Religion & Law

Chris Tollefsen has postedthis essay on the "abiding significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki", 65 years after those cities were bombed with nuclear weapons.  As I noted in my recent post, below, responding to Anne Rice, it is often the case that the Church will make even the most faithful and decent people feel a bit uncomfortable about the fact that they are too comfortable with things that should make them uncomfortable.  I take it that the bombings of these Japanese cities was not morally justified, even taking into the consideration the fact (let's assume, for now, it is a fact) that, on balance, they ended the war sooner than it otherwise would have ended and at the cost of fewer human (American and Japanese) lives.  As Tollefsen writes:   

Some few Catholic scholars, notably Elizabeth Anscombe and Fr. John Ford, S.J. argued at the time that the Allied approach was immoral. Their argument, which drew from a moral tradition dating back to St. Augustine, was based on the premise that intentionally killing the ?innocent? was always a grave wrong. Both Anscombe and Ford noted that, despite occasional confusion, the meaning of ?innocent? could not be ?morally innocent,? but rather must mean ?not posing a threat.? For it is a threat that justifies the use of defensive force in war, not the moral character of individual civilians who might be morally at fault in their support of, say, the Nazi government, yet be engaged only the in same tasks they would have been working on in peacetime: growing and distributing food, caring for their families, working in the medical profession, and so on. Given this approach to the distinction, Ford estimated that as much as two thirds of the city of Boston would, during World War Two, have been ?innocents,? when women, children, and the aged were factored in.

The Allied bombings in Europe, then, and the firebombing and atomic bombing in Japan, seem to have been deliberate targeting of civilian populations: in other words, intentional attacks on innocent human life. And, if Anscombe?s and Ford?s premise about intentional killing of the innocent is correct, then the conclusion is inescapable: these Allied actions constituted murder on a vast scale, running to hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .

In my own experience, this is -- for some people whose faith is deeper, and decency greater, than mine -- a hard claim.  It is hard to say -- or, if not to say, to really believe -- that the better, and more-right (or, at least, less-wrong) thing to do is not to end the war sooner.  Should it be so hard?  Harry Truman and Winston Churchill are admired by almost everyone.  (I have a Churchill poster in my office.)  Should they be?  Tollefsen concludes:

 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombings that preceded them, the decisions that led to them, and the rationalizations that justified them, remain with us today, underwriting both some of our most grievous moral errors, and our more ambiguous moral triumphs. As individuals, and especially as a nation, it still remains for us to grasp the deep significance of those fateful, and horrible, days.