Another new publication. This one is short, open access, and quotes unpublished letters to von Wright.
Abstract
In G. E. M. Anscombe’s extensive correspondence with G. H. von Wright, one of the many topics that come up is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. What she says in these letters is significant because of the interest in what she wrote elsewhere about the use of atomic weapons. It is especially interesting because she might seem to imply here that only a person with religious faith is capable of being just. This paper quotes the relevant passages from the correspondence, explores what she might have meant, and concludes that she is not committed to the view that only the faithful can be just.
"The people who support Truman’s action, both at the time and since then, generally believe that, while the bombing that he ordered cost many lives, it was the right thing to do because even more lives would have been lost if Japan had not been forced to surrender."
ReplyDeleteYou give no sources for this. But I wonder if it is quite true, even if you use this precise wording. There's more than one other widely circulated argument that is completely independent of this "generally" held one. For instance:
1) Hiroshima was the headquarters of the Japanese Second Army, with 40,000 soldiers stationed; Nagasaki had a significant naval presence and a major military factory. Thus it is at least arguable that the civilian casualties were covered by the doctrine of double effect. (Although Anscombe probably would have had an interpretation of the doctrine ready to hand which would have neutralised this objection for her?)
2) Anscombe's claims that Japan was "known by [Truman] to have made two attempts towards a negotiated peace" and that "Truman knew the Japanese were urgently seeking to surrender on terms" are seriously at odds with mainstream military and diplomatic history.
3) Anscombe tendentiously belittles the Potsdam Declaration to such an extent that this amounts to a serious misrepresentation. There simply was no "fixation on unconditional surrender" (Anscombe), as the Declaration was precisely a document that set out very clearly the terms for a conditional surrender.
4) The Japanese government took measures to obliterate any practical means for Allied soldiers to distinguish combatants from noncombatants in Japan, and publicised this as widely as possible in hopes that it would act as a deterrent to a conventional land invasion. In such an invasion, the indiscriminate killing of civilians would have had an equally large role as in the bombings, because the Japanese authorities themselves were doing their best to prevent any discrimination from occurring.
I would also add a consideration about Anscombe that I've been waiting for years and years for someone to address (I guess I have somehow never raised it with you before):
5) Anscombe viewed herself as being as Catholic as a Catholic can be. But before Truman came to Oxford, his 1956 European trip had taken him to the Vatican, where he'd had the same kind of friendly welcome as at Oxford, including from Pope Pius XII.
And I should add that this is not some suggestion that you roll over and play dead, overwhelmed by the sheer awesome force of these anti-Anscombe arguments. What I would be genuinely not only interested in, but extremely interested in, would be any serious attempt at formulating a thought-through response to the arguments from an Anscombean viewpoint.
I do not personally "support Truman's action" any more than I condemn it. Even here I'm trying to be faithful to the ideal of neutrality of D. Z. Phillips's contemplative conception of philosophy, on which I'm doing research, as you know. But over the years I have been increasingly irritated, occasionally almost beyond bearing, by the recurrent simplifications of the pro-Truman position in the secondary literature on Anscombe, by people who are quite up in arms about an exactly similar degree of simplification when it is applied to, say, "Modern Moral Philosophy" (as it all too often is!). This applies especially to the seemingly boundless willingness in Anscombe/Wartime-Quartet scholarship to take all of Anscombe's empirical claims about military and diplomatic history at face value without subjecting them to any source criticism.
ReplyDeleteBut this new paper of yours is nevertheless a good start, and as a von Wright-ite (after a fashion) I found it a truly fascinating read. I should perhaps add that I was commissioned to write a long essay review of The Creation of Wittgenstein for the Nordic Wittgenstein Review. It's now written up and coming up, I don't know if this year or the next. As a matter of fact I initially rather criticised your Anscombe chapter for not finding anything new to say about the Truman episode, but in acknowledgement that your research was still ongoing, I toned this down considerably after your book announcement came. Well, it turns out that I didn't even have to wait for the book to come out...!
Thanks, Tommi
DeleteIt's difficult to write a defence of Anscombe's position in response to these points because I don't know the history well enough, I don't think she really gives sources for her information (or her interpretation of the facts), and it is her position rather than mine (although I am sympathetic towards her view). But I'll see if I can come up with something better than this to say.
On the question of what Truman's defenders generally believe, I have spoken to a few and they have all offered this argument and no others. Perhaps I need to speak to more people and/or read more on the subject.