Anscombe, Just War, etc. at Open Book

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Anscombe, Just War, etc. at Open Book

August 9, 2006 by Daniel Nichols

For people who read this blog but not Open Book (if any), re our discussion of just war principles here: there’s an excerpt from Elisabeth Anscombe’s protest of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and interesting discussion following, over there.

–Maclin Horton

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Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

6 Responses

on August 9, 2006 at 2:27 pm | Reply Howard Blye

Ben Stein writes “When the Israelis capture Arabs in their wars, the captured Arabs are well fed, well housed, and eventually returned to their homes. When the Arabs (specifically the Syrians) have captured Israelis, they castrate them, cut off their male organs, decapitate the Israelis, and stuff their male organs in their mouths and leave the bodies on the field. Sometimes they also defecate on the bodies. ”

If I had a neighbot, lets say, Canada that treated me that way, yes, I would do exactly what the Israelis are doing to the Jihadists….Just war Doctrine is not pacifism.
on August 9, 2006 at 4:26 pm | Reply Daniel Nichols

Mr. Blye- Picture yourself with a son who is part of an antigovernment militia. While you may have some sympathy for his cause, you are not yourself involved.
Government troops show up one day with a bulldozer and level your home. There is no recompense.
Or perhaps many people in your town are involved in that militia. One night planes fly over and bomb your town into rubble. Cars fleeing the scene are targeted by missles.
That is what happens to Palestinian and now Lebanese civilians.
It is not as black and white as you suggest.
on August 9, 2006 at 4:41 pm | Reply Christopher Zehnder

Just war doctrine may not be pacifism, but it does mean something. And it does apply, strangely enough, to war. It tells us what conduct the moral law demands in the context of war. One is not absolved of the moral law because someone else violates it.
on August 11, 2006 at 8:07 am | Reply Steve Hayes

My Blye seems to include children among the “Jihadists” — but it is logical, of course. Kill off the next generation so they will not grow up to fight. Kill off the girls so they will not breed boys who will grow up to fight.

Funny, that must have been the reasoning of the Nazis when they sterilised Jews.

But is that what a “Just War” means?
on August 14, 2006 at 4:08 pm | Reply Greg Mockeridge

There’s one big problem with Anscombe’s objections. And that is that it is based upon a false premise. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not and, I repeat, were not, a direct attack on innocents as a means to ann end. To prepare for the Allied invasion of Japan, the Japanese had conscripted all males from ages 15 to 60 and females 17 to 45. This effectively erased the distinction between combatant and noncombatants, thus rendering ALL of Japan a legitimate military target.

The only atternative to the A-bombs would caused from ten to fifty times the deaths the bombs themselves did.

If we are going to make a moral judgments of the atomic bombings, we need to have sufficient knowledge of the circumstances within which President Truman made that decision. Otherwise, we have no business saying anything. This includes the Catholic theologians and prominent Catholic figures who condemned the bombings who failed to demonstrate they had such knowledge upon which to base their condemnations.

Last year, I refuted Dave Armstrong’s idiotoc rantings on the atomic bombings here:

http://coworkersintruth.blogspot.com/2005/09/debunking-dave-armstrongs-consensus-of.html
on August 14, 2006 at 5:11 pm | Reply Daniel Nichols

Greg- Like every consequentialist, you are comparing a speculative evil against a very real one. No one can say with any certainty what would have happened had the Americans not used atomic weapons, and those far more learned than you or I argue the question endlessly.
And what about the males under 15 and the females under 17? What about the children still in the womb? Aren’t you prolife? Or does that only apply to American babies?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki at that point were mainly peopled by old people, small children and their mothers.
I think that terms like “collateral damage” have long become meaningless. Proportionality is always violated in modern warfare; since WWII every war has entailed more civilian than military deaths.
In the end it perhaps comes down to our notion of ultimate good: realpolitik demands a formula for victory, and Jesus Christ says “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”
How you answer His question determines whether you think the deaths of a couple hundred thousand women and children here or there is an acceptable thing or not.