Jim Ryan is back in the blogic saddle, for how long is anyone's guess. His posts are infrequent but unusually stimulating. Catch him while you can. He has an argument for the morality of targeting noncombatants:
1. "Any war will be such that the deaths of enemy innocents will be inextricably woven into the chain of events known as defending oneself against that enemy.
2. "Self-defense is [morally?] permissible."
Therefore
3. "Inflicting death upon enemy innocents is [morally?] permissible.
The modified argument is valid, and since (2) is uncontroversial, the soundness of the modified argument rests on the truth-value of (1). I am strongly inclined to say that (1) modified in the way I suggested is true and that the modified argument is sound. Thus
1*. Some wars are such that the deaths of enemy innocents will be inextricably woven into the chain of events known as defending oneself against that enemy.
In support of (1*) Ryan adduces the World War II bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war against the Axis powers was just. If that be granted, then, given that the Germans and the Japanese either had inflicted or were about to inflict unspeakable destruction upon British and American population centers, thereby killing millions of innocents, the Allies were morally justified in destroying Axis population centers in order to end the war.
The idea, to put it simply, is that if a war of self-defense is justified, and if the enemy has shown that he is prepared to use any and all means to win, then the defending side also is morally justified in using any and all means to win.
I would like to add a point that Ryan does not make, but that I suspect he will agree with. Although it is morally permissible for an individual to "turn the other cheek," "to resist not the evildoer," etc. in the letter and spirit of the New Testament, it is morally impermissible for government officials in charge of national defense to do the same. For they are responsible for people besides themselves. Consider the analogy of the pater familias. He cannot allow himself to be slaughtered if that would result in the slaughter of his spouse and children. He must, morally speaking, defend himself and them. With a single person it is different. Such a person may (morally speaking) heed the advice Ludwig Wittgenstein gave to M. O'C. Drury: "If it ever happens that you get mixed up in hand-to-hand fighting, you must just stand aside and let yourself be massacred." (Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. R. Rhees, p. 149) That was presumably advice he gave himself while a combatant in World War I.
It is a serious mistake, and one oft-made by liberals, to confuse the private and public spheres and the different moralities pertaining to each.
Imagine a society that implements a policy of not resisting (apprehending, trying, convicting, incarcerating, killing) rapists, murderers, foreign invaders, and miscreants generally. Such a society would seal its own death warrant and cease to function. It is a fact of human nature that people, in the main, behave tolerably well only under threat of punishment. People for the most part do not do the right thing because it is the right thing, but out of fear of punishment. This is not pessimism, but realism, and is known to be true by all unprejudiced students of history and society.
As for turning the other cheek, it is a policy that works well in certain atypical circumstances. If a man has a well-formed conscience, and is capable of feeling shame, then turning the other cheek in the face of his affront can achieve a result far superior to that achieved by replying in kind. Nonviolence can work. Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to the British may serve as an historical example. The Brits could be shamed and in any case Gandhi had no other means at his disposal. But imagine what would happen if Israel turned the other cheek in the face of its Islamic enemies who would blow it off the face of the map at the first opportunity?
Once your enemy has reduced you to the status of a pig or a monkey fit only to be slaughtered, then there is no way to reach him, shame him, or persuade him by acts of forebearance and kindness. You must resist him, with deadly force if necessary, if you wish to preserve your existence. And even if you in particular do not care to preserve your existence, if you are a government official charged with a defense function, then you are morally obliged to resist with as much deadly force as is necessary to stop the attacker even if that means targeting the attacker's civilian population.
But is it not better to suffer wrong than to inflict it, as Socrates maintained? Would it not be better to perish than to defend one's life by taking life? Perhaps, but only if the underlying metaphysics and soteriology are true. If the soul is immortal, and the phenomenal world is of no ultimate concern -- being a vale of tears, a place through which we temporarily sojourn on our way to our true home -- then the care of the soul is paramount and to suffer wrong is better than to inflict it.
The same goes for Christianity which, as Nietzsche remarks, is "Platonism for the people." If you are a Christian, and look beyond this world for your true happiness, then you are entitled to practice an austere morality in your private life. But you are not entitled to impose that morality and metaphysics on others, or demand that the State codify that morality and metaphysics in its laws and policies. For one thing, it would violate the separation of Church and State. More importantly, the implementation of Christian morality would lead to the destruction of the State and the State's ability to secure life, liberty, and property -- the three Lockean purposes for which we have a state in the first place. And bear in mind that a part of the liberty the State protects is the liberty to practice one's religion or no religion.
There is no use denying that the State is a violent and coercive entity. To function at all in pursuit of its legitimate tasks of securing life, liberty, and property, it must be able to make war against external enemies and impose discipline upon internal malefactors. The violence may be justified, but it is violence nonethless. To incarcerate a person, for example, is to violate his liberty; it is to do evil to him, an evil necessary for a greater good that can be attained in no other way.
The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):
The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.] There is a tension between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.
As a philosopher/Christian, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.
What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug-smuggler or a human-trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law-breaking. I must be concerned with public order and the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's lawbreaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.
Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops and others who apparently cannot comprehend the simple distinctions I have tried to set forth.
I agree with you that the argument from (1) and (2) to (3) is sound, but (3) doesn't by itself justify "targeting" noncombatants as you say in your opening sentence.
The examples you give later may suffice to do that. But even here I suspect we might want to make use of the principle of double effect. The intention of Hiroshima, I presume, wasn't to kill noncombatants, but to induce a quick Japanese surrender and thereby to save lives overall.
You are right that the doctrine of double effect is relevant to this discussion. But as Anscombe argues in "War and Murder," the Allied obliteration of cities cannot count as a legitimate application of double effect.
Here is a case of double effect: I intend to stop a murderous armed intruder who is about to kill my children. I use deadly force, firing a .38 round into his upper body, knowing that there is a good chance I will kill the intruder. But my intent is not to kill him but to stop his attack. Although his death could have been foreseen, if he dies, his death is 'accidental.'
But the intent of the Allies was precisely to kill large numbers of civilians so as to terrorize the Axis opponents into surrender. Dresden, for example, had no military significance.
What I take Ryan to be arguing is that, quite apart from considerations of double effect, the firebombing of Dresden and the killing of its innocent population was justified in order to end the war. I think his position involves a repudiation of just war theory.
(a) where genuinely accidental 'collateral' death are caused by attacks upon valid military target. Seems justified, or at least unavoidable, particulatly in the case where the enemy has deliberately based itself in a civilian area?
(b) where some (but not all) civilians have been aiding the enemy and random civilian executions (possibly including innocect civilians) are necessary to persuade them helping the enemy is not a good idea. This was practised extensively by the German forces in Greece in WWII (where we stayed in August there was a village whose population had been wiped out), and most people believe this was a bad thing.
(c) where widespread killing of civilians is necessary to reduce morale and (in effect) save lives by ending the war. This was the justification for Hiroshima, Dresden, the bombing of Vietnam &c. Still argued about in our country now.
(d) where widespread killing, looting and rape is part and parcel of conquest, and difficult to prevent. E.g. the rape of Constantinople in the fourth Crusade, of Berlin by the Red Army in 1945
All these cases seem to fall into the category of 'deaths of enemy innocents inextricably woven into the chain of events'.
PS my boss, who is also interested in matters of theology, has reminded me that a Catholic bishop was asked by the military what they should do in capturing a Cathar town. How should they distinguish between the heretics and the faithful Christians. 'Kill them all' said the bishop, 'The Lord will know his own'.
Rhoda's suggestion that we must look to the intentions of actors is also helpful. But the doctrine of double effect probably won't help in justifying unintended deaths if those deaths are a means to achieving intended ends, or if they are not strictly necessary to achieving intended ends. Properly deployed, double effect arguments depend crucially on fine-grained details of the circumstances in which action takes place.
The discussion seems to take for granted that the firebombing of German cities played a significant role in bringing the second world war to a successful conclusion. That was the hope of the "air power advocates" of the 1930's, like Arthur "Bomber" Harris. In fact, the big lesson about strategic air power from WWII is how resilient civilian populations and military production are to this sort of attack. It didn't demoralize the British in 1940 nor the Germans in 1943-45, despite the hundreds of thousands of women and children killed. And German military production reached its peak in late 1944, when most German cities had been reduced to powder.
Albert Speer, the organizational genius behind German logistics, said that the one area where strategic bombing had a decisive impact was in the disruption of oil production and distribution. Targeted American daylight attacks (not indiscriminate night-time bombing of cities that the British employed) on the oil infrastructure grounded large parts of the Luftwaffe from 1944 on and severely limited the tactical options open to German motorized forces.
It was only years after the war that an honest assessment of the strategic bombing campaign could be made. How do you admit to yourself that the deliberate slaughter of hundreds of thousands of women and children had only a marginal effect on the war? That's one problem with embarking on such morally repulsive means. Churchill initially balked at the idea of targeting cities, and only authorized it in desperation at what looked like imminent German victory. As these things do, the strategic bombing campaign then took on a life of its own and became a moral monstrosity in 1944-45. The more repulsive it became, the more "Bomber" Harris piled on in an attempt to make the targeting of civilians justify itself by deciding the war. That is the background to the Dresden attack - it was supposed to be an attack of such horrifying violence that the Germans would surrender and thereby justify all the prior attacks.
In war, it is critical to be honest with yourself about what works and what doesn't. In my opinion, a decisive advantage of the Allies was their dedication to the truth - the truth about the enemy and the truth about what worked to defeat him. Nazi Germany was riddled with lies and deception, so much so that the Nazis had great difficulty in seeing the reality of the war situation, and so made catastrophic blunders in both technology and strategy. The one area where the Allies failed in this regard was the strategic bombing campaign - it continued with increasing fury against German cities despite any real evidence that it was effective. I believe the morally dubious nature of the campaign prevented an honest assessment of it during the war, and thereby served to lengthen the war rather than shorten it.
The phrase "inextricably woven into the chain of events" smells like a euphemism for "the fog of war" that cloaks a multitude of sins. Right-wing mush doesn't taste any better than its left-wing competitor. Targeting innocents? Sounds like someone who might find it difficult to get insurance in the propertarian order I favor!
As G. E. M. Anscombe argued in "Mr. Truman's Degree," “. . killing the innocent, even if you know as a matter of statistical certainty that the things you do involve it, is not necessarily murder. . . . On the other hand, unscrupulousness in considering the possibilities turns it into murder.”
You implicitly rested your case on assumptions about too many empirical matters for adequate coverage in this forum, so I will simply oppose those assumptions with the judgment that all the executive staffs of the belligerents of Second World War were unscrupulous in the relevant sense and therefore murderers.
There is no such thing as society if this is imagined to be some sort of agent above and beyond individual human agents. Thus I reject such talk as 'Society is to blame for Tookie Williams's being a murderer.' But it is a non sequitur to infer that there is no distinction between the private and the public.
You seem not to have appreciated my point. It is morally permissible for a man with no dependents to "resist not the evildoer" and allow himself to be slaughtered. But it is clearly not morally permissible for a man with dependents to allow himself and his family to be slaughtered. He has a moral obligation to feed and protect his children. And even if it were obligatory for the man with no dependents to "turn the other cheek," it cannot be obligatory for the pater familias to allow his family to be slaughtered.
If you disagree with what I just said, then we have no common ground, and it is pointless to discuss these issues with you. Fruitful discussion is impossible with people who do not share fundamental assumptions.
In any case, I much prefer what you call right-wing mush to your anarcho-libertarian bullshit.
No it doesn't. It takes for granted that in some cases the obliteration of cities, which results in the deaths of noncombatants, brings a war to an end. And surely that is true. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the War in the Pacific theater.
Regarding the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think it is important to know that the U.S. was NOT targeting civilians. An under-reported fact is that the U.S. Army Air Force dropped leaflets on all the Japanese cities that were targeted which warned residents to evacuate. Here is the text of the leaflet:
The U.S. sought to destroy the civilian infrastructure that was supporting the Japanese war effort, not civilians themselves.
Regards, Bill T
I'm no more a pacifist than you are, and for the reasons you gave. Simpler cases of self-defense make it hard to see how the provocative proposition you lifted up for discussion (the permissibility of targeting of innocent noncombatants) can arise. If criminals invade my home, for example, I try to repel them or capture them and hold them for trial. It does not occur to me to devise plans to blow up their houses with their loved ones inside, even if the aggressors intended an equivalent horror for me and mine. Those responsible for modern wars do, however, entertain such types of courses of action, and when they implement them, they are often proud of the results (although they just as often lie about them first).
The basic issue is aggression against persons and their property and the defensive response thereto. Even if my neighbors and I join forces to address the problem of, say, repeated aggression against the neighborhood, no "public" emerges to instigate "chains of events" into which are "woven" exemptions from the interpersonal bonds that morally limit human action.
Since "public" more often than not functions precisely as does "society" in the sense we both find distasteful, I'm surprised by your suggestion that I've committed a non sequitur. You're the one who highlighted in a separate paragraph the notion that "different moralities" pertain to the "private and public spheres." If that is not a "serious mistake," it is certainly a proposition in need of argument, especially given the cover it provides for state predations, especially in wartime. I trust you have words stronger than "mush" to describe rationales for unjust acts committed for reason of state, be they leftist-economic or rightist-military in content. (Like "society," "public" has its proper usage. One need not be a Whiteheadian to hold that every experience has both a private, inaccessible-to-others dimension and public, accessible-to-others expression.)
I don't know whether you intended "bullshit" in the Harry Frankfurtian or some other sense, but as I've been nothing but "civil, reasonable, and [if wordy, at least] germane" in my posts, I don't see why your exposure to my point of view should test your commitment to maintaining a Blanshardian reasonable temper.
My guess, for what it's worth, is that propertarianism is too close for comfort for conservatives as well as liberals, and so the urge to disown people with whom they fervently do not wish to be confused on some issues are actually people with whom they have much in common on others.
Whatever has motivated your adoption of a contemptuous tone in your response to me, I have no wish to irritate you by playing, on your private property, propertarian gadfly to the conservative horse you seem content to ride. So, Bill, please guide my deliberations regarding whether to offer comments in the future. If they're no longer welcome, just say so.-- Tony
I was aware that leaflets were dropped, and I thank you for the text. And to be clear, I am not arguing that the A-bomb obliteration of the two Jap cities was not morally justified. Clearly, if the Axis powers had A-bombs and the means of delivering them (and they were hard at work at developing them), they would have used them against Allied population centers. So the practical question became this: are we to allow our basically good civilization to be destroyed by the agents of basically evil (un)-civilizations? So drastic measures had to be taken to stop them.
But I think it is important to be intellectually honest. Surely no one expected mass evacuation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the basis of those leaflet drops! In fact, it would have been irrational for the Japs to evacuate in the face of what to them could only appear as Allied propaganda whose intent (from the the Jap point of view) could only be to sow the seeds of mass confusion. Plus, they weren't sure we had the A-bomb. The leaflet you quoted says nothing about a special superweapon.
In short, the officials in charge must have known that mass killing was about to be perpetrated on innocent noncombatants. Here is an analogy. Suppose you are almost always in your house, and I destroy your house, but say I didn't murder you since my intention was to destroy your house, not you. You can even suppose that I sent you an e-mail stating that I was going to destroy your house at a certain time.
You speak of destroying the civilian infrastructure of the Jap war effort, as opposed to destroying civilians and destroying military infrastructure. But now I think you are on thin ice if you are shooting for a 'just war' defense of the H and N bombings. Might be better to follow Ryan and jettison just war theory if you want to uphold the morality of the H and N A-bombings.
There is no clear answer here, but the A-bomb attacks on H and N cannot be subsumed under 'collateral damage' since, as you admit, it was civilian infrastructure that was targeted, and since the weapons used had unheard of and uncontrollable destructive power.
You read too much into my post, but in doing so, you raised some interesting issues. We surely agree that the U.S. met the burden of jus ad bellum in World War II. But was the burden of jus in bello met in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Whether or not the U.S. intended or desired the mass slaughter of civilians in those attacks, I would argue it was. That's because:
[1] It was clear that an invasion of Japan would result in hundreds of thousands of U.S. casualties and millions of Japanese casualties (Iwo Jima and Okinawa was sufficient evidence of that), to say nothing of the physical destruction of Japan;
[2] Extraordinary means were justified to bring about the surrender of Japan to prevent that extraordinary level of death and destruction;
[3] The atom bomb was the only effective means the U.S. had to avert that carnage, and compelling evidence that its use was necessary is that U.S. had to drop not just one atom bomb but two to force the Japanese to surrender.
That said, it is important to know that the U.S. did NOT intend or desire mass civilian casualties in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if U.S. war leaders seriously doubted that the notice of impending attack would result in evacuations, the fact that U.S. did give notice to civilians demonstrates that it did not target civilians. Unlike the fire-bombing of Dresden, the atomic bombings of Japan were not terror attacks.
The U.S. was striking legitimate military targets, because the Japanese had mobilized nearly the entire civilian population to defend against the expected invasion by the U.S. Nothing short of destroying the civilian capacity to carry on the war was going to stop that effort. So it was necessary to strike the civilian infrastructure, but not the civilians themselves, to end their support of the war effort. And so the U.S. took what measures it reasonably could to give civilians the chance to avoid the atomic attacks.
You note that the leaflets did not warn civilians that the U.S. was going to strike with a superweapon, so perhaps the U.S. had no reason to think the Japanese would take the leaflets seriously. I don't know about that. The B-29 campaign had already visited awful destruction upon Japanese cities, so warning of impending attacks was no small thing. Also, the atomic bomb was a superweapon in the sense that a single bomb delivered by a single B-29 had the destructive force of a 1000-bomber strike, which the Japanese were already experiencing. In other words, Japanese civilians already knew how terrible our attacks could be -- whether a thousand B-29's delivered it or a single one did.
So, let me wrap up by refining your analogy. My house is being used as a base to attack your family and home. You have suffered much because of these attacks. You know that if you destroy my house, you can end the attacks against you. Because you do not have to kill me to end the attacks, you warn me that you are going destroy my house and so I should evacuate it immediately. Let's say you also know with some confidence that I'll ignore your warning. Does that mean you are responsible for my death when you destroy my house?
Instrumentally but not morally. It was my indifference, recklessness, or immortality that made my house a danger to you. All you are seeking is an end to the attacks, now and forever. You seek to do so by the least destructive means available to you. If I do not pay heed to your warning after I had made myself part of the danger to you, then I have only myself to blame.
Regards, Bill T
Bill T
1. Random killings of enemy population within friendly lines, which successfully scare the enemy into surrendering.
2. Random killings accompanied by torture. This tactic was successfully employed by Vlad Dracul in Roumania to repel the muslim hordes. Dracul (whose name was the inspiration for the eponymous Count) is still revered to this day in Roumania, as a defender of Christian civilisation (a hard man who did hard but necessary things). (The torture in question was the impaling of live prisoners).
3. Random killings, possibly by torture, publicised on some mass medium such as television or the internet. Had the internet been available in Vlad's day, I'm sure he would have been glad to use it! The use of this technique seems to have been successful when used by Islamic terrorists. (Their justification for this is events such as Dresden and the bombing of Cambodia).
If you rule out these cases as 'uncivilised' you are on difficult ground, because you then have to decide which ways of killing innocent people are uncivilised. If you want to rule out torture, you have to decide which methods of causing painful death do not count as torture. There is also considerable evidence that some means of causing death used by the Allies and US were designed specifically to cause painful death, e.g. firebombs (which do not explode and do not kill instantly), and napalm, which is composed of substances that cause great heat (phosphorus) and substances that cause sticking to flesh (some form of polystyrene, to stop the victims escaping a painful death by scraping the stuff off). When does the causing of painful death count as torture?
See this rather chilling description here. Note the euphemism. The polystyrene increases the "effectiveness of napalm as an incendiary agent". I.e. sticks to the flesh. The effectiveness is in causing 'Morbidity and mortality' i.e. suffering and death, through 'trauma' i.e. pain.
Before anyone accuses me of being some sort of commie, let me assure you I have no interest in the rights or wrongs of the matter. My only interest is as a logician. How do we differentiate between civilised and uncivilised techniques of killing, and how do we differentiate between the causing of mortality by trauma, and torture?
You wrote: “. . . the practical question became this: are we to allow our basically good civilization to be destroyed by the agents of basically evil (un)-civilizations? So drastic measures had to be taken to stop them.” This seems to beg two questions: (1) Is the intentional immolation of two Japanese cities (and its subsequent celebration) by American civilization consistent with its alleged basic goodness? (2) Did the temporary helming of Japanese civilization by a clique that allied itself with the Third Reich make it “evil” (and therefore a potential target of destruction by agents of “good”)?
Also, even granting arguendo the hardly unchallengeable assumption that, as Bill T. put it “the U.S. met the burden of jus ad bellum in World War II,” it does not follow, as you are pointing out to Mr. T., that any means of “stopping them” was justifiable. What’s making the moral deliberation needlessly difficult, in my opinion, is the undefended assumption that the bombings were militarily necessary, that is, that the cost of known alternative means of achieving Japan’s surrender were intolerably high. The opinion of MacArthur, Eisenhower, Nimitz, Halsey, LeMay and many other officers who served under Truman, however, was that the bombings were not necessary.
Why so many who identify themselves as “conservatives” feel compelled to defend the haberdasher’s opinion against the soldiers’ is beyond me, unless it’s part of an advance apologetic for the coming strike against Iran before Truman’s worthy successor leaves office (barring a wartime “state of emergency” suspending the next general election). For another point of view (especially regarding “our basically good civilization”) is Justin Raimondo’s “Hiroshima mon amour: Why Americans are barbarians” from 2001. At least read this passage:
"A panel set up by President Truman to study the Pacific war issued a report, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, in July 1946, which declared,
"The report was suppressed, ignored, and shoved down the Memory Hole."
That's it down to a "T". ;)
Hi, Ockham.
You asked: "How do we differentiate between civilised and uncivilised techniques of killing, and how do we differentiate between the causing of mortality by trauma, and torture?"
If the suffering caused to defeat the enemy is gratuitous, then the difference lies there.
Regards, Bill T
You referred to this statement from the study Truman commissioned:
A couple of things. First, that conclusion was drawn upon information not available to the U.S. until after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese. Second, the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki did, according to this study, facilitate a quicker end of the war.
In doing so, four additonal months of strategic bombing of Japanese cities were averted. Keep in mind that an atom bomb was the equivalent of a conventional high-explosive strike of 50-250 B-29's (according to the study). So using the atom bombs was not necessary in the sense that the U.S. could have continued conventional bombing of Japan for several more months to bring about its surrender.
However, the carnage and destruction of continued conventional bombing would have been horrific. Four more months of it would have been equivalent to dropping 100-200 atom bombs on Japan. Indeed, immediately after Nagasaki, the U.S. Army Air Force sent a force of 1,500 B-29's on a conventional strike against Tokyo which caused 80,000 causalties.
I'm not sure how arguing for four more months of that speaks against the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Regards, Bill T
Vlad the impaler's actions saved Christendom from Islam. So they were certainly not gratuitous.
If the Study is correct, then the bombings were objectively unnecessary militarily. As for who knew what when, I must defer to the historians, but I find your claim instructive for future deliberations about bombing cities on the basis of information that our leaders are “so sure” is correct.
The bombings facilitated a quicker end to the war because the only end acceptable to the Allied command was “unconditional surrender,” which ultimatum gave the Japanese an incentive to fight until things were unconditionally hopeless. Providing an incentive (“conditional surrender”) would also have tended to facilitate a quicker end to the war.
If the criterion of the right course of action is expediency, you’re right. If, however, it is horrific (morally so) to incinerate noncombatants (remember my Anscombean point about scrupulosity in weighing probabilities attaching to prospective homicides), then I simply don’t see how one may choose to incinerate them over half a week rather than over four months. Murdering millions is worse than murdering hundreds of thousands, of course; the moral disparity, however, is a function of the magnitude, not of the intrinsic nature of the two events.
The strategic bombing of Japanese cities was not a meteor shower, but an action under human control, and so was averting it. In my opinion, the whole enterprise was morally tainted (on both sides). The Allied decision-makers were not like the innocent occupants of lifeboat who must reduce occupancy by one to avoid the death of all, and who then set about their grim duty. But that is not something we can get into here.
Regards, Tony
Thanks for the napalm link. As a logician and philosopher of language, you probably noticed this passage:
This effort resulted in the development of napalm B (super napalm, NP2), which substituted polystyrene and benzene for naphthalene and palmitate. The resulting substance continued to bear the name napalm, although it lacked the 2 components of its namesake.
'Napalm' as currently used is like 'Holy Roman Empire' which was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. You will remember that famous Kripke passage.
Anyway, no one here will accuse you of being a Commie, but I was surprised to hear you say: "I have no interest in the rights or wrongs of the matter. My only interest is as a logician." But what good is the logic-chopping and the conceptual clarification if it doesn't help us get clear about the the right or the wrong of the matter?
I am surprised that you confuse raising a question with begging a question. I explain the distinction here. In any case, you ask:
(1) Is the intentional immolation of two Japanese cities (and its subsequent celebration) by American civilization consistent with its alleged basic goodness? (2) Did the temporary helming of Japanese civilization by a clique that allied itself with the Third Reich make it “evil” (and therefore a potential target of destruction by agents of “good”)?
You have an annoyingly tendentious way of writing. Why bring up 'celebration'? What kind of person celebrates the horrific deaths of noncombatants? But the A-bombing of those cities was necessary to end the war and prevent the killing of even more combatants and noncombatants. And the answer to (2) is yes.
You may be a former Commie, but you still display the Left's insensitivity to danger. Do you have any idea what would have happened to civilization had the Axis powers won? You may no longer be a Commie but you still have a pollyannish view of human nature. You also refuse to face the threat of militant Islam, despite the collapse of the WTC in your own city. But of course you hold the loony view that that was an 'inside job.' I recall that when we discussed this you had nothing to say in response to the detailed refutations of your conspiracy nonsense by Tim McGrew and others. That thread is here.
I enjoy it.
Vlad the impaler's actions saved Christendom from Islam. So they were certainly not gratuitous.
Vlad's defeat of the Turkish army stymied Ottoman expansion into southeastern Europe for awhile, not his torture of the defeated Turks. Therefore, the suffering he inflicted by impaling them was gratuitous.
Regards, Bill T
P.S. Of course, this is assuming that the accounts of Vlad the Impaler are historically accurate. I don't know enough about that period of history to say one way or another.
You wrote: If, however, it is horrific (morally so) to incinerate noncombatants (remember my Anscombean point about scrupulosity in weighing probabilities attaching to prospective homicides), then I simply don’t see how one may choose to incinerate them over half a week rather than over four months.
It looks like you missed my point about why some military leaders stated that the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not militarily necessary. The A-bomb was not a superweapon because it caused devastation any faster than conventional bombs. It was because the A-bomb greatly increased the firepower of a single B-29 by fifty-fold or more. The U.S. could have visited the same level of destruction upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a sortie of one or two hundred B-29's with conventional high-explosive payloads, which it was already routinely doing against other Japanese cities.
So the A-bomb made a big difference for the U.S. because it greatly reduced the logistical requirements to deliver a certain amount of firepower against a target compared to conventional bombing. The difference to the Japanese between being struck by an atom bomb delivered by a single B-29 or an equivalent level of high-explosive bombs delivered by 100-200 B-29's was small (beyond the initial shock of seeing what a single bomber could do).
Therefore, the argument that the A-bombings were not a military necessity to end the war by the close of 1945 has merit only by accepting that the U.S. would have alternatively continued to deliver the equivalent of 100-200 atom bombs during four more months of conventional bombing. In other words, in place of the atom bomb the U.S. could have ended the war by visiting upon Japan a far greater level of death and destruction with conventional bombs.
As for this ...
The bombings facilitated a quicker end to the war because the only end acceptable to the Allied command was “unconditional surrender,” which ultimatum gave the Japanese an incentive to fight until things were unconditionally hopeless. Providing an incentive (“conditional surrender”) would also have tended to facilitate a quicker end to the war.
Perhaps, but the Allies had the experience of World War I in which an armistice with Germany brought about an even more devastating war twenty years later. Setting aside whether or not World War II was an inevitable consequence of that, the Allies were pursuing an end to global conflicts with their demand for the unconditional surrender of the fascist powers, and they largely succeeded in doing so over the past sixty years. No small achievement.
Regards, Bill T
>>what good is the logic-chopping and the conceptual clarification
I enjoy it.
That's a good fall-back position. If you push me to the wall and ask, "Why do you scribble all this stuff? You don't really believe you will improve the world or anyone's thinking, or arrive at some yet-to-be-discerned important truth, do you?", I always have the fall-back response, "I find it deeply satisfying; it makes me happy," a response with which no one can argue.
But, for me that is not good enough. The logic-chopping and conceptual clarificationougth to be in the service of higher ends. Surely eithics has something to do with becoming a better human being?
The object of your “surprise” is imaginary. The question that you raised, i. e, “are we to allow our basically good civilization to be destroyed by the agents of basically evil (un)-civilizations? – begs the question that our civilization is to be contrasted with other civilizations (even “un-civilizations”) with respect to basic goodness, i.e., we have it and they don’t, so perhaps normal rules don’t apply.
To answer the question you raised one must first subscribe to the disputed propositions you presuppose. The American empire which grew to dominate American civilization over the 20th century is not obviously compatible with “basic goodness,” and the temporary leadership of Japanese civilization with allies of the Third Reich is not obviously sufficient to condemn Japanese civilization as basically evil. It was empire in the first place that made an attack on Pearl Harbor an attack on “America,” and it was an evil intention that kept information of that attack from the hapless soldiers who bore its brunt (capping a decade of economically provocative behavior against Japan), the more expeditiously to exorcise from the body politic the ghosts of WWI-inspired pacifism.
Americans celebrated the end of the war cognizant of what “did the trick.” There is no evidence that “Jap”-bashing Yanks engaged in your casuistry or lamented noncombatant deaths of (those contemporaneously caricatured as) sub-humans. Granted, Americans didn’t dance on the charred remains of Japanese children (although at a Harlingen, Texas air show in 1976, the recently departed Enola Gay pilot, Paul Tibbets, simulated a re-enactment of his war-shortening blessing that crisped 140,000 people and irradiated many more others. He later apologized for the entertainment, but not for the unjustifiable homicides.) My unfortunate but parenthetical conflation of points should not have distracted you to the point of psychologizing my argument. In any case, bombing raids are not meteor showers but human actions, as are the statist wars that a given raid may or may not bring to a swifter end.
My theme has been that such wars are great excuse-makers for departures from our moral code. They are moral hazards that find and spawn opportunities for the “practically limitless human capacity for evil,” which of course, pre-exists the state, but which for some reason you believe is significantly worse in non-Western than it is in Western civilizations. It is just because “men are not angels,” indeed, that some men are devils, that we should not trust any of our fellow men with a monopoly on the means of violence. That is the danger to which I believe you and so many conservatives are insensitive, so I plead “not guilty” to your psychological conjecture, “You have a pollyannish view of human nature.” (My friends will have a ball with that one.) Such remarks only reveal the thinness of your conservatism. Don’t you have a few more moves before insinuating that my character is so defective that reasonable discussion with me pointless? You also know nothing of my view toward what you refer to as “the threat of militant Islam,” but even if time and space permitted, the tone you have recently taken toward me, despite my irenic efforts in recent comments, doesn’t incline me to share it with you.
You apparently have also divined what would have happened had the Axis powers won. At least in the short run, their defeat meant, among other things, Stalin’s control over Eastern Europe. But, Nazi or Communist, no form of centralized control is sustainable; conservatives, however, seem to suspect that it may be after all: once evil is on the throne, all is lost. You know, once a country “goes Red,” that’s it, saecula saeculorom. The Soviet Union, despite its Potemkin villages, atom bombs, and Sputniks, was an economic basket-case scheduled for implosion. That would have been the fate of a temporarily victorious Third Reich, which posed no clear and present danger to the United States. Socialism (not merely the political attempt to socialize production via confiscation and the imposition of command, but socialism)—the direction of production without markets and without money prices—is impossible. That goes for National Socialism. That goes for any militant Islamic edition.
As for 9/11, I did not have “nothing to say” to my critics. Here’s is how I left things: “It is the 9/11 Commission Report that utterly fails to meet a plausibility threshold. If we reject anything like Griffin's conspiracy theory—which is about many interrelated things, not just one thing—then either we're stuck with the government's utterly inadequate conspiracy theory or there's some third possibility no one has yet formulated. Griffin's controlled demolition of the Report may one day attract a Gerald (Case Closed) Posner. But this thread didn't convince me that that day is near. This will be settled elsewhere.” (Emphasis added.) But you’re right to believe that the suspicion that 9/11 was an inside job colors one’s view of the real threat we face.
Nothing on that now-dated thread is intellectually compelling. Mr. McGrew’s entertaining of “prior possibilities,” which so impressed you, left intact David Ray Griffin’s detailed refutation of the government’s conspiracy theory. You have given no evidence of having familiarized yourself with his exhaustive empirical and rational Debunking 9/11 Debunking, which came out this year. That lack has not, of course, inhibited you from berating me for my alleged failure to deal with “detailed refutations of” my “conspiracy nonsense.” After reading its third chapter with its detailed criticism of NIST’s report, you may regret your applause for Mr. McGrew’s breezy “Griffin is wrong about steel,” “Griffin depends on Jones,” “Griffin’s free fall calculations are irrelevant,” etc. Funny how the folks at NIST (an agency of Bush-Cheney’s Commerce Department), with a $20-million budget, didn’t think of all that first, but instead felt they had to tweak their computer model for five years until it saved their hypothesis.
9/11 is the gravest of matters affecting this country, but if you have a grasp of the state of the question, you are keeping it a secret. You seem oddly content to entertain possibilities second-hand (e.g., what do various commenters on your blog have to say to each other) and then air speculations about “prior possibilities” as if you were leading a freshman philosophy seminar on “possible worlds.” I had mistakenly thought you would be interested in the process by which a fellow philosopher, namely David Ray Griffin, who has demonstrated his analytical and critical skills on numerous occasions in academia, changed his mind about what happened on 9/11 as a result of his examination of the evidence. Yes, there is the question of why agents of Bush-Cheney (granting arguendo that the latter were hell-bent on finding a casus belli) would install explosives in the Towers if they knew terrorists were going to drive planes into them. Your inability, however, to conceive of an answer imposes no rational obligation on me to provide one, nor does it justify ignoring the evidence that the sufficient conditions for controlled demolition, and for no other explanation, were met. That factual matter must be settled in one’s mind before one takes up questions of plausible motivation. This you have not done. As Griffin has it, our knowledge, however limited, will not be informed by our critics’ ignorance, however vast.
The official conspiracy theory fails to add up in ways that suggest lying and cover-up to protect the official theorists’ ultimate employers. It has led exigent minds, like David Ray Griffin’s and perhaps yours one day, to seriously entertain a possibility that has been realized many times in history, namely, a false-flag operation. And that’s all Griffin has done. He has no more claimed to have demonstrated the truth of his alternative theory than he has claimed to have proven the truth of Whitehead’s metaphysics. In both cases he has claimed only that his theory makes better sense of all the evidence than any known alternative theory.
The impact of the planes was not sufficient to knock off of the insulation (irrelevant in the case of Tower 7), most of the jet fuel was lost shortly after impact, the fires were not intense enough, big enough, or long-lasting enough to do what the government’s NIST said they must have done. Period. All the evidence indicates controlled demolition, nothing indicates anything else. That conviction informed my initial rhetorical question, “Who set the charges?,” which you naively took as question-begging: the quality of the evidence, as Griffin has presented it, is such that one is warranted in boldly asking that question.
But the case for controlled demolition is only one piece of Griffin’s prima facie case against the 9/11 Commission Report and NIST. Has someone rebutted that case? Until someone has, it stands. As I said, this will be settled elsewhere than on your blog, from which coop (“looney,” “nonsense,” “bullshit,” “pollyanish,” etc.), the spirit of Brand Blanshard, the philosopher who occasioned your contacting me some years ago, seems to have flown.
Thanks for the space to air my differences with you.
Sincerely,
Tony
You think I missed your point, and maybe I did, but I thought I had conceded it when I wrote that if the operative criterion was expediency, then H-N bombings were militarily justified, and nothing you have just written inclines me to retract that qualified concession. (I don’t think you have given any weight to the threat of a Soviet invasion, independently of what the Americans might have done, in accelerating the Japanese high command’s decision to surrender.)
But military justification is rarely moral justification, and my point was that morally there is little to choose between varieties of programs that result in (morally certain) noncombatant incineration. What reduces logistical requirements to deliver a certain amount of payload is not obviously germane to moral deliberation. If I am told that such war crimes happened regularly in the PTO and that the H-N bombings simply concentrated the criminality, then my conviction that “all the executive staffs of the belligerents of Second World War were unscrupulous in the relevant (Anscombean] sense and therefore murderers” (see October 23 above) is only reinforced.
I do not regard those who lied and embroiled Americans into war after war in the 20th century as wise, pragmatic statesmen who did distasteful but necessary things for the common good. [For more on this, I recommend Murray N. Rothbard’s 1986 monograph, “War as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals.”] I cannot put aside what you ask me to, for I cannot imagine a National Socialist victory in the absence of the Versailles-directed humiliation of Germany. The American, by which I mean Jeffersonian, course of action would have been to let European folly and tragedy an ocean away take its course to a German victory in the so-called "Great War," and then it would never have had to be renamed "The First World War" to distinguish it from its successor. To this day we suffer the demographic impact of the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of young men, mostly European and of European descent, who, having been immolated in the furnaces of the World Wars, never sired children.
As guests on someone else’s blog, however, we cannot unpack all of our divergent assumptions, and so, as Bill O’Reilly likes to say, you may have the last word.
Regards,
Tony