Originally Posted by
Montmorency
To my mind, whether a military or political course of action is justifiable or justified comes independent of how bad the opposition may be. Justification is consequentialist, and there may be a ledger for reparations but not for vengeance or cruelty. What does that mean? It means a level of coercion (which itself means human destruction on all sides) is justified insofar as it subdues an inescapable threat against you. Or to others, if you want to get advanced. A much lesser degree of coercion could be justifiable to extract concessions or recompense for past damages. A program of bloodlust is not justifiable, e.g. 'killing those people would make me feel better,' or even, 'killing those people would make enough people feel good as to be politically convenient, or vice versa' - though in the latter it is at least possible to conceive of a balanced trolley dilemma.
The general ethical schema can be captured by the question: What level of general human suffering - and perhaps in particular civilian damage - are we willing to tolerate/perpetrate in pursuit of what goals?
It was clear that by the time firebombing (i.e. terror bombing) against Japan commenced with the March raid against Tokyo, it had been subdued as a threat to the United States and its major allies. It still remained a threat to many civilians in China, Korea, and SE Asia, as well as POWs. This suggests that the United States, USSR, and their allies had a moral imperative to quickly secure peace not according to the maximal satisfaction of their strategic or geopolitical designs, but according to whatever would expeditiously resolve the humanitarian catastrophe in the Pacific.
By the time of the Potsdam Declaration in July the firebombing campaign had essentially been completed; by this time we can say that the Allies had probably not been fulfilling their moral responsibilities, given the awareness of all parties that the Japanese leadership were willing to tolerate hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths to secure their own objectives. What should have gone into the Potsdam Declaration, or the timetable of operations in August, is a whole area of debate, but from the perspective of ending the fighting quickly the lack of clarification that the future position of the Emperor, or the kokutai, would be negotiable, was indefensible. I don't know how the Soviets felt about this messaging, but concealing the inevitability of their military intercession is another decision that could only serve to prolong conflict.
The atomic bombings, though an order of magnitude deadlier, were a continuation of the ethically-compromised bombing campaign already prosecuted. To sidestep the common debates of timing and so on, the most absolutely justifiable targets in Japan for any sort of incineration would have been the Emperor and his military elites. Not because they were bad men, but because decapitating the Japanese war machine would be the most obvious bridge to a cessation of fighting. (It's actually arguable that killing these individuals would not soften - alternatively even harden - Imperial resolve, but in principle it is low cost, most appropriate of target, and potentially decisive.)
In all the preceding the relevant considerations have not been the moral character of the enemy or their actions, you should note. Whatever your perspective is on Allied operations against Japan, it shouldn't come from that sort of place. The badness of an enemy in itself cannot be probative, or there would be a case for democide of conservatives in the style of Stalin or Pol Pot. Never say that we should do something to someone because of, purely in retaliation against, something they or some group associated with them did to us. Otherwise:
The only way I can think of to bring the bad behavior of the enemy into a consequentialist framework would be to argue that 'because they are such bad dudes, they will remain or reemerge as a threat unless we beat them into submission now beyond what is proximally proportionate.' Or in another very borderline sense, 'if they are such bad guys now, then maybe putting on the hurt will teach them a lesson and turn them into good guys, and this would eventually prove a greater benefit to everyone than to do otherwise.' This is a morally fraught and risky calculation to make any time - cf. historically-upcoming containment doctrine and "we had to destroy [them] to save them" - but at least it can be predicated on an admissible goal and argued on some merits.
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