Light On Dark Water

A Few More Words about Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Amy Wellborn at Open Book picked up my last week’s journal entry, along with a letter from the Bishops’ Conference on the same subject, and an extensive discussion followed. I must say that I’m irrationally flattered that something of mine played a role in setting off a 200-plus comment discussion—Open Book regulars know that’s a very high number, and not infrequently an indicator of hot tempers at work, but in this case the discussion was very civil and the quality of argumentation mostly high. Here are a few notes in follow-up to that discussion.

There were three main arguments in support of the bombings:

(1) That the victims of the attack were not actually classifiable as non-combatants because they supported the war effort either directly or indirectly. I don’t see how eliminating the traditional distinction between combatants and non-combatants can gain any purchase at all as a Catholic position. I first heard this basic argument some twenty years ago in a speech by William F. Buckley, and I think it’s one of the things that’s always made me keep a bit of distance between myself and the mainstream conservative movement, even though I pretty well fit there in most respects.

(2) That both cities contained legitimate military targets and the non-combatant deaths were not directly intended by the U.S. government. I don’t think this is supported by the facts. And even if it were, it would seem to stretch the principle beyond the breaking point.

(3) That the magnitude of the horror that was the apparent alternative to the use of the bomb justified its use. This argument was the major topic of debate and is indeed the most compelling. I think I went about as far toward granting it as one can without taking a fatal step into consquentialism, a term which I take—and I have no theological training—to be, in common sense terms, the doctrine that the end justifies the means, and that an action is good if it produces a good result. It seemed to me that many of those making this argument were in fact making a case for consequentialism.

Many years ago—more than thirty—I took what might have been my first conscious step toward embracing traditional Catholic morality when, in the context of writing a research paper on some aspect of Coleridge’s thought, I came to the conclusion that it is only by insisting on the highest ethical principles that we can expect to sustain a minimal level of decent behavior. I am now more fully convinced of that. One commenter at Open Book took me to task for not specifying what I wanted in saying that we must acknowledge that our action was wrong. But it is precisely the acknowledgment itself, and our continuing affirmation of the principle upon which it is made, that is important now.

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."

"No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly.

              —Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov