David Mathews:
Well, I suppose the rightness or wrongness of Hiroshima/Nagasaki depends on the overall impact on the free will of individuals, with all individuals being considered equal.
Death impedes the free will of individuals more than most or all other things. So, making a very rough moral calculation, and leaving out smaller considerations which probably don’t affect the outcome, one should probably conclude: If by these attacks, which caused 300,000 liberty-ending or liberty-limiting casualties, the liberties and lives of more than 300,000 persons (U.S. military, Japanese military, and civilians) were saved, then it was the morally correct thing to do.
However, this is an uncertain calculation if the numbers are particularly close. If it was a comparison between 300,000 killed and maimed if the bombs are dropped, versus 300,050 killed and maimed otherwise, I would be inclined to think that the bombs were better off not dropped.
This would especially be true if the 300,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely civilian, but the 300,050 slain without the atomic bombs were largely military (Japanese and American). In such circumstances, it might be moral to trade the lives of 600,000 military, or even 900,000 military, to avoid 300,000 civilian deaths. The moral requirement for preferring military targets over civilian is truly that profound, that it might merit a 3-to-1 ratio of conversion, when trading lives for lives.
So, was the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the morally correct decision? I don’t know; I can only articulate what seem to me to be sane standards, and then look up the actual numbers after the fact, in the interest of not biasing my judgment.
So. Having articulated such a standard (vague though it may be), perhaps one of you can give me the real numbers:
As far as the decision-makers in the U.S. knew, how many U.S. servicemen, U.S. civilians, Japanese servicemen, and Japanese civilians, would have been killed had the U.S. not used atomic weapons, and still pressed the war to total victory?
And, assuming the numbers of dead and wounded given above for Hiroshima and Nagasaki were correct, what percentage were civilians, and what percentage military?
Mitigating factor: What percentage of the civilians could simply not avoid being hit unintentionally using the “dumb bomb” technology of that day, if military targets were to be bombed? (I must add this last factor in because our moral choices are limited to what we can actually do, not to what we wish we could do. If a total victory over Japan would have required eliminating the military targets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — or comparable targets elsewhere — and if eliminating these targets could only plausibly be done from the air either with nukes or conventional bombs, then is there much/any chance that the conventional bombs would have destroyed fewer civilians than the atomic ones? How many fewer?)
