fought at all I can't see why just war advocates can argue that sometimes victory comes at too high a price. (And even on consequentialist terms - was the victory worth the huge risks of the Cold War?)

Graham

There could be a problem with the non-discriminatory effects of a nuclear explosion. They continue for some time and over a vast area.

Graham, this is a good occasion to shore up the import of Paul's comment on the general situation for the possible moral use of atomic bombs. Even taking your concerns into account the vastness and long-term effects doesn't preclude the possibility of finding some situations where its use is moral. If we had the atomic bomb in 1941, and if we had been able to find the Japanese fleet at sea during their attack on Pearl Harbor, using the Bomb against their fleet would have been moral without a shadow of a doubt. The impact would have fallen on those who had perpetrated an unjust attack, and ONLY on them. Because they were at sea, it would not have had any long-lasting effect on any land, and the effect on the sea itself would have been negligible (in ecological terms) in comparison to other protracted warfare effects - well worth the successful military result.

And the Cold War was going to happen anyway. With or without WWII, the US and Russia would have developed the A-bomb eventually, since the possibility is clearly foreseen in the science. The major difference would have been that without WWII, Japan and Germany would both have had the Bomb not long after we did, making the world a much more complex problem. We still would have had to confront the Communist menace of imperialism, with nuclear weapons as a spotlight issue.

When we evaluate the decisions of Truman or Neville Chamberlain, we should not treat each act in isolation, but rather keep the historical context in mind. The decision to bomb Hiroshima was not taken in isolation from other policies.

OK, how about this: Japan by 1910 was a rapidly opening society, becoming modern and to some extent western. Then some bigots and old-fashioned types who were appalled at the changes to their culture got into power as pushback from the rapid changes, and pushed them to becoming politically and mentally bunkered down against the forces of modernity, and pushed the racial and national purity issues. This led inevitably to the confrontational / imperialistic attitude of the 30's, which led to the Manchurian expedition and (inevitably) to confrontational attitudes with British and US economic interests in the region. Which led to the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", and military need, and the military junta.

So, the Pacific war could have been prevented if US and British influences could have prevented the rise of racial, national bigots to top Japanese influence in the teens, 20s and 30s. Which implies a very pro-active foreign policy, which implies an attitude having absolutely nothing to do with the near-isolationism promoted by the Pat Buchanans and such, who basically protest that we shouldn't have gotten involved with the European WWII at the least.

My point is that with hindsight, we can often see causes (or, at least, partial causes) of events that were unclear at the time. The people who say "this trend is bad, and if unchecked will result in disaster" are often right in theory but wrong as to practical probable outcomes; but after the fact of a historical disaster, there are always causes that can be picked out as contributing to it and, if those could have been prevented, might have made the disaster not happen. Political prudence seems to be in equal parts knowing when to not interfere with something that is not ripe for outside interference, and when to insist on getting involved even though the need is not an absolute direct moral obligation. Which can never be known with the certitude of mathematical theorems, nor with the near certitude of probabilistic predictions of quantum physics. But we can be certain that the leader who is unable to grasp basic moral principles in the abstract or in the context of historical problems will not make sound moral (and prudential) judgments in the concrete complex problems that face him and us.

Skipping over to the blockade: The use of blockade to obstruct inflow of goods (including food) is intended to reduce the capacity to resist militarily, and is not formally ordered toward the killing of women and children. The women and children are not intentionally targeted, they happen to be stuck with the same conditions as the enemy military that is resisting.
To choose to destroy without concern for whether the destroyed thing houses innocent children is to be reckless with life.

One could say the same thing about the semantical argument over blockades and intentions. You may not have "formally intended" to starve those children to death, but what the heck? You knew that blockades not only draw no distinction between persons, but that the opposing government was likely to seize what privately held food remained to feed its soldiers. This sort of philosophical hair-splitting is eerily reminiscent of the Pharisees when they argued complex points of the law but missed the "weightier matters" of the Torah.

The A-bombing of Japan was a deliberate targeting of civilians. You don't do that in a war, no matter how effective it might be. If dropping the bomb was right, then completely annihilating the Japanese--killing every last one of them--would have been right, because that was precisely what we were threatening with the bombs. We didn't actually have enough bombs to do it, but the Japanese didn't know that.

Sadly, the whole thing could have been avoided by dropping the ridiculous demand for unconditional surrender and allowing Japan to keep the Emperor--something we allowed anyway after the unconditional surrender.

Jeffrey S. writes:

To answer your specific question, yes of course that would be intrinsically evil to starve innocent human beings living in a city during wartime.

A little history:

In 1247 King Ferdinand of Castille laid siege to the largest city in Moorish Spain, Seville. He eventually managed to cut off every scrap of food from entering the city, and reduced it to utter starvation. The Moors, on the brink of extinction, sued for peace and offered terms. King Ferdinand famously interrupted them and said, “I’m not interested in your terms. I have terms of my own. I want the city liberated and you gone.” Thus, after using famine as a weapon against the whole city (Who knows how many women and children perished.), he ordered the entire population, hundreds of thousands of souls, eradicated from it. Therefore Seville, upon Ferdinand's orders, was completely depopulated and its residents were marched south and packed onto to boats for Africa.

Nice guy, wasn't he?

The problem, Jeff, is that this king, whom you would consider a mass murderer, is a canonized Saint of the Catholic Church. His body lies incorrupt in the Cathedral of Seville to this day. What’s more, according the Church-authorities he never committed a mortal sin in his entire life. Here are the words of his biographer:

It was established during the process of his canonization that St. Fernando had never lost his baptismal innocence. There is no sign or suggestion of any failing on his part, for his entire life was a flawless image of purity. (Saint Fernado III, James Fitzhenry, Lepanto Press, p. 333)

Obviously the Catholic Church doesn't consider someone's causing mass starvation to be necessarily inconsistent with "baptismal innocence."

So the way I look at it, Jeff, I have a choice: I can either side with King Saint Ferdinand III and the Holy Catholic Church, or I can side with you, Zippy, and Bill Luse.

I’m afraid that is not a very difficult choice.

If dropping the bomb was right, then completely annihilating the Japanese--killing every last one of them--would have been right, because that was precisely what we were threatening with the bombs. We didn't actually have enough bombs to do it, but the Japanese didn't know that.

That's not what we were threatening. What we were threatening was that we could reduce Japanese civilization back to when Japan was considered an island of backward barbarians in the eyes of the majority of Asians. Though in hindsight, Japan probably already did that through their conduct in WWII.

Sadly, the whole thing could have been avoided by dropping the ridiculous demand for unconditional surrender and allowing Japan to keep the Emperor--something we allowed anyway after the unconditional surrender.

Leaving out the distinct possibility that their militarists would have lured the allied troops into a trap. Bring the occupation forces in close enough under a pretense of surrender and then hit them with every piece of artillery and aircraft the imperial armed forces had left.

I haven't had a chance to watch it, but the History channel had a special on Japan's jet research program which claimed that Japan was actually very close to building operation ready jet fighters at the end of WWII. Here is part 1 of the documentary. This is an example of how, had we stopped hostilities and gone into negotiations, they might have had enough time to lay a trap for us. Considering their conduct at Pearl Harbor and general reputation WRT the laws of war, one should be able to understand why the allied nations didn't give them the option of peace on their terms.

There's also the possibility that they would have simply let our troops land, move into the cities and then called for a general uprising of the population once our forces were completely surrounded in what remained of their population centers. Consider what the insurgents have accomplished in Iraq without anywhere the training and weapons the remaining Japanese Imperial Army regulars had. Now imagine the militarists order most of their regulars to "disappear" into the civilian population until time to call for a general uprising where IA and militia suddenly swarm the occupying forces in a move like the Tet Offensive meets the Green Zone...

Graham, I've very much enjoyed the context you've provided in such detail. So let me take opportunity to ask your opinion on something that puzzles me.

I can see you understand the moral dilemma Truman (and Allies) faced quite well. The options they faced. And I understand that you accept the possible justifications for the bombing. But still it seems you think it is likely that a "crude consequentialism" was in play. So let me ask you what you think of the plausibility of the reason I never thought that charge was valid.

There were many who thought a conditional surrender should have been considered for Germany. Without question it would have saved many lives in Europe. I think it was Hemingway who thought the rejection of a political settlement of conditional surrender owed to the CW tradition he supposed to have been established by US Grant. I think his understanding of that was a bit simplistic, but yet in a sense he was onto something in tying it to the American understanding. Americans seemed to think that a finality to the drama had to occur. To the Americans, the Nazi and the Japanese regime were irredeemably evil. Okinawa had a large impression on the Americans as I think you mentioned. And I think people forget the indescribable rage the Americans felt at the Kamikaze attacks. Suicide attacks were such a shock to the Western understanding of fairness, which only began after critical Japanese defeats. Japan had a decreasing capacity to wage war and these desperate and unjustifiable moves to the American mind were seen as evidence of an evil that could not be compromised with. And let's not forget that both theaters ended with war tribunals of the defeated foe.

My impression was always that to the Americans no good could come whatever from allowing a regime like this to survive intact, or in any way other than a judgement pronounced that such evil precluded political settlement.

So it seems to me you are saying that they should have seen it as "consequentialism," but I don't think you've shown that they actually did. Over the years we forget some things and remember others. We remember reasons given for the public as to why the bomb was dropped, but I always thought the underlying reason that this calculation of probable death tolls on alternative scenarios and such were motivated by the felt need to end the regime with finality. Now the Russians weren't any more amenable to settlement in Europe, so the idea of finality wasn't uniquely American of course. The reasons the Russians wanted finality were different, so I'm by no means saying seeking finality of such regimes was unique. It wasn't as history shows. This was the way of the world. But at least the widely mocked and supposedly naive American moral understanding was surely the reason that there wasn't a "crude consequentialism" at work. My point is what made such calculation necessary was the fact that no compromise with such evil could be made.

So if declaring dropping the bomb an inherent evil is the trump card that allows one to not consider future outcomes seventy years after the fact, then I don't see how we can deny that Truman and most Americans also had beliefs in evil at the time that trumped alternative scenarios as well. I think we're laboring under the impression that projected calculations about future outcomes is somehow determinative. But it clearly isn't. I don't think it is possible not to. I think we all do, and it is unavoidable. So I think our case against Truman ignores what was going on in the minds of the decision makers and indeed the public. They had their own trump card, but unlike a modern absolutist, they knew that alternative scenarios still had to be considered. I think it is just wrong to claim that doing so is sufficient to declare "consequentialism" is at work.

So with your knowledge Graham, please give your opinion on the understanding I've always had.

Boy, I wish Mark had put this comment up at the beginning of the thread instead of at the end.

One could say the same thing about the semantical argument over blockades and intentions. You may not have "formally intended" to starve those children to death, but what the heck? You knew that blockades not only draw no distinction between persons, but that the opposing government was likely to seize what privately held food remained to feed its soldiers.

Mike, I'm not sure that works. When you bomb some city, your action constitutes violence that kills the civilians. That's true whether you think the bombing is justified or not.

For a blockade, what you are doing is not permitting the enemy to resupply his troops. You are not violently killing people. If the enemy is reasonable, before thousands of people die of starvation he gives in. If he is unreasonable, the proper cause of the deaths then is the unreasonable (futile) resistance of the enemy leaders.

Let me refine that: if the enemy army has a classical view of chivalry and the purpose of an army being to protect civilians, then upon being blockaded the army could do things like have soldiers give up their food to save the civilians. Since starved soldiers cannot protect the civilians, there is little point in continuing to resist once the soldiers lose capacity to function in combat, so that's when you surrender. If the enemy army instead has a distorted view of the purpose of an army, they might decide to keep all the food for themselves and use the plight of the civilians starving as a ploy to force the blockaders to end the blockade - thus USING the civilians as a weapon for military purpose. In the second scenario, the deaths of the civilians is due to their own army who decides to use them militarily.

One of the classic moves in Christian warfare, after you have enveloped a town and laid siege, is to offer to let the civilians leave (hopefully taking their food with them hahaha). If memory serves, Santa Ana did that at the Alamo. A little harder to do with a nation island, but there are alternatives: drop food packages with leaflets in heavily civilian areas, explaining the cause of the blockade and what they need to get it ended. If the Japanese civilians are getting food from us, and the Japanese soldiers spend all their time taking food away from the civilians, how long do you think it will take before the civilians no longer believe the racially motivated "Americans are western devils" mantra? Which is all different from a starvation blockade, but I am not saying I ever thought a starvation blockade was a good idea.

Boy, I wish Mark had put this comment up at the beginning of the thread instead of at the end.

Andrew, I say the same thing to myself after every debate. But if I could have, believe me I would have. It would be an interesting exercise for those who who have tried to cast my motives and character in the worst light to trace back through my comments. Because what they'd find is that even in the sarcasm, maybe even especially there, there are necessary components of the summary I just gave.

But there is progress. Once you get your thoughts categorized vis-a-vis your opponents viewpoint, you use these hard fought summaries as they are and the long torturous explanation isn't needed anymore unless someone asks for more evidence. It's like the old joke about the folks who told jokes that were familiar so that just giving the number of the joke made them laugh. If you can't categorize something you can't really know it, and sometimes people think I go to far, and sometimes I do, but the wiser heads will see that I'm not straining to diss anyone, and surely not to make myself look good, at least not any more than anyone else. I am straining to organize and categorize the things we're discussing a little bit harder than some. Because there is no other way. I don't do this in casual conversation, but this isn't a place for that and that's not what we're here for, or should be here for. When I am at my maddening worst, this is because I am trying to advance the argument somehow because the argument is worth it. If I seem completely dismissive of those who don't see this, it is because I think it is justified. I know it makes some people even more angry, but there isn't much I can do about that. The question is how bad do we want to know something, and what are we willing to pay to get it?

Mike, I'm not sure that works. When you bomb some city, your action constitutes violence that kills the civilians. That's true whether you think the bombing is justified or not.

For a blockade, what you are doing is not permitting the enemy to resupply his troops. You are not violently killing people. If the enemy is reasonable, before thousands of people die of starvation he gives in. If he is unreasonable, the proper cause of the deaths then is the unreasonable (futile) resistance of the enemy leaders.

When you blockade a nation like Japan where you know that the people are fanatically on the side of the military, you are working with their psyche that prevents them from responding according to chivalric views of warfare. Therefore you know that your actions combined with their culture will have consequences that would not likely occur in a truly Westernized state. I don't think you can reasonably claim that their culture absolved you of whatever guilt you may incur by deciding to blockade them. Therefore you can claim all day long that you had "no intent" of harming them, but you knew that they would not stop supporting their military thus you found their deaths to be acceptable.

I think there is an implied "reasonableness" assumption in the "non-consequentialist" approach used here against Mark. I personally think that you should strip out all reasonableness in the interpretation and examine that approach through the harshest and most logically progressed version of the idea. That is usually the only way to truly evaluate an idea; red line the engine. I remember pissing Zippy off in one discussion by showing all of the ways a truly barbaric enemy could use civilians as human shields that would effectively put all normal combat operations into a razor thin line of "did he intend to kill that civilian or not." His responses were mostly things dismissal of the idea that an enemy would do things like strap infants to their vehicles if they knew an enemy were truly mentally anguished by the PDE.

Let's say that a strict interpretation of non-consequentialism became the core of the UCMJ and soldiers literally had to be wary of every single shot fired near a civilian being evaluated according to that rather than the much more consequentialist underpinnings of most actually existing law. Do you think for a second that the imperial Japanese, an army that used to do things like bayonet Chinese infants in Nanjing would hesitate to do things like use small children as human shields all across their facilities and places of operation?

I remember this being discussed in general opposition to how Israel defends itself against Hamas when Hamas attacks from within heavily civilian populated areas.

Mark
An evil act is not justified simply because it brings about a greater good. An evil act is not justified simply because it ends a greater evil. Don't confuse consequentialism with utilitarianism.
I'll get back to you on the "naive" American view of the world...the US and the UK were capable of romanticism, idealism and profound cynicism.

Graham

Therefore you can claim all day long that you had "no intent" of harming them, but you knew that they would not stop supporting their military thus you found their deaths to be acceptable.

Perhaps. But saying "you found their deaths acceptable doesn't show "you intended them", that's implicit in ALL cases where you apply PDE. When the issue is "are their self-inflicted deaths, due to their deranged political climate, an acceptable level of evil consequence?", then the reasoning is the type that goes on in PDE, not in determining whether the act is intrinsically immoral. My presenting them an opportunity in which they will (foreseeably), immorally, choose to do something horrendously evil is not MY evil act, except insofar as I ignore the amount of evil that results from their foreseeable choices and fail establish whether that level of evil result is proportionate to the amount of good I expect. That's PDE.

I am not saying such a blockade wouldn't be wrong, I am saying the sort of choice is the sort amenable to PDE considerations because it is not intrinsically immoral.

It's like Bob playing poker with an addicted gambler Joe who isn't very good. Bob knows perfectly well that if he starts to play with Joe, he is likely to take all Joe's cash, including rent money and the money he needs for his wife's medicine. Bob knows perfectly well WHAT the results are likely to be, and knows that some of them are evil, and others of them are good (he rakes in a bunch of money). Knowing that the goods expected DON'T outweigh the evils, doesn't show Bob that playing poker with Joe is intrinsically evil, it just shows that it is wrong because of PDE. Suppose Bob does it anyway. Bob's being able to foresee THAT a consequence will happen isn't the same as Bob intending it, or we would never be able to use PDE at all.

It is also tempting to dehumanise the entire Japanese population (as either "subhuman" or "as good as dead") to justify the bombing of civilians...we need to resist that sort of temptation.

Graham

An evil act is not justified simply because it brings about a greater good. An evil act is not justified simply because it ends a greater evil. Don't confuse consequentialism with utilitarianism.

Graham, don't confuse evil with inherent evil. The concept of "lesser evil" has never implied that. Inherent in the understanding is that evil is degreed. That some evil is irredeemable and should never be done doesn't change that. I regard my car as a "necessary evil." I have yet to find anyone who thinks that is unintelligible or an abuse of the language.

The meaning of the term evil must not be equivocal if our discussion is to have any meaning. If it is true that your bare statement that "An evil act is not justified simply because it ends a greater evil," then what did Thomas à Kempis mean in the Imitation of Christ when he said "Of two evils, the less is always to be chosen"? Or Humanae Vitae that it is "sometimes licit to tolerate a lesser evil in order to avoid a greater evil"? What is your interpretation of what they meant?

I'm wondering how many men - who argue vigorously that no evil is ever justified - will answer honestly when their wife/girlfriend asks "do these pants make by butt look big"?

Just sayin'.

Right, Mark. If by "evil" we mean always and everywhere "morally evil," and especially "intrinsically morally evil" then we could never have half the expressions we DO have. We regard "evil misfortune" to be evil, and yet nobody's fault (that's what "fortune" implies), and if not a fault then not a moral fault. We being in a car accident an evil, and regard being the driver responsible for the car accident to be a fault, but not a _moral_ fault - that's what accident means. We regard publicizing a true but unnecessarily revealed shameful secret about someone else as an evil that is a moral fault, but not an intrinsically evil act - sometimes it the conditions warrant revealing those nasty little secrets, so it depends on conditions, so it cannot be intrinsically wrong.

Tony,

I asked Jeff this question yesterday:

Jeff, do you think that blockading or cutting off supplies to a city in order to starve it into submission, with full knowledge that many women and children will die of starvation as a result, is intrinsically evil?

Jeff has responded in the affirmative. Are you saying that you disagree with him and that this scenario is not intrinsically evil as I have laid it out? Yes or no.

I couldn't care less what Thomas a Kempis meant, to be brutally honest.
My point was - it's ok to use the evil of the atom bomb to destroy the evil of Imperial Japan is crude consequentialism.

Graham

Ok, well what do you think people mean when they talk about "necessary evils" or say that they chose the "lesser of two evils" in life?

A turn of phrase. Like calling an obstinate person an "ass", or an evil person "subhuman". I wouldn't mean either literally.

Are you saying that you disagree with him and that this scenario is not intrinsically evil as I have laid it out? Yes or no.

Yes. No. Both or neither!

I don't believe a blockade of a nation as such is intrinsically evil. Put it on a narrower setting: I don't believe that encompassing a town and laying siege to it by letting nothing in or out is as such intrinsically evil. Mainly because I think that it is legitimate to starve an army into submission. If that army is in a self-contained fort, starving them out seems to be obviously legitimate. If that army and fort is attached to a small additional compound of non-military services, which mainly serves the fort but also has other economic interests and has regular civilians, it still seems moral. If that fort is a large part of a small town, which town existed before the fort but the fort became the center of activity, it still seems somewhat legitimate, although one might start to wonder. If that fort is a a miniscule part of a city, where almost everyone goes about their business without regard to the fort all day long, year after year, it seems pretty UN-legitimate to me to starve out the whole for the sake of the few soldiers - all other things being equal.

That's an example of not-intrinsically-evil sort of evil: it depends on circumstances and conditions. When you find yourself having to nail down x, y, and z conditions before being sure it is immoral, it isn't intrinsically immoral.

And I haven't begun to get into things like: did that city ASK and require that the army to embark on some war of aggression, have the army fail and flee back to the city? Or promise to capitulate once before, but then repudiate their promise and attack after they had "surrendered"?

When you say simply "starve out the city" you leave it open and ambiguous as to conditions that may alter what that actually implies (are there even civilians there? What about King Khalid Military City?) When ambiguous, when you have to furnish more conditions, (like "you know the enemy will take the food from the civilians so that the women and children will die first) you are imposing the constraints that are used to establish when something is evil in the concrete case, even though it is not intrinsically morally evil by general category.

So: no, encircling a city and imposing a blockade is not intrinsically evil.

The point, Mark, is that a crude consequentialism lay behind the acceptance of area bombing. The logic of "bombing civilians is really terrible, but the victory of Japan would be worse (and, anyway, in wars you have to get your hands dirty)" is crude consequentialism. Just choosing the lesser of two evils without reference to any other consideration is consequentialism. Like Lydia said, this really isn't a controversial point.

Yes, we do need to clarify what we all mean by "evil". But I do think that the common use of the term evil, and what Humanae Vitae meant are different...

So, the question isn't "are some acts more evil than others?" but "are some acts impermissible in every circumstance?"
If you don't like the term "intrinsic evil" call it
"irredeemable evil". You don't have to be Kantian or Thomistic to believe in irredeemable evils. Moral objectivists of all stipes believe in them. And bombing a city full of civilians with a nuclear bomb is a good candidate for an irredeemably evil act, by my reckoning.

Graham

Jeff and Mark, my spleen thanks you.

Leaving out the distinct possibility that their militarists would have lured the allied troops into a trap. Bring the occupation forces in close enough under a pretense of surrender and then hit them with every piece of artillery and aircraft the imperial armed forces had left.

Is there a reason this couldn't have happened even after the unconditional surrender? I mean ultimately you have to accept the idea that an enemy can surrender in a war. If your assumption is that they are thoroughly evil and incapable of honoring an agreement, then you frankly should advocate killing them all and rejecting any surrender no matter what the terms are. Because nothing they say or do will be sufficient for you to believe them. At that point you are arguing for genocide, but at least you would have "red lined the engine".

Step2, that's what I was wondering.

The point, Mark, is that a crude consequentialism lay behind the acceptance of area bombing.

Nonsense, Graham. You can declare it all you want but you haven't shown that, and you are only assuming that. At the end of the day, you are projecting a consequentialism onto Truman and the American public because that's the only reason you can think of to justify it. But that is not how they justified it. The fact that calculation were made about future scenarios by no means implies consequentialism. Because what made the calculation necessary was their moral outlook and understanding of evil. Not even a moral absolutist view regarding an action to be taken (as opposed to inaction) could ever be so strong that you don't try to justify it by thinking of worse future alternatives. Unless you're dealing with an intrinsic evil. Otherwise, not to think of future scenarios is against all we know about the virtue of prudence and common-sense. It would be an idealism.

Involved in the moral outlook of the Americans in WWII there are cultural issues in play that some in our more cynical age has trouble understanding. Anyone that studies American or English history should know that past times had far less cynicism than our own. Most here would decry the idea that cultures are equal, but yet if that is so we must give a less cynical public of an earlier age the justice of not projecting our own ideas about "crude consequentialism" onto them for thinking they had the right and duty to destroy an evil regime that had attacked them and afterwards committed itself to survival in what was considered shocking degree of viciousness in order to merely survive. To most Americans leaving such evil regimes in place was just not an option. That is why the high cost for the final push to Berlin as well. Ending these regimes was not consequentialist. It was a moral imperative.

So the debate really is a clash of two moral visions, and that rules out a crude consequentialism. One side is the type in the heads of the Americans at the time, and the other is a type of absolutism in the minds of those now that also happens to project a type of "consequentialism" onto Truman and the public. The problem is that the trump card employed today against Truman et all is a moral absolute pointing in the negative direction, inaction. But for those who think it absolves them from prudential considerations of future scenarios, it isn't a legitimate point against anyone considering positive action. And those who are inclined to declare Hiroshima immoral on grounds that it was consequentialist are presupposing the moral good of inaction that isn't warranted without argument, and such an argument would involve speculating on future scenarios unless inaction is a trump card too, or whatever that could mean in the middle of a vicious hot war not of our choosing. One trump card per customer please.

So the zippy-style trump card is invalid without other dubious assumptions not argued for, and the idea that Truman and the American public were motivated inappropriately by consequentialist ideas is bogus. The main factor was their moral outlook and their ideas about evil. Those who don't understand the moral outlook of another generation tend to project onto them other reasons for their actions than the ones they actually used.

If your assumption is that they are thoroughly evil and incapable of honoring an agreement, then you frankly should advocate killing them all and rejecting any surrender no matter what the terms are. Because nothing they say or do will be sufficient for you to believe them. At that point you are arguing for genocide, but at least you would have "red lined the engine".

That's absurd, whatever the Hell "thoroughly evil" means for you. Americans believed their culture was sufficiently evil to destroy, and it was. They had an understanding of the social nature of evil cultures that didn't entail that each person or even most were evil. And they thought such a culture could change after humiliating defeat. Is this really necessary to explain? And it did change a little I guess. I couldn't find the one where Koizumi actually sings an Elvis tune unfortunately.

And bombing a city full of civilians with a nuclear bomb is a good candidate for an irredeemably evil act, by my reckoning.

That is the text I should have quoted above, because I was responding to the atom bomb specifically.

Just choosing the lesser of two evils without reference to any other consideration is consequentialism. Like Lydia said, this really isn't a controversial point.

The idea that there weren't other considerations is an absurd claim. You can't support that, and all the evidence is against it.

Graham, I have no problem with your view that dropping the bomb was an irredeemably evil act. That isn't what this debate is about.

You can think hula hooping is an irredeemably evil and I'm fine with it. The point is that you have a different view of the world than those who dropped the bomb, and you can't impute your version of why they acted onto others to make it wrong for them to do by declaring consequences. You can say they were wrong, but NOT on consequentalist grounds. It is a harder job to declare the dropping of the bomb evil if not an intrinsic evil, but you need to find other reasons than the one you are using.

And don't tell me this is moral relativism. We don't have time for a argument about which moral outlook is better between your camp and the actors in question, but we certainly could. In fact, on any other day here at W4 someone would be claiming just that. Where are the romantics when you need them.

The problem is that the trump card employed today against Truman et all is a moral absolute pointing in the negative direction, inaction.

I'm not sure what thread you've been reading, but I doubt it is this one. There have been a few options suggested that could have been used, perhaps in combination: a demonstration on an uninhabited area, a purely military target, a blockade.

Americans believed their culture was sufficiently evil to destroy, and it was... And they thought such a culture could change after humiliating defeat.

I also believe it deserved to be changed, but there are a couple of unsupported leaps involved in assuming a humiliating defeat was the only way to accomplish that goal or that a negotiated surrender wouldn't have been humiliating.

They had an understanding of the social nature of evil cultures that didn't entail that each person or even most were evil.

I was using MikeT's weird logic against him. By "stripping out all reasonableness in the interpretation and examining the approach through the harshest and most logically progressed version of the idea." Sorry if I didn't explain myself well enough to suit you.

I understand your last point step2. But about the rest see below. You must realize that my task here is a takedown of the view of the zippyites, who try to claim the moral high ground without a real argument in my judgement. That is the problem. They don't provide a realistic argument, they provide the substitute for one. My project here is to remove them from their "high horse" in your terminology to the rest of us where we discuss future scenarios like everyone does in real life.

So my task is two-fold. To shred the argument that a) Truman and the American public employed consequentialist reasoning in the way they use it (not in a technical or classic sense but only as a scary word that implies bad moral judgement); and b) that the zippyites have a superior view because it requires no dependence on foresight. That is my project, and the zippyites do not critique zippy's view for reasons I'll never understand. So you see, step2, the debate up to this point is not whether the atomic bombing was justified, but whether the zippyites are on a better moral footing. If they're not, and they are not, then they have to get their hands dirty along with the rest of us and allow for prudential thinking about future outcomes. One thing at a time. Theology is in play here and no one is discussing it, but that would be a later step too.

So about that "consequentialist" interpretation of the American actors in the atomic bombing . . .

Well , if consequences were so important why end the regime at all? What did they think the payoff would be? To end an evil regime so their sons wouldn't have to return and do it all again in the next generation? Just an idea. Just an idea based on the testimony of veterans who fought the conflict, and the testimony of American soldiers to this day of why they fight.

You can't put your own consequence scenario in someone else's head and declare them a consequentialist! That is so brazen and ridiculous it is beyond comprehension! This is self-evident. And why would one want to do this? All so one can claim the moral high ground and not give a relevant argument for one's view. No matter what any of the zippyites say, the implicit assumption is that a future American generation of sons would NOT have to fight a future war with the same people and suffer violent deaths. So much for your idealist position where you don't need to sully your idealistic minds trying to foresee the future. Does anyone doubt that in the counterfactual scenario of a negotiated settlement, that a war 20 years hence of the sons of the WWII soldiers would be seen as anything but a massive failure of will, moral vision, of courage? Anyone? What's that you say? How do I know the Japanese wouldn't have eventually turned peaceful and saved lives at the end of WWII and a future generation of Americans not had to go off to war? Great question, but that is your unstated vision of the future you claim you don't have while mocking others for having one.

Oh but yeah, you've got the trump card, I forgot. You don't need to answer any of this because of that card up your sleeve you keep telling us about. Got it.

do you think that blockading or cutting off supplies to a city in order to starve it into submission, with full knowledge that many women and children will die of starvation as a result, is intrinsically evil?

Hey, George. If you have "full knowledge" (which I take to mean certain knowledge) that many women and children will die, then you're not trying to starve the city into submission; you're trying to kill people, right?

I can either side with King Saint Ferdinand III and the Holy Catholic Church, or I can side with you, Zippy, and Bill Luse.

Well, you should definitely side with a Church that canonizes mass murderers as opposed to heretical bloggers.

Who knows how many women and children perished.

Couldn't you give us a clue? A hint? One? Two? Two thousand? How many people did Ferdinand intentionally starve to death? Approximately. Emphasis on 'intentionally'.

At the end of the day, you are projecting a consequentialism onto Truman and the American public because that's the only reason you can think of to justify it. But that is not how they justified it. The fact that calculation were made about future scenarios by no means implies consequentialism. Because what made the calculation necessary was their moral outlook and understanding of evil.

Mark, I had a lot of trouble following your 8:42 post. This is the clearest part, to me anyway. And I am not sure I accept what you say.

Let's suppose for the sake of hypothesis that Truman wasn't a dyed-in-the-wool consequentialist, and that his moral reasoning was an ATTEMPT to reason not taking a consequentialist methodology.

He has a war to wrap up, i.e. a Japanese military to induce to become peaceful (not just pretend peaceful for 2 weeks, but truly giving up aggression), and a lot of follow-up effects after that. He has a number of tools in the toolbox to use, but finally they all constitute ways of pressuring the decision makers to throw in the towel. The main ones at that point were (1) continued conventional bombing, (s) an invasion, (3) the A-bomb, and (4) a blockade. The secondary options included things like accepting conditional surrender. (I am also willing to assume that for the moment accepting conditional surrender was considered a bad option, but it was considered so for a set of REASONS, and those reasons constitute projected consequences - nobody thinks that accepting conditional surrender is intrinsically evil.)

As always when you have several options, you start to weigh the pros and cons, but you don't bother to weigh the pros and cons of the options that you view as intrinsically immoral because for them the con weight is infinite - you just take them off the table. But you have to at least identify those as off the table, you have to spend a moment rejecting the ones that are not going to be considered. If ALL POSSIBLE avenues are fully on the table for weighing, then that would be tantamount to saying that no possible avenue could constitute an intrinsically evil option that would be rejected out of hand.

Now, it is possible for Truman to have considered each of (1) through (4), and come to a considered conclusion that all 4 of these do not constitute intrinsically evil options, so they all remain on the table for weighing the pros and cons. If that were the case, we could not be right to talk of his weighing of the pros and cons as a consequentialist position, rather that (some of us) would DISAGREE about that initial consideration that concluded that none of them are intrinsically evil. Once you conclude an option is morally possible, you are supposed to weigh its good and bad effects to see if it is a PRUDENT option.

However, I would like to be a little more cautious, and take baby steps: one can take on the concept "use the A Bomb" and conclude it is not intrinsically evil as an abstract theory, because there are (theoretically) uses where it is applied solely to combatants, for example; whereas one might forget that this conclusion rested on the possibility of being discriminating about how and where to use it: it is FUNDAMENTALLY possible to use the Bomb in a discriminating way. But it is also fundamentally possible to use the Bomb in a non-discriminating way: if you go after a population center that has no military presence, SOLELY for the terror effect, you are not pursuing war but terrorism. The effect might be to shorten the war, but moral, PDE-consistent pursuit of war implies having an object of your acts be limited to those acts that are ordered to the restraint or suppression of the enemy's unjust aggression, of their capacity to pursue the war. Bombing a pure population center isn't that.

So, some might say, although it is theoretically possible to consider using the Bomb in a licit manner that takes into account the pros and cons of effects, because it is used in a GENERAL approach that is consistent with a PDE analysis, not every such use is that. It is possible for Truman to rationally decided at the general level "using the Bomb is not an intrinsically evil option", and STILL fail to take the necessary steps to put the Bomb licitly on the table for a reasonable estimation of the good and bad effects - if he failed to even attempt to constrain the objectives to ones that would be licit for a "lesser of evils" analysis.

I am not claiming that this is how I would analyze it: I think that a failure to lay licit objectives for an A-Bomb use is exactly the sort of thing we identify to attempt to winnow out good from bad options under PDE: In addition to the first criterion, the act being not intrinsically evil in itself, you have to have(second criterion) the object of the act not include the evil foreseen. In this case, the evil of the civilian deaths was part of the objective, and therefore the option as presented fails the PDE test on the second criterion, not the first.

But if, like some around here, you don't go along with the notion that this sort of PDE analysis is right, you might want to say instead that "dropping an A-bomb on civilians is intrinsically evil." If that were right, then Truman would have erred not at the level of the abstract conclusion "using A-bomb is intrinsically immoral", but rather at the next step, making an ATTEMPT to set out licit objectives for such a bombing. Please note, I am not trying to claim a moral superiority from our perspective of 70 years after the war ended: if he made an ATTEMPT to lay out a constraining set of objectives for the use of the Bomb so that its use would rightly fall under a good PDE analysis, he would have satisfied the requirement for avoiding the label "consequentialist", even if we disagreed that his specific objectives were proper, e.g. even if we disagreed with the 1940's laden values and perspectives. The attempt to stay within a moral boundary away from "intrinsically evil" options would do it.

As I say, I think he probably was just wrong to allow the objective to include the psychological effect of killing 50,000 civilians. That doesn't make him automatically a consequentist, but it is possible that he was one if he made not even an attempt to reflect on whether certain uses of the Bomb could be moral and other uses could be immoral. But I think it far less important to decide whether Truman (by which I really mean the entire decision group) was consequentialist than to decide how to morally deal with complex problems like that.

So, some might say, although it is theoretically possible to consider using the Bomb in a licit manner that takes into account the pros and cons of effects, because it is used in a GENERAL approach that is consistent with a PDE analysis, not every such use is that. It is possible for Truman to rationally decided at the general level "using the Bomb is not an intrinsically evil option", and STILL fail to take the necessary steps to put the Bomb licitly on the table for a reasonable estimation of the good and bad effects - if he failed to even attempt to constrain the objectives to ones that would be licit for a "lesser of evils" analysis.

But Tony, I've said I'm entirely open to a discussion on whether dropping the bomb was immoral. Have you seen my statement on my task?

As I told step2, I am not arguing that what Truman did was not immoral here, I'm arguing that the zippyite case on which they claim it is immoral is bogus and misleading in the extreme. I'm quite willing to have the debate on whether it was immoral or not, but not on the zippyite terms which are distorting, idealistic, and determinative in an illegitimate way.

They could never admit that the double-trump card is invalid because that would involve a debate about the merits of the case as it occurred, as the actors saw it, and with the understandings they had. That would level the playing field, and they'll never do it. Take away their trump card and they are like normal mortals with counterfactual scenarios.

So I understand you loud and clear, but I've been saying the same for several days now. I'm not the one you should be telling about how it could still have been wrong, it is the zippyites. But guess what? The zippyites aren't going to give up their trump card and so you'll wait a long time for that discussion on the merits. Arguments on the merits are difficult and demanding. Their trump card is a substitute for an argument on the merits.

But I think it far less important to decide whether Truman (by which I really mean the entire decision group) was consequentialist than to decide how to morally deal with complex problems like that.

Well Tony, again, it is the zippyites you should be talking to about that, not me. They're not stupid. The "consequentialist" argument does an awful lot of work on their account. Can you dispute that they see it as a very important part of their argument against the morality of dropping the bomb, or that they can't stop talking about it? Surely not. They attempt to wield it to great rhetorical effect. A person would be blind not to see this. Read the top of the thread again if you need a reminder. Not being snarky, but just saying.

Interesting discussion: So what's the verdict here? Was Truman a crude consequentialist who ought to be numbered among the wicked warlords of the 20th century - like Stalin, Mao, and of course, Hitler?

Or was he just a fallible but decent man who made a judgment on what he thought was the best advice available at that time, and without all the information which we now have?

For those that doubt the centrality of the "consequentialist" charge to the zippyite argument, let me try again in a sort of diagram.

1) zippy Scylla says "The atomic bombing of Japan was intrinsically evil!"

Now if you disagree with '1' and mention any alternative scenarios you've fallen for the trick.

2) zippy Charybdis says "You're a consequentialist!"

The zippyites have set up the trick question and laugh as people struggle to get out of the box they've constructed. Hardy har har.

But the correct answer to the faux-clever conundrum is to disagree with '1' that it was inherently evil (as many here disagree), and to say that ending the regime was considered a moral imperative for the Americans, as it was. This regime wasn't inherently evil (no genocide please!), but sufficiently evil to require destruction. The Americans didn't need to know or speculate on the specific future evil scenarios that would result from the continued presence of an evil regime to know the result would be evil. To know that evil things will happen doesn't mean you know how, what, or when.

That is the historically correct answer to the zippyite trick question, and it doesn't presume to project future contingencies other than that evil produces evil results, and the American moral vision was to end the evil at its source once the fight took the brutal character it did. That was their moral outlook. Unless one is a screaming idealist one imagines alternative scenarios beforehand to see if one's moral vision is attainable. If you want to act with any wisdom, you must act on prudential foresight. If you don't do that you aren't taking prudential action, but engaging in reckless behavior.

Anyone who thinks this is "consequentialism" needs not an argument, but therapy.

Mark, I understand the temptation to refer to Zippy as the leader of the argument you are opposing, but he isn't here and (given the history) isn't likely to come in here to argue the case. If Jeff and/or Lydia say Truman was consequentialist, or that "dropping an A-Bomb on a city is intrinsically immoral", whether because Zippy convinced them or not, you should argue the case with Jeff or Lydia, not Zippy.

But the correct answer to the faux-clever conundrum is to disagree with '1' that it was inherently evil (as many here disagree), and to say that ending the regime was considered a moral imperative for the Americans, as it was. This regime wasn't inherently evil (no genocide please!), but sufficiently evil to require destruction.

Yes, but saying so doesn't imply that the means actually used would have been chosen by anyone except a consequentialist. It is not the fact of the final intention being "regime change" rather than "get them to surrender" that constitutes the determining factor for acceptable methods to use, or for justifying the A-bomb as used. And you sort of give the appearance of a proto-consequentialist when you say the above as an answer to 1 and 2. Why would you not simply say 1 is wrong (for the reasons given above), and 2 is irrelevant name-calling without foundation, and leave it at that?

Mark,

To jump back in, since as Tony says Zippy is not here to defend his honor, I'd like to address your last comment which I think is an excellent and clear statement of the moral situation as you see it:

"But the correct answer to the faux-clever conundrum is to disagree with '1' that it was inherently evil (as many here disagree), and to say that ending the regime was considered a moral imperative for the Americans, as it was. This regime wasn't inherently evil (no genocide please!), but sufficiently evil to require destruction. The Americans didn't need to know or speculate on the specific future evil scenarios that would result from the continued presence of an evil regime to know the result would be evil. To know that evil things will happen doesn't mean you know how, what, or when."

So we are at an impass -- either you think directly killing innocent human beings, even with all the context and qualifiers you want to stipulate, is wrong or you don't. All I am saying, is that I now believe that those who do disagree with '1' and use some sort of other moral framework, whatever you want to call that framework, is operating in a rough consequentialist manner. I used to operate in that consequentialist manner and I have sympathy for those who were making the decisions back at the end of WWII (as I said already). But how this fails to get the consequentialist label -- I don't understand (although I may need therapy, so keep that in mind when you respond!!!)

Because nothing they say or do will be sufficient for you to believe them. At that point you are arguing for genocide, but at least you would have "red lined the engine".

There is a point of absurdity, but what most of the people commenting against Mark don't seem to realize is that our leaders had every reason to believe that the Japanese leadership would not genuinely lay down arms until they were of a mindset to simply say "whatever it takes, we want peace." Any honor intact might have left them in a state of mind to continue hostilities. IIRC, around the time we were negotiating with them for how to actually carry out the surrender, there was an attempted coup by a group of young officers that came pretty close to successfully kidnapping the Emperor and separating him from the government.

But I think you missed my point about some of the hand-wringing as evidenced by how you quoted me there. In the past, some of the posters here have vacillated in what is and isn't acceptable in a time of war. Mainly on the topic of Israel which presents a lot of fun, philosophical scenarios about urban warfare, intent and all that jazz. Hamas frequently presents the IDF with situations where the IDF probably cannot defend the Israeli people "morally" (as defined here) by using tactics like holing up some missile batteries inside a school or hospital with a very large civilian population inside.

Based on some of the criteria that Tony has established here, the use of nuclear weapons on a civilian population center would not necessarily be intrinsically evil. For example, it would not be immoral to use several low yield nuclear weapons on large government targets of tremendous military value in a large civilian population center. There would be collateral damage, but a small nuclear weapon could easily wipe out a large military base nested inside a national capital without causing unnecessary damage to the civilian population; an air burst high above the capital could decapitate all central government communications channels in most states without directly targeting the population. Heck, most of our powerful bunker busters are nuclear weapons.

I think the only way you can conclude that the use of nuclear weapons here was immoral was that the main target in Nagasaki was the civilian population and the level of force used to annihilate the war-making capacity of Hiroshima was badly disproportionate. However, in the case of Hiroshima, if WWII happened today and we used several low yield nukes on Hiroshima, you'd have to be a pacifist to argue against that.

(Sure, you can cite radiation as a side effect; you could also say that normal toll of war on the food supply makes any large scale war a problem for the same reason...)

Yes. No. Both or neither!

Tony, that response is completely unacceptable. If someone asks you, “Is X intrinsically evil, the only possible responses are “yes” or “no,” or “I don’t know.” To respond, “It depends on the circumstances,” which seems to be your meaning here, is the same as to say “No, it’s not intrinsically evil.” For an act that depends on circumstances to be evil cannot be evil of itself; for if it were, it would not have to depend on circumstances to be evil; it could just depend on itself.

But then at the end you write:

So: no, encircling a city and imposing a blockade is not intrinsically evil.

But that’s not an answer to any question I asked, so I’m wondering why you even wasted your time writing it.

The question I asked was this:

Do you think that blockading or cutting off supplies to a city in order to starve it into submission, with full knowledge that many women and children will die of starvation as a result, is intrinsically evil?

Now if you don’t have the intestinal fortitude to answer that question, just say so -- or don’t say anything at all. I’ll understand.

Mark,

Le May, Sinclair, Portal and Harris didn't use consequentialism to justify area bombing? Churchill didn't? Rev John Collins and Bishop George Bell didn't use just war theory to oppose area bombing? Area bombing wasn't part of the historical context for the decision to drop the A-Bomb?
Stimson's Interim Committee set up to deliberate all questions concerning the bomb's deployment did not consider Japan to be morally equivalent to Nazi Germany. In fact the Imperial Japanese army got off easy compared to the Wermacht. Unit 731 was not prosecuted. Evidence of horrible barbarity was quietly filed away. The Emperor was not put on trial, and was given civil treatment by MacArthur. You have imagined a "moral vision" for US policy makers and read it onto the past.

Let me quote Le May, after the US caused 30 times the casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined by dropping fire bombs on wooden homes in Summer time: "we in the bombardment business were not at all concerned about this...We just weren't bothered about the morality of the question. If we could shorten the war we wanted to shorten it."

Let me quote Michael Burleigh:
"That the US was capable of adjusting the notion of unconditional surrender was already evident from its dealings with Darlan's Vichy Regime in North Africa and with the army and monarchy of Italy after the deposition of Mussolini. Japan amounted to more than they, but it did not represent the same order of evil as Nazi Germany, which all agreed had to be utterly destroyed. Throughout the weeks before the atomic bombs were dropped, the prospect of settling for something short of Japan's unconditional surrender was occasionally mooted, the guarantee being that the US would maintain the imperial system. That it did not come to this was largely because of the financial and technical momentum the Manhattan Project had itself created, although the decisions were made by a few men rather than abstract forces." Moral Combat p522.

Now the Western Allies and the Axis powers were not morally equivalent. And I imagine that if I was in Truman's shoes, I too would have swallowed the fiction that Hiroshima was a military target. (In fact, civilian homes were targetted for maximum effect. Stimson's committee had decided that, because factories were situated on the edge of cities, the destruction of a military target would have less psychological impact than the destruction of residential areas). I could easily have made the same decision. And I would have been wrong.

But I give up, Mark.
If you want to think World War Two was just like "The Sands of Iwo Jima", you go right ahead.

The act: blockading a city
The intention: to starve it into surrendering
The consequences: the city surrenders or holds out with the possibility of civilian deaths.

So to answer the question in full: No blockading a city is not intrinsically evil. The intention to starve it into submission isn't an evil intention. A desire to kill civilians would be an evil intent. The consequences of civilian deaths is evil, but moral culpability for that falls on the besieged, not the besiegers.

So it is far from clear to me how the Church's canonization of King Ferdinand translates into Zippy et al being wrong about directly incinerating civilians with an atom bomb. Furthermore, let's posit that King Ferdinand did commit an evil act. That wouldn't necessarily mean a loss of baptismal innocence given the conditions for mortal sin.

"we in the bombardment business were not at all concerned about this..."

Do you really think anyone doesn't know this? How does it show anything that helps you show consequentialism? Stop the presses, Graham has discovered emotional coldness towards enemies in wartime.

"That the US was capable of adjusting the notion of unconditional surrender was already evident from its dealings with Darlan's Vichy Regime in North Africa and with the army and monarchy of Italy after the deposition of Mussolini. Japan amounted to more than they, but it did not represent the same order of evil as Nazi Germany

You think the statement that "the US was capable . . . of unconditional surrender"? I have already laid out why it was morally objectionable to the US in the case of both countries. And citing Vichy France? Really? Just because Michael Burleigh said it I'm supposed to think the comparison of Germany or Japan to Vichy France is not as ridiculous as it seems on its face?

Le May, Sinclair, Portal and Harris didn't use consequentialism to justify area bombing? Churchill didn't? Rev John Collins and Bishop George Bell didn't use just war theory to oppose area bombing? Area bombing wasn't part of the historical context for the decision to drop the A-Bomb?

Graham, can you tell me what kind of bombing wouldn't be consequentialist on your understanding of the term? How would you distinguish consequentialist and non-consequentialist bombing? Because you're simple using "consequentialist" as a synonym for immoral. You think it was immoral, and so it must be consequentialist. That doesn't work.

Scott W. writes:

So it is far from clear to me how the Church's canonization of King Ferdinand translates into Zippy et al being wrong about directly incinerating civilians with an atom bomb. Furthermore, let's posit that King Ferdinand did commit an evil act. That wouldn't necessarily mean a loss of baptismal innocence given the conditions for mortal sin.

Scott,

Allow me to clear up some confusion:

I never claimed that the King’s canonization proves that Zippy is wrong about the atom bomb. The two scenarios are not parallel -- I recognize that.

I never claimed that the King committed an evil act. On the contrary, I hold that his siege and conquest of Seville were both good and meritorious. Nor do I hold that wicked means were employed to achieve them.

I do hold that, assuming the account in his biography is true, i.e., that at his process of canonization it was determined that he never committed a mortal sin, it would have never been so determined if he had ever committed grave crimes such as deliberately slaughtering innocents, whatever the state of his mind might have been.

So we are at an impass -- either you think directly killing innocent human beings, even with all the context and qualifiers you want to stipulate, is wrong or you don't.

Exactly Jeff.

All I am saying, is that I now believe that those who do disagree with '1' and use some sort of other moral framework, whatever you want to call that framework, is operating in a rough consequentialist manner. I used to operate in that consequentialist manner and I have sympathy for those who were making the decisions back at the end of WWII (as I said already). But how this fails to get the consequentialist label -- I don't understand (although I may need therapy, so keep that in mind when you respond!!!)

Jeff, I love the back and forth. But you seem to have missed my entire argument about the moral imperative driving a complete defeat from the American side? Why? How is having a moral imperative central to one's purpose (as the Americans did at the end of WWII) compatible with "consequentialism"?

Your statement "How this fails to get the consequentialist label?" is quite revealing. Your understanding of consequentialism is idiosyncratic. Like zippy and others, you are using it in a way that is a rough synonym for "immoral." It is redundant. You might as well say "X is inherently evil and evil." That's all you've said.

And yet this statement of yours is the most revealing of all: "using some sort of other moral framework . . . is operating in a rough consequentialist manner"

Wow. How does one avoid translating that as "The only non-consequentialist moral framework is my own"? How binary is that? Yet that is what I've been saying all along. For the zippyites, consequentialist/non-consequentialist is just a stand-in for moral/immoral. You are just confirming this.

Saying it is "consequentialist" in this idiosyncratic and tendentious fashion doesn't add any force to your argument, and it serves only a rhetorical role for those who don't realize you haven't added anything by using it. Let me use an example to illustrate. I have seen in discussions where people use the word "natural" in a way that I realized over time didn't seem to anything definite. So I have to stop and ask them "what would be an example of something non-natural" to see if they're willing to do it. What types of things would the term rule in, and what types of things would it rule out? If not, then the term means nothing definite.

It seems to me to those following zippy, that the term "consequentialist" means everything and nothing. So I ask you, can you give me any scenario where bombing from an airplane isn't "consequentialist"? And if so what distinguishes it from bombing that you do see an "consequentialist."

Mark,

I'm not convinced that you understand what consequentialism is, or the differences between virtue ethics, deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. I don't think you understand the differences between, say, WD Ross and Kantians on objectivism and moral absolutism.
I'm not convinced that you would be able to distinguish between, say, divine command theories or the thesis that ethics is autonomous.
In other words,I think that you are getting yourself into a muddle and blaming everyone else!

The option of changing the definition of unconditional surrender appears in the minutes of the meetings that Stimson chaired...so, yip, you might open a history book now and then.

Furthermore, you keep changing the terms of the discussion in a haphazard fashion...and your anger is bewildering.
So whatever, mate. I've wasted enough time.

( Have you any idea what went on in Vichy France???? The casualties suffered in Torch??? Do you know what happened to Darlan??? Sheesh!!!)

I'm not convinced that you understand what consequentialism is,

Rich you would say that.

( Have you any idea what went on in Vichy France???? The casualties suffered in Torch??? Do you know what happened to Darlan??? Sheesh!!!)

Yep.

But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before -- that the United States is like "a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate." Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.

Winston S. Churchill

Oops. Meant to highlight "the last desperate inch." Yeah that's a nation of bean counters alright.

My project here is to remove them from their "high horse" in your terminology to the rest of us where we discuss future scenarios like everyone does in real life.

It wasn't until I mentioned genocide was still on the table that you conceded some war acts are illicit. Up until then you were doing a dance where you wouldn't admit to any illicit war acts. So if you want to be upset about a moral high ground you need to define where the ground is at a minimum.

How is having a moral imperative central to one's purpose (as the Americans did at the end of WWII) compatible with "consequentialism"?

You know consequentialism is a moral system that involves imperatives, right? It is a system where in basic cases it is compelling for the ends to justify the means, hence Lydia's very common critique about killing one patient to save many others. So Zippy and others are using the term in a basically correct fashion. Now there are many variations of consequentialism, so it would be inappropriate to say every consequentialist will consider the atomic bombings a slam dunk, but it does clearly fit a core pattern for that system.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/

So I ask you, can you give me any scenario where bombing from an airplane isn't "consequentialist"?

Any scenario where innocent civilians are not necessarily included as part of the target. Hasn't that been clear from the beginning of this whole argument?

Sure, you can cite radiation as a side effect...

Since nearly one third of the total deaths came from radiation poisoning in the weeks after the bombings, it is a fairly severe side effect. Just saying.

Now if you don’t have the intestinal fortitude to answer that question, just say so -- or don’t say anything at all. I’ll understand.

George, I didn't answer the question you asked because you asked a wrong question. It was misformed out of a misunderstanding of "intrinsically evil acts." It's like a scientist asking an experimental subject "now, is this wavelength of sound green, or blue? No other answers allowed."

"Intrinsically evil" refers to acts that are morally evil by general principles, by the _nature_ of the act at the species or genus level of identification by the object of the act. This is as distinguished from acts that are morally evil by reason of the specific conditions, circumstances, and particulars that apply here but not to all instances of that species of acts. Also, as distinguished from acts that are morally evil by reason of their intention, the goal of the action. The three causes of an evil act being immoral being: its nature, its circumstances, and its intention. Intrinsically evil acts are acts evil by reason of their nature, having a disordered object. (Adultery is evil by its nature, so it is evil even if you do it well, or poorly, or in a large bed or a small one, or if you do it for the goals of money, prestige, or whatever.) St. Thomas:

(In the interior act of the will, does goodness or malice depend on the object?) Good and evil are essential differences of the act of the will. Because good and evil of themselves regard the will; just as truth and falsehood regard reason, the act of which is divided essentially by the difference of truth and falsehood, for as much as an opinion is said to be true or false. Consequently good and evil will are acts differing in species. Now the specific difference in acts is according to objects...

(For exterior acts, does goodness or malice of the act depend on the goodness of the will?) I answer that, As stated above (A[1]), we may consider a twofold goodness or malice in the external action: one in respect of due matter and circumstances; the other in respect of the order to the end. And that which is in respect of the order to the end, depends entirely on the will: while that which is in respect of due matter or circumstances, depends on the reason: and on this goodness depends the goodness of the will, in so far as the will tends towards it.

Now it must be observed, as was noted above (Q[19], A[6], ad 1), that for a thing to be evil, one single defect suffices, whereas, for it to be good simply, it is not enough for it to be good in one point only, it must be good in every respect. If therefore the will be good, both from its proper object and from its end, if follows that the external action is good. But if the will be good from its intention of the end, this is not enough to make the external action good: and if the will be evil either by reason of its intention of the end, or by reason of the act willed, it follows that the external action is evil.

From the Catechism:

1755 A morally good act requires the goodness of the object, of the end, and of the circumstances together. An evil end corrupts the action, even if the object is good in itself (such as praying and fasting "in order to be seen by men").

The species of act under discussion is "blockading or cutting off supplies to a city". For reasons given above and re-stated by Scott and Mike, this is not intrinsically evil.

You then go on to add the intention: in order to starve it into submission, and then you add a circumstance: with full knowledge that many women and children will die of starvation.

Since the second and third clauses do not describe the nature of the act but things that get to the OTHER two reasons an evil act can be immoral, they cannot speak to the act being INTRINSICALLY evil. You asked a wrong question.

I put the question rightly, and answered that. Blockading a city is a species of act that is neither intrinsically right nor intrinsically evil - of its own nature it is morally neutral. Hence its morality cannot be determined apart from the other two elements, intention and circumstances. If in a particular case you blockade a city intending to starve the women and children, that would be an example of an evil, immoral blockade, but still not an intrinsically evil blockade.

So I ask you, can you give me any scenario where bombing from an airplane isn't "consequentialist"?

Any scenario where innocent civilians are not necessarily included as part of the target. Hasn't that been clear from the beginning of this whole argument?

Another person who thinks immoral = "consequentialist". You've confirmed my point step2.

You know consequentialism is a moral system that involves imperatives, right? It is a system where in basic cases it is compelling for the ends to justify the means, hence Lydia's very common critique about killing one patient to save many others. So Zippy and others are using the term in a basically correct fashion.

No, no. Look, Graham got the definition right that it was "whether an act is morally right depends only on the consequences of that act," which comes straight from the link you provided. The problem is that this definition doesn't fit the actions at the end of WWII in question. Winston Churchill knew the Americans would fight "to the last desperate inch" before they had even reacted to Pearl Harbor because it is in their character to dislike ambiguous moral outcomes when evil that grows into violence and bloodshed and sacrifice have already occurred. It was their moral outlook.

All acts have consequences, and all wise people consider what the consequences of their actions might be before acting. The zippyites have defined "consequentialism" down so far they can't tell us what it isn't.

Another person who thinks immoral = "consequentialist". You've confirmed my point step2.

You are right, I should have added that the bombers believe that directly killing innocent civilians will save many more lives, either directly or indirectly. They wouldn't target civilians if they believed it would produce a net increase in casualties, not under a consequentialist framework.

Since nearly one third of the total deaths came from radiation poisoning in the weeks after the bombings, it is a fairly severe side effect. Just saying.

Never disagreed with that. I was just saying that pointing to the radiation as something which particularly meaningful about the nature of a nuclear attack's morality except as a factor in determining proportionality is not insightful. A war on the scale of WWII could easily do to the crop supply, transportation for crops or both the same or more damage that would cause terrible casualties through non-nuclear means.

You are right, I should have added that the bombers believe that directly killing innocent civilians will save many more lives, either directly or indirectly.

That is complete horse-hockey. You are projecting a consequentialism onto them. What the command supported by the public wanted was an end to the regime. They thought ending the regime would be a better outcome. That's it. All people strive for some end. Sometimes things get worse after the end is achieved, and wise people don't presuppose it won't, but it is still considered a better outcome even if things get worse because the goal and the consequences aren't the same. It's amazing I need to explain this.

They wouldn't target civilians if they believed it would produce a net increase in casualties, not under a consequentialist framework.

And you know they were under a consequentialist framework because you've projected it onto them. This is bizarre. The only way to preclude a military force of consequentialism on the zippyite account would be what? To lose more men that the enemy did? Then we'd know that it wasn't consequentialist? Nope. You could still be couldn't you? Yep.

It might be possible to exist in a state where most people (or at least the philosophers in power) acted on the high moral principle that the end can never justify the means. But it is only a conceivable existence.

As it is, we live in a Machiavellian world.

It might be possible to exist in a state where most people (or at least the philosophers in power) acted on the high moral principle that the end can never justify the means.

The moral worry about the "end justifying the means" only pertains to a means whose character is intrinsically evil. When the means is morally neutral but PHYSICALLY evil (like cutting off an arm), the end is precisely and necessarily what justifies the means. That's the core of "lesser of 2 evils" analysis.

The trick is knowing when you have an intrinsically evil means, and when it is not. Most people can see the difference on obvious cases for normal everyday activities, even if they cannot articulate it clearly: you don't murder someone for a walletful of money. The fact that even philosophers cannot figure out the right answer shouldn't be surprising in a situation where so many philosophers are bad philosophers.

The fact that even philosophers cannot figure out the right answer shouldn't be surprising in a situation where so many philosophers are bad philosophers.

Well, a lot of situations at a level of complexity like WWII operations don't lend themselves to easy discernment. 4G warfare is certainly a quagmire for people trying to create a moral framework for warfare that is actually compatible with the realities of modern warfare.

"That is complete horse-hockey. You are projecting a consequentialism onto them. What the command supported by the public wanted was an end to the regime. They thought ending the regime would be a better outcome. That's it."

Yeah, ridiculous to think that a teleological ethic was at work there...

For the record, I was not equating a teleological ethic with "evil"- I was prepared to discuss that. I was also prepared to discuss why some secular consequentialists (Grayling, Glover) believe area bombing was morally wrong.
I don't think that consequentialism is a good account of ethics, and I don't think it's good policy. I don't seem to hold to the same ethical theory as Lydia, Zippy etc. But I pretty much agree with their conclusion that the use of the A-Bomb was wrong. It's an important issue.
Apologies to Jeff S for getting grumpy on his thread. For what little it's worth, Jeff, we ended at the same destination taking different journeys - but I agree with you on this issue.

Graham.

Graham, I don't give a rat's ass if you or anyone agree with me on the atomic bomb issue as far as this thread is concerned. I never did. You have your opinion and I have mine on it. My problem is when people use reasoning to advantage their argument that confuses the issue, whether it is intentional or not. FWIW I assume it is unintentional.

It might be possible to exist in a state where most people (or at least the philosophers in power) acted on the high moral principle that the end can never justify the means. But it is only a conceivable existence.

As it is, we live in a Machiavellian world.

I myself wouldn't go as far as to say it is generally Machiavellian on the way people often use the term Alex. Russia and France have some of the most cynical foreign policies in the world, whereas ours bounces back and forth between realpolitik (the "realists") and the Reaganite moral strains (for lack of a better term) depending on how the last election came out.

But if their isn't enough high moral principle at work, one thing's for sure. You can't take some sort of general anti-consequence pose in ethics. Such an anti-realist form of meta-ethics has never been proposed because it would be so bizarre and repugnant to humanity. That is not what "consequentialism" means. It never did, and never could.

Not saying anyone is doing this, but if those who keep slinging the "consequentialist" tag around when they can't or aren't willing to rule out that it might not even apply to things driven by ideology and moral imperatives then it raises this sort of fundamental question. At any rate this just makes it apparent that this method merely prejudices the argument in their favor.

One must therefore reject the thesis, characteristic of teleological and proportionalist theories, which holds that it is impossible to qualify as morally evil according to its species — its "object" — the deliberate choice of certain kinds of behaviour or specific acts, apart from a consideration of the intention for which the choice is made or the totality of the foreseeable consequences of that act for all persons concerned.

Z, you can come out of the closet.

The only way to preclude a military force of consequentialism on the zippyite account would be what?

In deontologist ethics, the Right precedes the Good. Moral norms have priority over any consideration of good (or bad) consequences.

Such an anti-realist form of meta-ethics has never been proposed because it would be so bizarre and repugnant to humanity.

Deontologists think the same thing about consequentialism, that it is profoundly alienating and counterintuitive. So cry me another river.

Z, you can come out of the closet.

I'll play his consequentialist theme song, that might help :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjcH2UmK1uo&feature=player_detailpage#t=75s

step2, it is too late to play this off as simple meta-ethical disagreement. Those are very abstract, and I have never even heard of such a contentious debate over that as we're having now. As I've shown, the zippyites are using "consequentialism" in an idiosyncratic and extremely expansive way that would get no rise out of anyone because of its abstractness, including me, if they weren't doing so in order to make a *practical* point about the morality of Hiroshima. If they not make that practical move the meta-ethical issues would only be a matter that grad-school students would discuss while stroking their chins.

So your attempt to pass this off as meta-ethical rivalry fails. The zippyites make a subtle shift from an abstract issue of meta-ethics to enhance the punch of a shrill claim about practical morality by delegitimizing possible responses to them. The latter is what makes it contentious, not the former. It is an illegitimate move.

Do you really think that because they keep imputing "consequentialism" to others that you can merely assume the issue for them is about the superiority of an actual deontological view? That is pretty dubious since none of them has even given me a reason I shouldn't think them to be "consequence-nihilists." Not that anyone would care if anyone had such a bizarre view if they weren't using it to bludgeon those who disagree with their moral judgements. But of course they aren't that crazy and don't actually believe that, they only need a rhetorical consequence-nihilism that can be selectively applied when disagreements arise over moral judgements. It is a pose for whacking those over the head who disagree with their moral judgements.

But the consideration of these consequences, and also of intentions, is not sufficient for judging the moral quality of a concrete choice. The weighing of the goods and evils foreseeable as the consequence of an action is not an adequate method for determining whether the choice of that concrete kind of behaviour is "according to its species", or "in itself", morally good or bad, licit or illicit. The foreseeable consequences are part of those circumstances of the act, which, while capable of lessening the gravity of an evil act, nonetheless cannot alter its moral species.

In the case of the positive moral precepts, prudence always has the task of verifying that they apply in a specific situation, for example, in view of other duties which may be more important or urgent. But the negative moral precepts, those prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behaviour as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception. They do not leave room, in any morally acceptable way, for the "creativity" of any contrary determination whatsoever. Once the moral species of an action prohibited by a universal rule is concretely recognized, the only morally good act is that of obeying the moral law and of refraining from the action which it forbids.

Exactly right John. Can I call you John?

"Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation." A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons - to commit such crimes.

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