The Ethics of Mass Murder

The Post-Socratic Sandbox

In 1956, Oxford University granted an honorary degree to former US President Harry Truman. Elizabeth Anscombe, a British philosopher who taught at Oxford, opposed the grant of the degree on the grounds that in deciding to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Mr Truman had committed acts of mass murder.
Anscombe is a fascinating character and was one of the most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century. She was also possessed of enormous intellectual courage, and publicly made the somewhat unpopular case against the award of the degree to Truman. In 1958, she published a pamphlet in which she set out in detail the arguments she had put in support of her position.
As an admirer of both Truman and Anscombe, and of course as a philosopher of sorts, I find myself drawn to this dispute. Truman accepted the degree, apparently unfazed by Anscombe's opposition to it. And Anscombe never backed down, asserting that the US insistence on Japan's unconditional surrender, coupled with the almost taunting language of the Potsdam Declaration and a refusal to engage with Japanese offers to negotiate peace, rendered the bombings a deliberate attack on civilian populations by the US in circumstances where it had ignored legitimate diplomatic alternatives.
It could be said, of course, that even if Anscombe's hindsight was perfect, it had fallen to Truman to make a decision that would have catastrophic consequences whatever he had done, and that he had had to decide in real time, with imperfect information, advice that was undoubtedly confounding, and a fundamental responsibility to his country and the world to try to minimize death and suffering.
From a moral perspective, the stakes could not have been any higher. And Anscombe argues that it may well have been the advent of a flawed and troubling consequentialist school of moral thought that led to a grisly calculus in which many thousands of innocent lives were taken at a stroke.
In this episode, I try to consider Anscombe's arguments objectively. The terrain is difficult, both emotionally and intellectually, and such profound circumstances do not admit of facile moral reasoning. But to me, it is terrain that must be traversed, and wherever we come out on the matter we should be grateful to Elizabeth Anscombe for having taken this on.

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