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Godfollower
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What are you talking about? Catholic theology doesn’t change.
“Don’t kill innocent people on purpose” has always been immoral. Sure, the Catechism denounces it, but it’s based on millenia-old theology.
Catechism ¶ 2261, citing Exodus 23:7.
A lot of this thread has focused on the principle of double effect: it’s one thing to send in a missile to destroy a munitions factory, even though it will kill the cleaning crew (a moral purpose accompanied by a known, bad result is still morally permissible under the right circumstances); it’s another thing entirely to kill innocent people in a city on purpose in hopes of forcing a surrender (a moral goal – surrender of the enemy – accomplished by the deliberate killing of civilian noncombatants, including children below the age of reason and unable to fight, is evil).
Catechism ¶ 2263, citing St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, 64, 7, corp. art.
Sure, the Catechism itself is young; but its teaching is ancient. There’s no question of ex post facto changing the rules on people; you can’t kill innocent people on purpose.
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Neildown
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When physical war is in full bloom you can’t exactly do anything but retaliate, especially with America being the poster-child of the free world. Going to war for the sake of retaliation against an unjust act is actually permissible according to Catholic doctrine as far as I remember.
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Godfollower
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It’s actually fairly straightforward (not “easy” – all paths were difficult at the time – just “straightforward”). First, make a list of everything that you are in fact able to do (invade, blockade, nuke military targets, nuke civilian targets, nuke Mt. Fuji, etc.). Second, delete all entries that are immoral. Third, choose the most feasible and palatable of the remaining entries.
If it’s evil, you can’t do it, regardless of the consequences. You don’t get to say, “Sure, it’s evil, but it’ll save me money. Or time. Or property. Or lives.” You simply can’t do it.
Suppose you could go back in time and abort Hitler while he was still in the womb. Would you do it? Of course not; abortion is intrinsically evil, so it’s off the table as a choice, even if you somehow knew that it would save millions of lives lost because of him during World War II.
So why are you able to deliberately kill the thousands of babies and small children living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 in order to save lives by avoiding an invasion or blockade? What makes their deaths so much more acceptable?
[Edit: Sorry about the Godwin’s Law violation].
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smichhertz
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I think you are confusing personal culpability with morality. Sure, Truman did not have clear direction from the Church so he arguably was invincibly ignorant when he made the decision to drop the bomb, but that doesn’t change the morality of the act, only his responsibility for it.
Take another example: slavery. The Church held slavery as morally permissible for a long time before finally ruling it immoral. But good look explaining to all the slaves how what was done to them was not immoral. It definitely was immoral, and the Church firmly declares it as such now.
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Godfollower
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That’s essentially what we did after the war, which is why Germany, Italy, and Japan are now allies of the U.S.
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Neildown
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I just rented a book about that from the library.
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GWright
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The thing, in war, is that many people are called upon to commit immoral acts thanks to their participation in the war (which may be forced upon them).
I see war as a temporary suspension of normal circumstances, if you will, in that individuals might commit immoral acts (murder) but these are not sinful in the usual way, if the war meets our Catholic understanding of a “just war”.
From the Catechism, for a war to be a “just war”, it must satisfy these demands:
An invasion of the home islands would only been successful if every last Japanese adult (males anyway) had been killed. Remember that surrender was a total dishonour to the Japanese mind and generally their troops would chose to die - even needlessly - rather than give up. I think the bombings were a tragedy, but I think they were a lesser - and less individualised - tragedy than would have occured, if America was forced to physically invade Japan. It was Japan who started the war and it was Japan who ultimately forced the bombings by refusing to surrender, when they had no remaining chance of success - see below also).
I see war as a temporary suspension of normal circumstances, if you will, in that individuals might commit immoral acts (murder) but these are not sinful in the usual way, if the war meets our Catholic understanding of a “just war”.
From the Catechism, for a war to be a “just war”, it must satisfy these demands:
- It must be authorised by a competent authority (For America, in WW2, this is satisfied by the United States Government, a democratically elected body, declaring war on Japan in response to an unprovoked surprise attack by the Japanese).
- It must have a just cause (the American cause for war was just as they were victims of unprovoked, surprise aggression which cost many American lives, as well as a global “loss of face” for America).
- It must have a just purpose (which was to defeat Imperial Japan, an aggressive nation which attacked America)
- It must be a last resort (essentially a moot point here, as war was forced on America by Japan’s surprise attack. America did not make the decision and so cannot be accused of going to war too readily).
- the methods used must be proportionate (this is perhaps a debatable point. I would argue however that the bombings were proportionate. Imperial Japan was a dreadful, fearsome enemy - let us not forget - which was happy to invoke large scale slaughter of P.O.W.s and civilians, and terrifying (to the western mind) suicide attacks in their war effort.
An invasion of the home islands would only been successful if every last Japanese adult (males anyway) had been killed. Remember that surrender was a total dishonour to the Japanese mind and generally their troops would chose to die - even needlessly - rather than give up. I think the bombings were a tragedy, but I think they were a lesser - and less individualised - tragedy than would have occured, if America was forced to physically invade Japan. It was Japan who started the war and it was Japan who ultimately forced the bombings by refusing to surrender, when they had no remaining chance of success - see below also).
- there must be a reasonable chance of success (America had every right to feel confident, being the dominant global industrial and military force of the middle 20th century)
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Neildown
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Relevant question though - what WOULD we - or rather - what SHOULD we have specifically done if not the nukes?
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Barb3
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I certainly haven’t read all 17 pages of this forum, but I was alive during World War II – in fact, I remember well hearing on the radio that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. If I remember correctly before we dropped the atom bomb the Japanese Emperor had prepared a speech to give to his people that Japan should surrender because he knew they were losing the war but his military people wouldn’t allow him to give it. My husband was in the military and the USA was in the process of moving our troops to better locations for the invasion.
If we had invaded Japan you can just imagine what our casualties would be. If I ever had questions about our dropping the bomb all of them disappeared when I read the book “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilence, and Redemption” by Laura Hillenbrand. It’s on the best seller list and is a true story of one of our POW’s of the Japanese. Their cruelty to the POW’s was unbelievable – if any of you have any doubts I recommend that you read this book. One of my cousins was a POW of the Germans and he definitely didn’t experience that kind of treatment.
If we had invaded Japan you can just imagine what our casualties would be. If I ever had questions about our dropping the bomb all of them disappeared when I read the book “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilence, and Redemption” by Laura Hillenbrand. It’s on the best seller list and is a true story of one of our POW’s of the Japanese. Their cruelty to the POW’s was unbelievable – if any of you have any doubts I recommend that you read this book. One of my cousins was a POW of the Germans and he definitely didn’t experience that kind of treatment.
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Godfollower
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Actually, retaliation is not a morally acceptable choice. Self-defense is acceptable, as is defense of others. Similarly, just war includes the option of invading to destroy an enemy’s ability to carry out immoral attacks. But “retaliation” (you killed my civilians, so I’m killing yours) is not morally permissible.
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Godfollower
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The problem with the nuclear weapons was not specifically their atomic nature; it was their indiscriminate deployment against innocent civilians. Offhand, taking that option off the table leaves (A) nuclear weapons against non-civilian targets; (B) non-nuclear weapons against non-civilian targets; (C) invasion; and (D) blockade.
Yes, those options had higher costs – in time, property, and lives. But Catholic theology denies the validity of “the ends justify the means.” If killing innocents is evil, it’s evil.
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Neildown
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Wow.
Another good book which contains tales of the atrocities of the Japanese in WWII is Ghost Soldiers. It’s about an attempt to rescue POWs that had gone through the Bataan Death March if I remember correctly.
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Warrior1979
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You’ve actually posed an interesting question. Abortion is intrinsically evil because it is considered murder; i.e., killing of the innocent. If you actually knew what was going to occur, it would have had to come from God. The interesting philosophical question then becomes if God told you that a great evil would occur and you just stood by, is that wrong?
So murdering by nukes isn’t allowed, but slowly starving the innocent is completely acceptable?
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Neildown
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I can accept that view.
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Whitacre_Girl
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I suppose the proper Catholic response is that it was morally wrong and the ends don’t justify the means.
I don’t feel it was wrong though. Here are the reasons:
But then again, in an ideal world the war would never have happened.
I don’t feel it was wrong though. Here are the reasons:
- The people of the town were told to get their stuff and get out because it was coming. The town was blanketed with flyers before it happened. They ignored the warnings.
- Nearly every person from Japan I have ever talked to about it (and let me assure you, it’s quite a few since that’s my typical social circle, especially in college) feels that it was a necessary evil. They believe that their government was corrupt, and thank America for waking them up and stopping the killing of millions of other innocent Japanese in the war at the expense of these cities.
But then again, in an ideal world the war would never have happened.
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Lui
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That’s a good point. The USA were probably fed up with the war by this point and the Japanese would have fought until the last man. The USA probably thought it was better to kill a couple of thousand Japanese more(by the atom bomb) than having more and more Americans soldiers being killed. Anyway, there were already more people being killed by the massive bombings that were taken place than the deaths that were caused by the atom bombs so the atomic bomb was more a “sudden stop” to the war solution.
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Neildown
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A - Did we really* have *any non-civilian targets worth using an atom bomb on though?
B - We were already doing that and it wasn’t really working.
C - out of the question unless we were looking for self-sacrifice.
D - Did the Japanese really rely that much on foreign goods? They were still using swords as a main battle weapon in WW I if I’m not mistaken [it might have been earlier] and officers still used them in WWII. I don’t think food would have been a great problem considering their agricultural… culture. What would a blockade [effectively] do?
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sedonaman
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I’d still like to know why, in general, there are no discussions at all about worse atrocities committed by America’s enemies.
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Neildown
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There is an article about the most famous of those here - it contains no atrocities within themselves in its images, but the implications are really chilling. I don’t know if you like Glenn Beck, but this is a great article of his - glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/none/glenns-travel-log10/.
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