The ethics of Hiroshima

[Skids]

Why can't we just all get along?

Shit happened, move forward and try to improve on past mistakes, so sick of everyone having to complain about what's been and gone, we can't change it. Worry about tomorrow. I've got a bathroom and laundry to renovate, 2 hours at the ink shop and a half marathon to run this weekend

[Mugwump]

First off, slaughtering civilians is not a valid act of war. In every other context, we recognise it as a war crime. Why not here?

David, I think you're committing the historic fallacy - reading the past through the lens of today's ethics. We believe that (and it might be true - but let's come to that in a minute) but they certainly did not. All of the major nations happily bombed civilian areas as a matter of military doctrine. It was not a war crime by either the ethics or the code of the day.

Let's consider the basic proposition, however - let's imagine we are attacked, by an enemy that would have no compunction about bombing our cities into ruins, and is doing so. Are you certain that it would be wrong to bomb their cities in return ? Are you sure you want to give them that advantage, and grant them that comfort ? This is not an academic question - it was, and is, the very basis of the Mutually Assured (nuclear) Destruction that has underpinned Western defence strategy - pretty successfully - since the 1950s.

Morality is always difficult to sunder from context, especially under the morally-inverted circumstances of war. It is (usually) wrong to initiate war, but once it is initiated against you, it is probably wrong not to fight it in a way that makes an aggressor think twice. The boundaries of that are hard to negotiate, of course. Why not gas ? Why not torture ? etc. In what ways are these worse than burning and asphyxiation ? I don't think there are easy answers here, but it does seem to come down to boundaries that are either self-imposed or matters of mere convention.

[stui magpie]

David, I think you're committing the historic fallacy - reading the past through the lens of today's ethics.

Thank you. This is something that occurs way too often and it annoys me no end.

You cannot condemn the actions of people in the past by the ethics or morals of the future. You first need to look at them from the perspective of the time.

[David]

Amazing how willing people are to defend the indefensible. I exclude Tannin from that because, as much as I completely disagree with his interpretation, at least he's making a utilitarian argument (i.e. the standard Western propaganda position that Hiroshima saved more lives than it killed).

But let's go through some of the more preposterous arguments:

If Japan had the bomb, what do you think they would have done with it, being the bastions of humanitarianism that ther were?

Flip it around: would the fact that the American military were willing to drop bombs on Japanese civilians morally justify other countries slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the US? That's a terrible argument.

Shit happened, move forward and try to improve on past mistakes

How can we do that if we won't even admit that it was a mistake in the first place? Sounds like a good way to make sure exactly the same thing happens again next time around.

David, I think you're committing the historic fallacy - reading the past through the lens of today's ethics.

I think you're committing the fallacy of assuming that interpreting the past through the lens of today's ethics is a fallacy.

How else are we to judge historical events? How much slack are you willing to cut the Nazis for the Holocaust given the anti-semitism of the time?

I think what you're trying to say is that we can't pass moral judgement on people from different places and time periods according to our cultural morality. Sure, I agree with that, but I don't really support passing moral judgement on people anyway, and I'm not talking about passing moral judgement here either (as I've said before, I think it's at least somewhat possible that the US generals thought that this was the most humanitarian option available to them). What I'm interested in is the ethics of the act, and that I think remains the same whether it happened in 1945, yesterday or in the paleolithic era.

Let's consider the basic proposition, however - let's imagine we are attacked, by an enemy that would have no compunction about bombing our cities into ruins, and is doing so. Are you certain that it would be wrong to bomb their cities in return ? Are you sure you want to give them that advantage, and grant them that comfort ?

I'm pretty certain, yes. Of course it is. That's the logic that says that Tutsi thugs are slaughtering your friends and family members so you need to kill their women and children too so they don't get the upper hand. Madness.

[stui magpie]

So someone who doesn't believe in free will is passionately arguing that people had choices and chose the wrong one.

[Mugwump]

^ David, if you think that ethics of the international community in 1940 (such as it was) included the industrial murder of millions of people for their race, then I'd need evidence. At one simple level, of course it is wrong to bomb anyone. It's wrong to kill anyone, as an act. But the context in which you operate matters, and I think the best judgement you can make is whether a government or military acted according to the higher ethical standards of their time, judged against the pressures under which they were operating.

On the matter of reciprocal violence as a deterrent, well, what you espouse is a consistent position. Because there are wicked people in the world who see war as a strategy and have no scruples, I think your position will give rise to more violence and reward for aggression than the alternative. Life is paradoxical like that.

[think positive]

Until someone comes at you with a knife, willing to drive it into you,whatever it takes, you don't know what you would do to survive. Actually I do, any bloody thing.

Re read tannins posts, you asked about taking other stances, and he gave you a detailed reason why each would be a worse choice.

And he also detailed just how much damage to mankind the Japanese did, not even taking into account the horrendous torture methods used on their POWs. That quite frankly, make the recent shit look like a picnic in the park.

If that assailant coming at you had dropped the knife and surrendered, you wouldn't have shot him dead.

Oh, and if you chose not to shoot, just in case he developed a good old fashion case of conscience or something, well ,more fool you.

[think positive]

So someone who doesn't believe in free will is passionately arguing that people had choices and chose the wrong one.

top post

[pietillidie]

So someone who doesn't believe in free will is passionately arguing that people had choices and chose the wrong one.

top post

David and I differ on this, too, but that's a ridiculous misinterpretation which I've explained over and over again to people.

David has never said he doesn't assume free will to get things done like you or anyone else. Like me, he doubts it as a general universal principle of physics.

[think positive]

So someone who doesn't believe in free will is passionately arguing that people had choices and chose the wrong one.

top post

David and I differ on this, too, but that's a ridiculous misinterpretation which I've explained over and over again to people.

David has never said he doesn't assume free will to get things done like you or anyone else. Like me, he doubts it as a general universal principle of physics.

you either have free will or you don't.

Even when your locked down in chains, you still have a mind to think, and to make choices, even if they are programmed by something or someone.

[David]

You don't have free will. There isn't really any connection between that acknowledgement and saying that a given decision was unethical or that it had negative consequences.

I do sometimes wonder if I'm explaining my stance on free will well enough.

It's a complex topic. Think of it this way: did the American generals who decided to drop the bomb have a 'free' choice? My view is that, given the problem each of them were trying to resolve, all of their experiences, their DNA, their personality traits and their cognitive states at that precise moment of time, there was nothing else they could have done. But that's not in any way a justification of the act, because you can say the same for every human decision ever made, including Martin Bryant's decision to open fire at Port Arthur or Donald Trump's decision to open his mouth and say crazy shit or my decision to type all this for that matter.

If you want to assess the value of an act, you need to throw the issue of free will out the window and just weigh up the consequences (or, depending on the context, the likely consequences given the information that was available at the time). That's two interesting ways of looking at this question: was bombing Hiroshima an ethical decision a) given what the American military decisionmakers knew, or b) with the benefit of hindsight?

As should be clear now, that has nothing to do with the philosophical question of whether or not the choices they made were predetermined. It's just a straightforward question of ethics - i.e. what's the best thing to do? Obviously, I believe some acts have better consequences than others.

Now I look at it, I actually realise that, contrary to what Mugwump said, we absolutely need to assess the act with the benefit of hindsight (as Tannin and I are both trying to do) before we can even to attempt to answer the question of whether it was the right thing to do given what people knew at the time.

[Pies4shaw]

Well, we don't really - they well knew it was a war crime but, as ever, they also well knew that the victors get to decide who goes on trial for what.

[think positive]

It was a case of kill or be killed, the Americans stopped, would the Japanese have if it had been reversed? Ask the whales

This no free will thing is bullshit! Of course we have free will. No one made me get drunk last night, I exercised my free will! Karma may have almost chucked me down the stairs this morning, but I chose to get drunk knowing the consequences.

(Both my head and my heart told me not to, I chose to tell them to **** off and I have no regrets! ...and some really cool photos!)

[think positive]

You don't have free will. There isn't really any connection between that acknowledgement and saying that a given decision was unethical or that it had negative consequences.

I do sometimes wonder if I'm explaining my stance on free will well enough.

It's a complex topic. Think of it this way: did the American generals who decided to drop the bomb have a 'free' choice? My view is that, given the problem each of them were trying to resolve, all of their experiences, their DNA, their personality traits and their cognitive states at that precise moment of time, there was nothing else they could have done. But that's not in any way a justification of the act, because you can say the same for every human decision ever made, including Martin Bryant's decision to open fire at Port Arthur or Donald Trump's decision to open his mouth and say crazy shit or my decision to type all this for that matter.

If you want to assess the value of an act, you need to throw the issue of free will out the window and just weigh up the consequences (or, depending on the context, the likely consequences given the information that was available at the time). That's two interesting ways of looking at this question: was bombing Hiroshima an ethical decision a) given what the American military decisionmakers knew, or b) with the benefit of hindsight?

As should be clear now, that has nothing to do with the philosophical question of whether or not the choices they made were predetermined. It's just a straightforward question of ethics - i.e. what's the best thing to do? Obviously, I believe some acts have better consequences than others.

Now I look at it, I actually realise that, contrary to what Mugwump said, we absolutely need to assess the act with the benefit of hindsight (as Tannin and I are both trying to do) before we can even to attempt to answer the question of whether it was the right thing to do given what people knew at the time.

The right thing to do at the time was not go to war, but the Japanese, don't forget, chose to bring the USA into it by their efforts on Pearl Harbour, the smartest thing to do at the time, was for the most powerful team to end it as soon as possible, with as few casualties on its own team as possible as its first consideration, and then to take the action that will bring the end to the war, preferably with as few oposition casualties as possible, but the bloody fools kept coming, hence the need for a second bomb!

Nothing about war comes under the heading of right, but had the USA not won, you would now be slave labour for the Japanese.

[think positive]

Ethics and morals don't matter if the other team are going to cheat anyway, and kill you with as much malice as possible. Watch Fury with Brad Pitt, you will hate him (ok more than you do now, that green monsters a bastard!) for what he does to a young soldier who thinks everyone is going to play fair.

War is futile, a tragic waste, but if someone comes into your yard, you have to fight back or die. And no one should judge you for pulling the trigger to protect yourself. And yes I'm pissed. My grandfather was a bomb disposal expert in world war 2, my mum was shipped off to Hong Kong and then South Africa to keep her safe from those German bombs dropping on London. How many army barracks were they aiming for? There certainly wasn't one in the street my dad lived in, where the houses across the road were just gone when he came home from school.