Libertarians for Nuking Civilians

According to Cathy Young at H&R, if you condemn the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as immoral, you are just being lazy. And unpatriotic.

The comment thread is reminiscent of something you might read at Little Green Footballs.

Cathy’s conclusion: “When anti-Americanism becomes so extreme that it turns the U.S. into the bad guy of World War II, that's truly frightening and depressing. As for whether the bombing was indeed the least evil of all available options: again, I don't know. I'm sure there is room for legitimate debate on this issue. But that debate is almost entirely drowned out by hate and self-righteousness. The insistence on moral purity has turned to moral blindness.”

I’m not sure what Cathy means by “morality”, but I can unequivocally say that bombing those people was immoral, as were a lot of things done in World War II. That’s because my moral values, admittedly arbitrary as all such values are, preclude murdering people for the purposes of terrorizing other people.

Were there other even more evil alternatives that might have been pursued? The US government could have bombed three cities or built enough bombs to kill every single Japanese person. Should the US get credit for not doing worse? If so, then Hitler gets a medal for not killing 7 million Jews.

Were there less evil alternatives that might have been pursued? Actors are free to refrain from evil or to establish a limit on just how evil they would ever let themselves become. There are always less evil options if you care about whether you are evil. Hitler could have decided not to murder the Jews, an admittedly less evil alternative, but then he would have had to forego goals associated with extirpating non-Aryans.

Identifying “good guys” and “bad guys” in WW2 is a matter for propagandists. There is very little in the way of “good” that can be said to have come of that horrible conflict.

It is not “moral laziness” to apply one’s moral values consistently and universally and to hold oneself to the same standards as one holds others. It is quite simply a moral stand that one might take. That Cathy Young chooses to eschew moral purity is her privilege, but there is no basis for her assertion that such a stance is any sense morally superior to that of the purist.