How should we judge wartime atrocities?: Just war reformers

After the room

We are less interested in whether Truman was right than in why the room existed at all. A species that builds weapons requiring moral philosophy to adjudicate their use has a design problem, and the design problem is upstream of every debate the other three camps are having.

The Geneva Conventions were drafted in 1949, four years after Hiroshima. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty opened for signature in 1968. The International Criminal Court was established in 2002. Each institution was built because the previous war demonstrated that the existing architecture of restraint was insufficient. Each is incomplete.

The institutional gap

The absolute moralists offer principles. Principles do not constrain governments. The contextualists offer empathy for decision-makers. Empathy does not prevent the next decision. The consequentialists offer arithmetic. Arithmetic is only as honest as the person feeding it numbers. What constrains governments is machinery — treaties with teeth, courts with jurisdiction, inspection regimes that make first-strike calculations uncertain enough to deter.

The question is not whether Hiroshima was justified. The question is what we build so that no future leader faces a room where those are the only options. Nine nations currently possess nuclear weapons. The room is still furnished and still open. Eighty years of arguing about the last war’s morality while the next war’s arsenals grow is its own form of recklessness.

Where we concede ground: The ICC has secured convictions primarily against leaders of small, weak states. The machinery works selectively.

What would change our mind: Fifty years of robust international enforcement failing to reduce the incidence of atrocity below current baselines.

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