The Hiroshima/Nagasaki fallacy revealed
More than once I've heard people say that "By dropping the bombs, we actually saved more lives than we ended, because if there had been an invasion of Japan, the loss of life on both sides would have been astronomical."
Now, let me ask a simple ethical question. If we are just counting lives, then suppose the Japanese had offered to surrender if we would simply give them a six year old American girl that they could douse with gasoline and set on fire.
This would have ended the war with the loss of only one life, and according to the body count methodology would have been an even better way to end the war than dropping the bombs.
Somehow, looked at this way, the body count excuse sounds like a pretty bad excuse. Does it still sound good to you?
posted by NudePhotoGuy @ 12:45 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
It's nice to think that less deaths would be better. But reality is that many Japanese military members of that time had the same type of conditioning terrorist suspects have today. They would not give up just because we hand them someone to set on fire.
Your thinking in that manner also seems to hint at something deeper. Maybe you think we were the cause of their involvement in world war 2?? Why did you come up with "simply give them a six year old American girl". First it seems kind of sickening and second, they already did that (see http://www.newbie.com/PearlHarbor/casualties.html)
Anyways, bargaining with them would have worked in the short term. But what about the long term? They most likely would have not stuck with any agreements. That is if they agreed with them in the first place. Invading Japan would have been a disaster. You've already heard that point before so i don't need to go into detail.
The Japanese military was not into negotiating whatsoever. The unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor proved this clearly. Their only trade to lay down their arms would have been the total annihilation of this country. The same thing Hitler dreamed of, alongside the Japanese, and what Islamists dream of today.
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Every now and then someone comes along who either through sheer stupidity or an indomitable determination to avoid addressing the thrust of an argument, supplies a refutation to an argument I never made.
I was NOT suggesting a practical solution to the end of the war with Japan, as you so strangely seem to to have divined, but rather a thought problem to test the argument that's commonly used to justify using atomic weapons.
The argument, stated in its simplest terms is that IF saving all those lives at the risk of some tens of thousands of lives was worthwhile, then stopping the war at the cost of just one life would be even better.
I think most people would not want to end the war by burning a child alive, even if it saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Thus, I see this idea that the bombs were justified because of all the lives they supposedly saved (which is likely, but still conjecture) is a lot of nonsense we tell ourselves to soothe our guilty conscience.
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