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Jonah Librande
Prof. Pyle
Hiroshima & Nagasaki
28 November 2016

Ethics at Oblivion: Human discourse on Atrocities and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

I.

Introduction: On Atrocities and Outline

There are some events in human history that are characterized by both a massive loss of

life and dire arguments for and against them; they are rarely unambiguous, and are often famous
or infamous, depending on who is asked. Shermans March to the Sea caused a great deal of
destruction and turmoil, but it saved the war; Chairman Maos Great Leap Forward killed
millions, but pulled an agrarian society through the muck of progress to modernity; an
occurrence happens that does something large at a similarly large cost. Events of this general
form may be called unavoidable evils by leaders at the time, but they are fundamentally dreadful
and abhorrent not indefensible, but any defense of them must acknowledge that something
awful is being done. These, simply put, are awful, terrible actions that may or may not have
proper justifications; it will then do us good here to acknowledge this atrocious aspect of these
events by simply calling them atrocities.
What is of interest to this paper is not that these events occur, but how people view them;
an atrocious loss of life is not automatically a bad thing for many, or else Stalin would have no
defenders of the same policies that brought about the Holodomor, and Chairman Mao alone
would be glad for his modern China. Many people say that these events were, in fact, good

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things in the end. There are a great many nuances in arguing that an atrocity, despite its atrocious
nature, was a net benefit for humankind, and those nuances are treated well in other papers, but
this particular paper examines the ethical judgment implicit in the word good, and ignores the
logistics treated in a given argument.
The word good is used in this context to deem that an action was something
permissible, or ethically desirable as opposed to the alternatives. When we say that it is good that
we donate to charity, we mean something about the ethical desirability of donating to charity, just
as when we say that it is good that we performed some act, no matter how atrocious it is, we
speak of that actions ethical desirability. What is ethically desirable, preferred, justified, or
whichever term one prefers, is based on ones own system of ethics, and the huge variance in
systems of ethics is what allows for people to differ on whether an action is justified.
Here, the author seeks to grapple with two problems related to these atrocious events:
first, the reason for the immense variance in ethical perspectives on seemingly black and white
issues will be found, and then we will find what unifies the defenses of and attacks on these
atrocities in an ethical sense. This task, if performed properly, allows the analyst to understand
not just how certain awful events have happened in the past but also, if the trends in thought are
adequately understood, will allow the analyst to see how atrocities begin, how they germinate
from a thought and bloom into some cantankerous long-suffering atrocity, extending the logistic
analysis others are fond of to the very beginning of an event, so that we may recognize from
modes of thought that the roots of an awful decision are taking hold; we allow for prediction in
the future.
To that end, this paper examines in particular the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the conclusion of World War II for two reasons: one, they are

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commonly presented as catastrophic losses of life in favor of the beneficial cause of ending the
war they are atrocious, even if (and that is an if) well-justified, so they may be examined as a
microcosm of the many ethical problems surrounding atrocities; two, the bombings have a rich
philosophical literature surrounding them that allows for a rich surveying and analysis of the
ethical dimension of the bombings.
II.

On History as a Text
The diversity of views on the atomic bombings is deeply astonishing considering how

many of the viewpoints use the same key bits of evidence, and it warrants explanation. Four
schools of thought exist on the bombings, and all interpret the bombings differently: the
Orthodox school claims the bombs were an ethical way to bring the Pacific War to a conclusion;
the Revisionist school counters the Orthodox, claiming the bombs were a sort of political
machination to counter the Soviets, dropped on unsuspecting and undeserving civilians who had
no business being caught between the two superpowers; the Imperial school, which places
culpability on the Japanese Emperor and the Japanese state for resisting surrender; and the
Domestic-Cultural school, which attributes the bombings to the United States policy of
unconditional surrender during the Pacific War that simply had too much momentum to be
stopped1. Again, these schools mostly look at the same set of evidence, but view different pieces
differently; one may stress a certain piece of evidence (say, for an example, diplomatic cables),
while another discredits that entire class of evidence. Methodological questions are raised (e.g.
How can we infer the thoughts of the more important military officials from diplomatic
cables?) and some information is regarded as subordinate to some other forms.

1 Pyle

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This issue of evaluating evidence in this way is how each school reaches its interpretive
conclusion, and each schools interpretive conclusion encompasses everything about how it
views the bombings, so it must necessarily include that schools ethical evaluation of the
bombings. At first, an observer may think that this implies an objectively correct ethical
interpretation of the bombings; after all, the proper examination of the evidence must reveal to us
the actual political and military reality of 1945, and from that we can clearly deduce who really
prompted the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is therefore ethically culpable, right?
Not right, because the interpretation of evidence is not something as simple as thinking
about it very intensely for a stretch of time. Kenneth Pyle came very close to stating the truth
when he said that [o]n major interpretive issues, historians do not dispense objective truth. Even
supposing the historian to be free of bias, the past is simply too complex.2 To see why Pyle is
correct and there exists no objective truth to ground our ethics (or anything else in our
interpretations of history), we look to a document on methodology from another field: literary
criticism.
Morris Weitz opens his book, Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism, with the claim
that he states he has no space to prove: that the conclusions he reaches are applicable to all types
of criticism, and that he only has space to deal with Hamlet specifically. In at least the case of
historical criticism, his book certainly holds value, for nothing else but the more general claims
he makes about conclusions and evidence in his section on the methodology of interpretation3.

2 Pyle
3 Weitz himself is very inconsistent with which word refers to the critics act of deciding the primacy of facts or significance of the dramatic
work as a whole, sometimes calling it explanation while using interpretation at infrequent intervals. In either case, the act is what many of us
did to books in our high school English classes, defining a theme of the work and trying to discover the authors intent, and the word itself is
analogous to the historical interpretation of the sections opening paragraph. Thus, I will use the word interpretation throughout.

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The key issue with any sort of interpretation of some dramatic work, according to Weitz, is that it
lacks a solid grounding in the facts of the work, because no work of art tells explicitly what is the
most important within it in Hamlet specifically, that Hamlet suffers is given in the play, but
that his suffering is his central trait and that this trait is the most important in the play are not
given.4 This not-given component that such-and-such beyond what is explicit in the play is
the critics interpretation, and it cannot be authoritative as long as debate and doubt are possible
on the categories of [interpretation] and what is primary in the play.5 The problem is that all
categories of interpretation are subjective, since they themselves are abstractions that are
unprovable, and it is difficult to see just how a metaphysical statement about tragedy or the
nature of man, or an aesthetic statement about the nature of drama can be established as true.6
This argument that it is impossible to create an objective interpretation of a play because the
interpretation will depend upon unprovable things applies with slight modification to historical
interpretation, which explains how we have so many (and so varied a selection of) schools of
historical interpretation. Continuing with our examination of diplomatic cables as evidentiary, it
is a fact that there exist Japanese diplomatic cables from the end of World War II between the
Japanese ambassador to the Soviet Union, Naotake Sat, and Japanese Foreign Minister
Shigenori Tg, that these cables include statements from the Foreign Minister pressuring the
ambassador to open negotiations with the Soviets so that Japan could exit the war, and that these
very cables had been intercepted by U.S. officials; some schools use this to claim that Japan was
ready to surrender at the time of the bombings and the U.S. knew this, and thus the U.S. clearly
4 Weitz p. 256
5 Weitz p. 258
6 Weitz p. 257

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had ulterior motives if they still dropped the bomb7, while other schools disregard this very same
fact as unimportant compared to military cables or useless in the face of contradictions with
other diplomatic cables8. The former argument is a typical Revisionist argument while the latter
is common with modern Orthodox scholars, but they are both united by an eerie similarity to the
appeals to objectivity that Weitz criticizes as impossible to prove. To state it in Weitzs wording
makes the appeal more clear: it is given that the Japanese diplomatic cables show that the
ambassador was trying to initiate negotiations with the Soviet Union, but it is not given that the
entirety of the Japanese government sought surrender with the United States; since surrender
with the United States was not sought openly, that such a surrender was desired by the Japanese
government would have to be decided with some sort of theory of the politics of Japan in World
War II, or with some sort of theory about the integrity and honest of the producers of diplomatic
cables in this time period, or perhaps even some other more esoteric calculus. No matter what is
decided upon as a means of making sense of these cables in the context of the Pacific War, it
must always depend upon some artificial, theoretical framework that not only lacks evidence, but
is beyond evidence, because it is our means of ordering evidence in the absence of the truth of
the matter to structure it for us.
The problem is that these statements are fundamentally unprovable, since they are merely a way
of putting into words our opinions of how to prioritize evidence such that a certain viewpoint
similar to our own on the truth is obtained. This means that there can be no truth, and no
agreement, and no objectively correct interpretation, since, as Weitz said, there may still always
be disagreement in the absence of proof. There is then no way for the Revisionist who holds up
7 See Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
8 See Richard B. Frank, Downfall

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the diplomatic cables as proof of the Japanese desire to surrender to defend themselves, for how
can they prove the theoretical framework (of the diplomatic cables as accurate reflections of a
governments (or even the specific case of the Japanese governments) political will)
undergirding their claim? What proof can ever be provided that this abstract and insubstantial
construct is verifiably, undoubtedly true? The answer is that somebody could still conceivably
raise a valid objection to such a theory even if it had lined up an unbelievable set of facts; if
every member of the Japanese government at the close of the war signed a document supporting
the theory, and every historian agreed that the Japanese government functioned just so, an
outsider could still raise a perfectly valid and possibly true objection to the theory, for perhaps
the Japanese officials had reason to lie, and the historians were blinded by consensus, or any
other permutation of this scene such theories are beyond proof. The same could be said of the
Orthodox historian who tries to counter the Revisionist; they could not find an unassailable
theoretical grounding for their attack any more than the Revisionist could find one for their
defense.
The sense in stating all this is threefold:
First, it shows that arguments about historical interpretations are fundamentally
undecidable. There is no argument that exists that could properly prove a historical
interpretation, because they all rely on the abstract theories that Weitz warns are unprovable;
thus, there is no way to prove one such argument. A corollary to this is that there is no objective
ethical grounding for such interpretations, because we lack the knowledge of the truth of the
circumstances we are trying to judge, so we cannot assign culpability to an event we lack proper

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knowledge of9. In other words, there exists no objectively correct ethical judgment of the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no matter what the four schools may say. It is still
possible to ethically defend and attack the bombings, of course, but not in any verifiably correct
fashion.
Second, all four schools are equally defensible, regardless of evidence. This is because all lack a
solid grounding for the theories of evidence organization on which they turn, so all are equally
likely to have valid objections raised against their content by some concerned critic; it is always
possible to justify the arrangement and interpretation of the evidence in a certain way, just as it is
always possible to attack a given interpretation.
Third, as a direct consequence of the point above this one, the actual specific pieces of
evidence used by each school are unimportant in our analysis, since all are equally justifiable.
There exist theoretical frameworks that could justify including, criticizing, or excluding the
diplomatic cables of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, so there is no reason we should antagonize
over how a given interpretation views just the cables if our goal is examining the general outlook
the interpretation takes towards the bombings. The individual pieces of evidence would be an
unneeded level of specificity.
Now that we properly understand the grounding of the ethical judgments made about the
bombing and that all are equal, we may consider how the bombing is actually dealt with, from an
ethical standpoint.
III.

Arguments for the Bombings

9 To see why knowing completely the circumstances of an event matters, consider an extreme example: a Nazi who was involved with logistics
but did no killing himself is brought before a tribunal and found guilty of war crimes. He is being carted away at the trials conclusion when an
Allied officer arrives, angry, and informs the jury that the man was a double agent who leaked the locations of the concentration camps and
prisoners of war to the Allies. The man seems obviously morally repugnant before the officer arrives but completely exonerated after; however,
then suppose that no one could verify the officers identification, and that the officer had a peculiar but faint German lilt to his voice; we lack
knowledge now of the truth or falsity of the circumstances of the original Nazi logicians guilt, because our evidence is in doubt

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The objective of this section is to first survey a selection of arguments that are
representative of the span of ethical arguments in favor of the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, and then to examine what unites these arguments. Note that we are now ignoring the
schools of thought as they are commonly referred to, as they are a tier of complexity above what
we need to deal with in this section. Instead, we consider the much simple characteristic of moral
advocacy: all authors here were selected because they favored or defended the bombings, not for
any school-based affiliation.
The surveying section will necessarily read like a collection of separate essays since they
will each treat of a different author in brief, but the analysis will all be combined in the second
section (III.B) so that a busy reader may move to that section.
A. A Survey of the Proponents of the Bombings
i.
Karl T. Compton
One of the blunter advocates, Compton outlines his thinking process very clearly,
which is a nice starting point for us, as we are primarily interested in thought processes.
He defends the bomb because he believes that it brought about an earlier end to the war,
and that prevented a larger loss of life. His argument does circle around a bit from that
central justification, but whenever he speaks about the war ending, he mentions the
associated lives saved; he believes with complete conviction, that the use of the atomic
bomb saved hundreds of thousands perhaps several millions of lives, both American
and Japanese.10 Compton does go on to mention how he believes the bombs to have
ended the war right after this, but when the subject of the wars end is treated again later
on in a section called Was Japan already beaten before the atomic bomb?, he retreats
back to listing expected casualties to defend his point that Japan was still capable of
10 Compton p. 54

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fighting, telling us that General MacArthurs staff anticipated about 50,000 American
casualties and several times that number of Japanese casualties in the November 1
operation to establish the initial beachheads on Kyushu. After that they expected a far
more costly struggle before the Japanese homeland was subdued.11 This is Compton
clearly conflating the ability to inflict death with the ability to conduct war; war is bad
because it involves a loss of life, while ending war is good because it eliminates the risk
of the enemy killing ones soldiers, and saving lives is to be preferred. Everything, for
Compton, hinges on that fact that the bombings saved lives and lessened the terrible
struggle12 that would have taken them.
This is not to say that Compton is ignorant of the costs of the bombing; he addresses
them in no uncertain terms, and deems the major costs as worth less than the net lives
saved. Some he is too callous with his dismissal of, like when he opens a section in his
paper titled Was the use of the atomic bomb inhuman? with the sentence All war is
inhuman,13 implying anything that adheres to recognizable wartime conduct is
permissible; other costs he gives more than a nod to, noting in his introduction that the
bombs were in fact used to kill so many thousands of helpless Japanese,14 and he does
seem focused on beating back the costs of lives from the bombings with evidence of lives
saved.

11 Compton p. 55
12 Compton p.55
13 Compton p.54
14 Compton p.54

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In this way, Compton is pitting two numbers against each other in order to show that the
lives saved is so much larger than those incinerated in the bombings that we ought clearly
to have dropped the bombs. That is the first notable aspect of his defense; the second is
his statement that all war is inhuman, which warrants having attention drawn to it. In
this way, we can characterize Comptons argument as trying to maximize the amount of
lives saved while placing no bars on the conduct of warfare.
ii.

John David Lewis

The esteemed doctor Lewis wrote one of the most nationalistic and zealous
examples of a defense of the bombings, but his black-and-white viewpoint will actually
valuable in our analysis for showing the extremes of reasoning that can be reached.
Like Compton, Lewis is perfectly willing to discuss lives, throwing out a figure
for Japanese casualties of 175,000 across both bombings15, which is a step beyond
Compton, who only discussed American casualties. This is counterbalanced by Lewiss
statement that countless American lives were saved,16 which by rule of arithmetic, is
obviously more important; something that one cannot count is bigger than anything you
can, so the countless lives are obviously more important or at least, this appears implicit
in Lewiss argument. The differences from Compton emerge in how Lewis characterizes
the combat and Japan itself; he openly admits that the atomic bombs followed months of
horror, when American airplanes firebombed civilians and reduced cities to rubble, and
goes so far as to say that the Japanese only surrendered when [f]acing extinction.17 He
15 Lewis
16 Lewis
17 Lewis

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contrasts this with the fact that the bombings effects were so beneficent as to rank
them among the most moral acts ever committed, which is a very bold move after
acknowledging the suffering of Japanese civilians in the very same paragraph.
This is irrelevant to him, because of how he perceives that the Japanese state held the
emperor as a god, subordinated the individual to the state, elevated ritual over rational
thought, and adopted suicide as a path to honor, a system which he characterizes as a
Morality of Death for the focus on suicide attacks, dying for the emperor, and other
macabre practices he perceives and emphasizes as products of this cultural system.
America attacking Japan he sees as the first proper moral response to the Japanese
Morality of Death. To Lewis, it was a way of teaching the Japanese, because [t]he
abstraction [of] war, the propaganda of their leaders, their twisted samurai honor, their
desire to die for the emperor all of it had to be given concrete form, and thrown in their
faces if they were to return to morality.18
While blind and arguably xenophobic, this account is still functional, which is all that is
required to analyze it, so we shall do just that. The bulk of the paper does not deal with
the numbers briefly provided at the beginning of the paper, and instead deals with the
Morality of Death argument. Since the numbers have been treated in III.A.i, let us deal
with what is unique to Lewis.
The Morality of Death does two things to Lewiss subjects, when applied: first, it
makes them incomprehensible. Someone so preoccupied with death, something
antithetical to all living beings, has a certain wrongness to them, like the antagonist in a
horror movie. They are allied against the existence of us, the living observers, by being

18 Lewis

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allied with what is our opposite; all who follow the Morality of Death are antithetical to
us. Second, since the Morality of Death is antithetical to their existence, too, they are
vitally in the wrong, for they must be acting against their own lives, so they are a danger
to themselves. That means that they, the followers of this Morality, must be taught to not
follow this foolish system, which is so clearly against their interests.
The Morality of Death is dehumanizing, and subjugates whoever follows it to
anyone who does not. It is a way to excuse bigotry, and places something like the
infamous White Mans Burden on America to do anything to rescue the poor, misguided
barbarians from their incorrect ways. With such a system, of course Lewis believes
America was justified, for they were not dealing with people, but blood-hungry savages
obsessed with death that needed to be taught civility by any means. Or so he would
imply.
iii.

Wilson D. Miscamble

Miscamble is open is his dealings with moral issues, and begins by condemning those
who deal with anything but the actual chaos that is political decision-making, specifically those
who wantonly condemn anything that involves killing when many options will involve killing.
He moves on to the bombing, and is quite willing to state that the bombings allowed the
Japanese government to negotiate an end to the war.19 Miscamble also treats of the alternatives,
and dismisses them on grounds of having higher casualties, as all the viable alternate scenarios
to secure victory [] would have meant significantly greater Allied casualties and higher
Japanese civilian and military casualties, which would also include the deaths of prisoners of
war and indirect deaths from starvation in a naval blockade, from periphery damage in a

19 Miscamble

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sustained firebombing campaign, or any other number of sources of casualties that arise in
wartime20. The deaths caused by the bombing also pale in comparison to the estimates of
seventeen to twenty-four million deaths attributed to the Japaneses hideous rampage from
Manchuria to New Guinea, and the upwards two-hundred-fifty thousand people dead each
month in these territories from the Japanese occupation after 194521. Miscamble, despite this, is
very open about the evils of the action, because the bombings entailed the least harm of the
available paths to victory.
The bombings, then, are justified because there exists no other option that could have ended the
conflict in a satisfactory way; those who call it morally wrong are ignorant of how actual
decisions must be made, Miscamble says; morality is comparative, so if every action available is
morally abhorrent, then that means that the most moral action will still be abhorrent, but it will
be the least abhorrent. His use of numbers is the crux of his argument here, for they give proof to
his claim that every option involves killing; in this respect, he lines up more with Compton.
iv.

Michael Rockler

Rockler is a philosopher, and is then unusually blunt in his dealings with ethics,
moreso than Miscamble before. He speaks mainly of utilitarianism, or the philosophy
which wishes to grant the greatest amount of good to the largest number of people
possible.
For Rockler, saving lives is the most obviously utilitarian action one can perform,
and his paper focuses on Harry S. Truman, so it is a clear conclusion for him to say that
Truman was a very good utilitarian. This is because Truman averted a costly invasion of
20 Miscamble
21 Miscamble

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Japan that, although it was near-certain to be successful, would have cost in the range of
500,000 to 1,000,000 Allied casualties, which would be in addition to the the
continuing slaughter of Japanese from ongoing non-nuclear bombing[s].22 It was then
clear to Truman that [d]ropping atomic bombs and forcing the Japanese to surrender
would not only save Allied and American lives, it would end further futile Japanese
soldier and civilian deaths as well,23 which is a neat little utilitarian argument: the
decision is good because it minimized the harms of death and war.
The focus here is on costs, specifically the casualties that would be had without the
bombs. Rockler paints the actions as justified for minimizing the costs associated with the
war effort, and in the end, this focus on costs wins him a concise argument.

v.

Thomas Sowell

Sowell states near the beginning of his paper that he does not believe the atomic bombs to
be very special in a moral sense when compared to conventional bombings that took a
comparative number of lives, because [m]orality is about what you do to people, not the
technology you use.24
The bombings were atrocious, Sowell admits, but he is quick to point out that they involved a
lower number of deaths compared to an invasion, because for Japan, defense against invasion
involved mobilizing the civilian population [] for the same suicidal battle tactics that the
22 Rockler
23 Rockler
24 Sowell

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army used during some of the most brutal battles of the war25. There would be the deaths of both
civilians and Allied forces in such attacks, which would be innumerable and grisly, Sowell
reasons.
There are some notes of fear for if leniency had been exercised, for Sowell uneasily remarks that
in that case Japan would have risen again later, just as militaristic, this time armed with nuclear
weapons that they would not have hesitated for one minute to drop on Americans.26 The fear is
nurtured when the author remarks on Japanese atrocities in their colonial territories, as if to
provide proof of latent hostility.
The curious fusion of humanitarianism and antagonism fuel Sowells argument: humanitarian
desire to save lives, and antagonism towards the Japanese who may have continued on their
militaristic path if not for the American bombs.
vi.

Henry L. Stimson

Stimson is often said to be the classic account of why the bomb was dropped, and
many of his arguments have already been covered, but they warrant being recovered from
the source himself. The paper in question was originally meant to explain how the
government of the U.S. came to the decision to drop the atomic bombs, but a good
portion of it is concerned with ethical dimensions of the attacks.
After going through a listing of several large concentrations of troops at various
locales, Stimson says that if the Japanese government should decide upon resisting the
invasion, the Allies would be faced with the enormous task of destroying an armed force
of five million men and five thousand suicide aircraft, belonging to a race which had
25 Sowell
26 Sowell

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already amply illustrated its willingness to fight literally to the death. Stimson notes that
American casualties could be as much as a million, with the Japanese casualties more
than that27. With this as a backdrop, he asserts that the bombings were justified, as they
were the only feasible way to avert such chaos but he does not turn away from the
harms caused. He does note that [t]he decision to use the atomic bomb was a decision
that brought death to over a hundred thousand Japanese, but justifies this by saying the
bombings stopped the fire raids, and the strangling blockade; it ended the ghastly specter
of a clash of great land armies.28
Stimsons entire account stresses the difficulty of his decision, and the many options he
had to contend with; in the end, he concludes that this was the least abhorrent option. Of
course, he claims that all war is awful as Compton does, as if to explain why all his
options were awful, remarking that death is an inevitable part of every order that a
wartime leader gives.29
In this, Stimsons account does serve as an archetype: it argues for lives with numbers,
and it argues for a difficult choice with the more awful choices not taken.
B. Observations on the Surveyed Accounts in Favor of the Bombings
The most apparent feature that all accounts share is an intense interest in numbers. Even
Lewis, who argues from a more abstract moral standpoint, cannot help but issuing some number
for the Japanese casualties, while the rest follow suit. Casualty figures do vary across these

27 Stimson p.102
28 Stimson p.107
29 Stimson p.107

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accounts, but the variance is irrelevant, for all deem them sufficient for their argument, so it then
becomes a question of why figures are needed at all.
Something that may be more surprising is that every account was willing to submit that
the bombings were awful, atrocious occurrences. This makes the bombings themselves morally
repugnant in most cases, which makes the admittance thereof more surprising; it would make for
a much easier defense of the bombings to not grant that it was a painful, atrocious thing to bomb
these cities.
IV.

Arguments Against the Bombings

A. Survey of Arguments Against the Bombings
This selection of arguments is one that the author believes is representative of the

discourse against the atomic bombings, but a great deal of the accounts that argue against the
bombings are intensely theoretical with some necessary framing components required to make
sense of the arguments, so it follows that the accounts collected here will have more explanation
as to the authors contrived ethical system this is purely necessary to make the accounts
intelligible.
i.

G. E. M. Anscombe

Anscombe charges that Trumans choice to drop the bombs was unjust, and starts
from the simple premise that [c]hoosing to kill the innocent as a means to your end is
always murder,30 and she clarifies that the innocent are all those who are not fighting
and not engaged in supply with those who are the means of fighting.31 She presents
some scenarios in which a state is justified in killing someone, and concludes that
defenseless persons may only be killed by the state if they are guilty malefactors; from
30 Anscombe p.3
31 Anscombe p.4

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this comes her argument that there do exist scenarios in which killing is separable from
murder, and that war itself is not a moral swamp as Compton supposed, and she seems to
directly contradict him by saying that [t]he correct answer to the statement that war is
evil is that it is bad, i.e. a misfortune to be at war [] But that does not show that it is
wrong to fight or that if one does fight one also cannot commit murder.32 This is why she
feels outraged by the bombings it was an action against innocent civilians that had done
nothing to warrant their killing, so Anscombe sees the action as murder, and therefore
unethical.
The rigorous and abstract character of Anscombes argument is the most apparent thing
about it at first, followed by the focus on the humanity of the civilians. Her whole paper
turns on the defense of the rights of the individuals harmed in the bombing, and she
spends much time examining the relationship of the nation to the populace to back herself
up; this shall be seen to be a key component of the accounts.
ii.

Adriana Cavarero

The basic dignity of a person is in their unity as a singular, unmutilated body,

according to Cavarero, as the singular human body represents the human form and thus a
key part of human existence. This means that mutilation and destruction of the body is
especially horrible; [t]he [] human being is filled with repugnance for this violence,
which aims primarily not to kill it but it but to destroy its humanity, to inflict wounds on
it that will undo and dismember it.33 In this way, a human shape is tied to humanity

32 Anscombe p.7
33 Cavarero p.16

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itself, and when the former is destroyed, the latter is obscured, as the corpse is turned into
something more than meat but less than a person.
This is combined with her implicit notion that terrorism is a wholly negative evil, and that
modern combat is muddled as to the distinction between terrorism and legitimate warfare.
She gives the key distinction between them as regards the subjects of the violence:
terrorism involves attacking those that are, in practical terms, defenseless. The United
States and other major powers assert they themselves do not commit terrorist actions, but
Cavarero believes that Hiroshima and Nagasaki [] reveal how weak, above all from
the viewpoint of the populations attacked [] the overall framework of the
argumentation is.34
To Cavarero, then, the bombings are doubly immoral once immoral for the killing and
disfiguration of the innocent civilians, and once more for being indistinguishable from
terrorism. She represents the most graphic appeal for human dignity in this section, far
from the distinguished and academic airs of Anscombe or Rawlss arguments.
iii.

Thomas Nagel

Nagel defines two systems of morality that interact to constrain how an individual
may act in wartime: the utilitarian system, discussed in part III.A.iv, and the absolutist,
which operates as a limitation on utilitarian reasoning, by means of prohibiting certain
abhorrent actions from being performed.35 Nagel gives as an absolutist requirement that
we must always be able to rationalize to the subject of our aggression why our aggression
is occurring, as a rough benchmark of seeing if we are respecting the subject of our
34 Cavarero p.71
35 Nagel p.58

Librande 21
aggression as a person at least to some degree. For this reason, the bombings can already
be seen to be wrong, for they violate this prohibition; one cannot say to the victims of
Hiroshima, You understand, we have to incinerate you to provide the Japanese
government with an incentive to surrender.36 The populace being harmed in this case
deserves no aggression, and Nagel expands this to the general case, because when one
ignores the actual target of ones aggression (the opposing military or government), then
one precludes having any justification behind ones attack, so [i]n attacking the civilian
population, one treats neither the military enemy nor the civilians with that minimal
respect which is owed to them as human beings.37
Nagel takes Anscombe a step further by requiring further mental engagement with the
victimized populace; he forces the would-be aggressor to imagine themselves even closer
to the subject of their actions, making this a more personal appeal to human dignity than
what Anscombe presented.
iv.

John Rawls

Beginning his account with a six-point set of principles for a statesman, or ideal
head-of-state, to adhere to, Rawls places a duty to other nations at the forefront of a
wartime states duties; a statesman is who all heads-of-state ought to aspire to be, Rawls
says, and if a statesman is at way, then he must be at war against an undemocratic
country, since democracies never go to war against each other, them being the ideal form
of government (according to Rawls), so the statesmans interest during wartime must be

36 Nagel p.68
37 Nagel p.69

Librande 22
to conclude the war in such a way that the opposing country will be able to institute a
democratic form of governance.
By constantly hammering away at Japan with bombings and ignoring any
capacity for governance on their part by forgoing negotiations, a duty was breached, since
[a] conscientious attempt to [negotiate] was morally necessary.38 Without giving them
this much, we violate our duty to respect the nation of Japan as potentially democratic.
Rawlss account is thus another focused on dignity but with a longer-termed view. The
decision to bomb, to continue to attempt to force compliance with the American will
without negotiating, is something that imperils the future betterment of the country and
its populace, which no statesman would allow.
v.

Michael Walzer

Walzer comes at the problem of the ethicality of the bombings while trying to
establish ground rules for war. He criticizes the bombings as based on arbitrariness,
because if Japan were to have dropped an atomic bomb on an American city, it would
have been a crime, and yet we do not consider the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
crimes; the only way this is possible is if one renders judgment [] against the ordinary
people of Hiroshima and insists at the same time that no similar judgment is possible
against the people of San Francisco, say, or Denver.39 Walzer cannot conceive of any
such judgment, and thus deems the bombings to have been immoral for firstly that
reason, but also because no one forced the United States to pursue the political and
military goals that lead to dropping the bombs, which means there is no excuse for the
38 Rawls p.327
39 Walzer p.264

Librande 23
barbarism that the United States chose to enact to achieve those goals; speaking of the
Japanese government during the War, Walzer says firmly that if killings millions (or
many thousands) of men and women was morally necessary for their conquest and
overthrow, then it was morally necessary in order not to kill those people to settle for
something less.40
This flies in the face of some of the defenses of the bombings that call them the lesser of
all evils or something similar, for it claims that the choice amongst all of these evils is
artificial; there was not actually any requirement to make a choice amongst such awful
options, so that means the decision to bomb was a completely unnecessary evil.
What is unique about this account is that it barely depends upon some conception
of human dignity or rights, instead relying on the idea of necessity and comparative
worlds the same means that the lesser evils defenders of the bombing utilize. This
raises the question of how these critics, with the same method, arrive at different
conclusions; this issue will be treated more fully in section V.
B. Observations on Arguments Against the Bombings
All of the surveyed authors have an element of moral shame in their arguments, and by
moral shame I mean an argument that seems to shame anybody who would defend the
bombings. This is how one can see what unites the disparate accounts of Walzer and Cavarero:
while Walzer points to the better options available and Cavarero holds high the ignominy of a
mutilated corpse, both craft arguments that shame any who would try to run against their moral
conclusions by supporting the bombings, as do all other authors in this section. In a more general

40 Walzer p.268

Librande 24
sense, all of these authors are on the offensive, unlike the guarded defenses of the proponents
of the bombings.
The analogue to the proponents focuses on numbers is the mentioning of dignity on the
side of the detractors; all allude to it or explicitly reference it throughout. Even Walzer touches
on the subject when speaking of avoiding killing, for life is a simpler sort of dignity, but still one
that he allows to his subjects.
V.

The Use of Ethics in Discourse on Atrocities

Armed with our surveys of arguments, we may now discuss how ethics are used by the

authors in the various accounts presented above.

We start by first noting strong trends in each class of arguments: proponents of the
bombings (1) universally employ numbers and (2) tend to be more defensive and explanatory,
while opponents (1) focus on the moral shame that results from not complying with their
conclusion, (2) are universally concerned with dignity, and (3) tend to be on the offensive. In
addition, recall that one of the more surprising conclusions we could draw about the nature of the
proponents arguments is that they were all willing to acknowledge the atrocious nature of the
bombings, and since the antagonistic opponents would surely agree on this point, we may say
that all accounts are aware of the atrocious nature of the bombings. Having stated all of this, our
task is now to explain why these tactics are used, for they appear to be the keys to defending or
attacking atrocities in general.
When we start with the proponents, it is useful to start with the most extreme advocate,
who is Lewis, who claimed the Japanese followed a Morality of Death. His argument was
focused on how highly he viewed the consequences of the bombings despite the costs. This is a
common theme: since all proponents admit the costs of the bombings, they are all arguing that

Librande 25
the bombings were good despite some cost. In Lewiss case, he states that the bombings were
both retribution and moral pedagogy, and the mere cost of 175,000 lives; such is the essence of
his argument. However, the three components of this argument are curious, for they have a subtle
similarity: retribution against some faceless enemy, teaching some foolish stranger, and an
anonymous pile of numbers are the three justifications, and none of them involve truly thinking
of that number of dead as, well, humans. They all obscure the nature of what is being calculated,
hiding the nature of that atrocious cost behind a universal moral dictate that cares not about
opponents but only about injury (in this case, Lewiss contrived dictate that we must answer the
pain of Pearl Harbor with the pain of nuclear annihilation), the lecturing of some force akin to
thoughtless children (beings to barbarous to be fully human, for they cannot understand even
these basic tenets of humanity), and the abstraction of arithmetic. This is already leaving out
Lewiss heavily problematic but still argumentatively functional conception of a Morality of
Death.
Having seen this extreme, we see then the trend repeated throughout the section, albeit
without the bigotry. Compton, one of the first defenders of the bomb, before even Stimson,
pioneered the use of a statistic in these accounts; when he mentions some arbitrary figure for the
deaths, he is allowed to escape the reality of the piles of charred corpses, burning homes, flayed
bodies etc. that Cavarero finds herself so preoccupied with, because the figure of such-and-such
casualties is a colorless binary figure; it is a count of how many people simply became
casualties, and the almost scientific nature of the figure and attached term allow the proponents
to ignore the depths of suffering or violated obligations inherent in them being innocents, and
instead focus their attention on this clean, purely mathematical figure, so that they may more

Librande 26
readily operate upon it, experiment with how to reduce it, and try to shrink it as small as possible
without regards to the moral lines crossed in the process.
The opponents of the bomb so vigorously use shame, then, because that is the most
effective way to ignore the raw force of lives saved, which also have a pull that is not necessarily
completely counteracted by any moral system if they were, then there would be no deliberation
on how to respond to tragedies, for we would always resist the urge to save lives, and there
would be no need for this paper. Instead, the immediacy of the focus on an individual life blots
out the utilitarian calculations of the proponents, and we are moved if at all then by empathy to
side with the opponents of the bombings; we do not want to violate their dictate and feel the
moral shame they threaten. Cavareros specter of mangled corpses or Nagels whispered
assurances to the victims of violence are so much more visceral and compelling than the number
of this many lives saves, this many lost, etc., etc They have an emotional element to them that
the numbers lack, calling the reader to sympathize with and oppose the action because these are
humans with dignity, too.
In this way, with this consensus of voices, we can generalize this result and say that the
divide between the defense and degradation of an atrocious action is the same as the divide
between empathy and efficiency. To perpetrate an atrocity, no matter how justified the atrocity
may be, is to see those who will suffer the atrocity as abstract values, digits, and scientific little
modifiers. Essential in the dialectic that opposes tragedies is an element of dignity, to break this
spell of abstraction.
However, even that is not completely effective, because there is still the issue of innate
human preference. This issue is reached by asking why all of the proponents seemed to have
simpler arguments themselves than the highly rigorous webs spun by the opponents. Most

Librande 27
opponents, like Anscombe, spend much of their papers defining some abstract ethical system that
can then be easily applied to the bombings. Compare this with the more simple, perhaps elegant
arguments of the proponents, where the author need only point out the number of lives that can
be saved, and see that there is a disparity in the amount of argumentative legwork that each side
needs to do to be convincing; who can truly say that the simple argument of Compton does not
even slightly tempt them when faced with such a well-crafted argument as Nagels? There is a
connection between this observation and the observation that the proponents are more defensive
than the opponents; the proponents concede that the actions taken were awful, but argue that this
is a permissible sort of awfulness, while the opponents are always attacking this conception. The
opponents of the bombing even anticipate arguments made by the proponents and counter them
in their papers, with Walzer attacking the comparative evils argument while Rawls, in his
conclusion, attacks the idea that, as General Sherman said, war is hell, and all actions that end
it are permissible because it is so bad an experience. He does so by denying all actions to end it
are permissible, as decent civilized societies [] all depend absolutely on making significant
moral and political distinctions in all situations.41 Anscombe makes a similar argument, stating
that it is a misfortune to be at war, but it is not nearly the hell that Sherman claims, where all is
permissible. The important issue here is that these are preemptive counterarguments, that serve
only to block certain proponents arguments, something that seems lacking in use on the side of
the proponents. This is telling; it indicates a possible bias towards the numerical arguments of the
proponents.
If the arguments of the proponents were not as convincing as those of the opponents of the
bombings, then they would necessarily have to expand them, making them just as expansive as

41 Rawls p.327

Librande 28
the opponents just in order to be complete enough to convince the reader but instead, the
arguments are more skeletal on the side of the proponents, while the wonderfully nuanced
systems of the opponents must struggle to compete with the simple iterative argument that the
bombings were good because they saved this many lives, and that many soldiers, and so-and-so
many civilians. The gap in rigor is so extreme across the board that there must be some sort of
bias against the opponents forcing them to necessarily make their arguments more robust to
compete; if not, then it is highly likely that someone would have figured out how to write a more
concise and simple argument against the bombings that could compete with the proponents, and
we have yet to find such an argument! Simply put, so strong is the bias towards the numerical
argument that the proponents have no need to even claim the action was entirely moral like
Lewis does, and they may instead openly admit to the atrocious nature of the bombings, flash a
value for lives saved, and be done.
VI.

Summation and Conclusion

We have now formed a solid picture of how we discuss the ethics of the bombings, and

how our various systems of ethics vary and take shape. Because it is impossible to ground an
interpretation of history in something objective, there can be no correct interpretation, so it is
natural that ethics will vary, as interpretations and opinions do.
We have also seen how the critics of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki vary in
their attacks and defenses, and observed the impressive consistency in the ethical opinions across
advocacy lines. Numbers predominate in the former camp, while robust arguments for dignity do
in the latter. Knowing this, the issue becomes what we do with this information.
The first thing we must note is that we saw practically no bleeding-over of methods.
The opponents of the bombing were champions of dignity, while the proponents were champions

Librande 29
of numbers, with no noticeable overlap. This tells us that some systems are simply predisposed to
some types of reasoning, and since there is no objective system of ethics for us to use without an
objective interpretation of history, there is no reason to believe that we cannot switch between
the systems at will; after all, one can understand and sympathize with arguments from both
camps in this paper, but one will also have a favorite camp here but that favorite camp (for or
against the atrocity) will not necessarily be the same with some different atrocity. After all, there
is nothing in our definition of atrocity that prevents it from being the best action for an actor to
take. If one can sympathize with both systems of ethics, then they may perhaps use both at
different times, since there is nothing to suggest this is impossible.
Ethics in interpretations of history can then teach us that ethical arguments can be used as
tools to fit to a certain situation, depending on ones own preferences and opinions. This paper
then tells us how we may use these various ethical arguments to justify ourselves in our actions,
and how to recognize the possible ends of that reasoning. Since we saw no numerical arguments
against the bombings in our survey, why should we expect ourselves to be any different with our
use of numbers? It is likely from this analysis that we use numbers to permit the normally
impermissible, like the United States did with the slaughter of civilians during the bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while we use arguments of dignity to stop ourselves, and halt the logic
of arithmetic. That, at the very least, is how ethics function in these border cases, in which some
atrocity is being considered, enormous cost balanced by enormous benefit, with no clear correct
answer in sight. Simply put, when we have to face some extreme example of ethics at the bottom
of some great abyss with no proper guide to how we should act, we fall back on our opinions,
and there is always some sort of ethics to make right every opinion.