Monday, December 12, 2011
"The Least Evil Option"
Fr. Wilson Miscamble (Notre Dame), my friend and colleague, has posted a response to Chris Tollefsen, and a "defense of Harry Truman," over at Public Discourse. Fr. Miscamble writes, among other things, the following:
. . . I suggest that, in retrospect and within the privacy of his heart, Truman likely understood that he had been forced by necessity to enter into evil. And so, I argue in my book, he had. He ordered the bombing of cities possessing significant military-industrial value, but in which thousands of noncombatants, among them the innocent elderly and the sick, women and children, were annihilated. Evaluated in isolation, each atomic bombing was a deeply immoral act deserving of condemnation. The fact that the bombings entailed the least harm of the available paths to victory, and that it brought an end to destruction, death, and casualties on an even more massive scale, cannot obviate their evil; it should, however, satisfy those who accept a utilitarian approach to morality, in which good ends can justify certain immoral means. I am not in that number.
Yet I remain sympathetic in evaluating Truman and his decision. . . .
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/12/the-least-evil-option.html
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Fr. Miscamble has an interesting article, however, he fails to address Anscombe's objection to the assumption of the necessity of unconditional surrender. Further, Fr. Miscamble maintains a false dilemma between Atomic destruction and invasion destruction.
Prior to August 1945, Japan was defeated militarily, and accordingly, the US could have stopped at Okinawa. A surrender could have been negotiated, or no surrender could have negotiated. Either way, the US at that point had won the war and could have stood down. If it was immoral to nuke Japan, or invade and occupy it, then perhaps standing down or holding at Okinawa would be sufficient. It may not have led to the Japanese-American economic miracle, but it would have been a morally correct position.
Either way as Fr. Miscamble attempts, the fog of war does not excuse the war criminal be he Churchill, FDR or Truman. Each were responsible for murders of their own. The sympathy one can find here was explicitly addressed by none other than Mick Jagger:
"I rode a tank
Held a generals rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank
"Ah, what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game"
Anscombe wasn't puzzled, even considering the fog of war, the name of the game is consequentialism.