How should we judge wartime atrocities?: Consequentialists

Before the bomb

March 1945. The United States firebombed Tokyo and killed approximately 100,000 civilians in a single night. In the five months that followed, sixty-six additional cities burned. Conservative estimates: over 300,000 dead from conventional raids. No hand-wringing. No hearings. LeMay received the Distinguished Service Medal. The moral crisis did not begin August 6. It began when strategic bombing doctrine accepted civilian infrastructure as a legitimate target.

The absolute moralists frame Hiroshima as the moment civilization crossed a line. The line was crossed at Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Guernica. The atomic bomb did not introduce civilian targeting. It made it efficient enough that people who had ignored it were forced to notice.

The arithmetic

Operation Downfall’s combined projections ranged from 250,000 to over a million Allied casualties. Japanese military and civilian casualties: several million. Against this: 210,000 from both bombs combined. The arithmetic is not close. When you have the capacity to compare outcomes and choose the one producing less suffering, and you decline because comparing feels impure, you have elevated your moral comfort above the lives of people who die in the scenario you refused to prevent.

The double-effect distinction the absolute moralists rely on is, in practice, a linguistic technology for arriving at consequentialist conclusions while maintaining deontological credentials.

Where we concede ground: Our framework has no internal mechanism for detecting when the inputs have been corrupted.

What would change our mind: Rigorous counterfactual showing Japan would have surrendered before November 1945 with fewer total casualties.

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