How should we judge wartime atrocities?: Absolute moralists

Sadako

Sadako Sasaki was two years old on August 6, 1945, living about a mile from the hypocenter. She survived the blast. Ten years later she developed leukemia. She folded paper cranes in her hospital bed — a thousand, she believed, and she would be healed. She died at twelve. Her cranes are in a museum case. She was not a military target. She was a toddler eating breakfast, and a government calculated that her death was an acceptable input.

The consequentialists need her to be a number — one of 210,000, weighed against a projected million. We do not dispute their arithmetic. We dispute the premise that human beings are the kind of thing you do arithmetic with. The just war tradition understands double effect — foreseen but unintended civilian deaths can be permissible. What cannot be permissible is the deliberate targeting of civilians as a means. Hiroshima was not collateral damage. The target was the city.

The contextualists respond with decision memos. We have read them. We are the tradition that produced the laws of war — Geneva, Hague, the architecture of restraint. That architecture exists because necessity is the argument every atrocity makes for itself. LeMay’s Tokyo firebombing was also wrong. One atrocity preceding another does not launder either.

Where we concede ground: We cannot stand in Truman’s room and claim we know what we would have done.

What would change our mind: Conclusive evidence that no path to surrender existed before the bombs, making it tragedy not failure.

Read the full synthesis: How should we judge wartime atrocities?