Ethics of the Hiroshima Bombing: Utilitarianism vs. Deontology

Introduction

The bombing of Hiroshima raises significant ethical issues. From a military perspective, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as the catalyst for Japanese surrender, thereby ending the war in the Pacific. However, these attacks on civilian targets were among the most horrific in the history of wartime. Such attacks would be outlawed today under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which was enacted in 1949 partly as a response to the bombings and other atrocities committed against civilians and prisoners of war during the Second World War. While the bombing of Hiroshima violated any reasonable code of ethics, it resulted in a net sparing of human life and was therefore a necessary act to bring the war to an end.

The Bombings

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people were killed immediately, and many more would die later as the result of radiation exposure (History.com, 2012). Some sources attribute the total number of dead in the Hiroshima attack to have been 140,000 — mostly civilians — making it the deadliest attack on a civilian target in history (BBC, 2012). This attack was followed three days later by the dropping of a plutonium bomb over Nagasaki. Japan issued its surrender six days after that second attack.

The war in the Pacific to that point, fought primarily between the United States and Japan following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, had been exceptionally bloody. Japan had spent much of the 1930s expanding its empire, and by the time it attacked Pearl Harbor had already occupied large parts of China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and other areas across Asia. The subsequent conflict with the United States was fought across a series of islands in the Pacific.

At the time of the attacks, the Fourth Geneva Convention did not yet exist, so there was no explicit international agreement prohibiting the targeting of civilians in wartime. The European theater featured extensive bombing of civilian targets on both sides. The Americans famously leveled the city of Dresden in 1945 near the end of the war, and had engaged in a similarly aggressive firebombing campaign against Japan during July of 1945. With the war in Europe concluded, the United States, the United Kingdom, and China called for Japanese surrender on July 26, 1945, in the Potsdam Declaration. This declaration was an attempt to avoid a ground invasion of Japan that would have cost both sides millions of lives and caused significant devastation to Japan's civilian population. The destruction of Japanese infrastructure would also have set back that country's recovery by several years. The Declaration was, however, ignored by Japanese Emperor Hirohito. Faced with Japan's determination to continue fighting even at the cost of an Allied invasion, the nuclear option was deployed as a last-ditch attempt to force surrender.

The Ethical Frameworks

There are two principal ethical frameworks through which the decision to bomb Hiroshima can be evaluated: the utilitarian framework and the deontological framework. Each leads to a markedly different moral verdict.

The Utilitarian Case for the Bombings

Utilitarianism is "one of the most powerful and persuasive approaches to normative ethics" (Driver, 2009). Distilled to a single principle, the ethical action is the one that delivers the greatest good for the greatest number. The outcomes for the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific and unprecedented, but those bombings arguably spared a much larger loss of life. The ground invasion of Japan was avoided, saving the lives of millions — including Japanese civilians whose casualties from an invasion could have rivaled those of the nuclear attacks. The bloody battles at Guadalcanal and Okinawa, which each cost tens of thousands of lives, would have been replicated many times over during a full-scale ground invasion. In addition, the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as a warning to the world's nuclear powers about the devastation such weapons could cause — a warning that may well have deterred other nuclear attacks during the Cold War.

There is a counterargument to the utilitarian case, however: the choice to bomb or to invade may not have been a binary one. While the Japanese were unwilling to surrender under the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, the Allies treated the Declaration as though no other options existed. They could, for instance, have pushed Japan back to its principal islands and left the war at a stalemate — an approach later used in Korea. Alternatively, they might have withdrawn from the Pacific theater after having demonstrated military superiority. This option might not have been acceptable to China in particular, but it could have served the broader interests of peace. Further diplomatic negotiations with Hirohito were another possibility, as was detonating a bomb offshore to demonstrate its destructive power without directly killing civilians. The counterpoint to the utilitarian argument, then, is that other approaches might have achieved the same outcome — Japanese surrender — without the enormous cost in human life that either the bombings or a ground invasion would have entailed.

Conclusion

The utilitarian approach is more appropriate in this situation. The war in the Pacific needed to come to an end, and prolonging that war would only have subjected all parties to massive loss of life. The military leaders of the Allied Forces believed that no reasonable option remained after the Potsdam Declaration failed to generate any response from the Japanese. If a case exists that other options were available, that case is speculative at best. There may have been alternatives, but they carried a low likelihood of success. Given that millions of lives — including Japanese civilian lives — were at stake, the bombing was necessary to bring the war to a swift conclusion with the lowest possible loss of life.

The nuclear option posed a unique ethical dilemma in that no good option was available. The decision could not have been an easy one, but under the utilitarian framework — and given the options realistically available at the time — it was the only defensible choice.

References

Alexander, L. & Moore, M. (2007). Deontological ethics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved November 25, 2012, from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/

BBC. (2012). Japan marks Hiroshima bombing amid anti-nuclear calls. British Broadcasting Company. Retrieved November 25, 2012, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19144486

Driver, J. (2009). The history of utilitarianism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved November 25, 2012, from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/

History.com. (2012). The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. History.com. Retrieved November 25, 2012, from http://www.history.com/topics/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki