Encefalus

I was reading the other day on Psychology Today this article: Dropping atomic bombs on Japan was an act of utmost compassion. The author of the post is Satoshi Kanazawa who is also the co-author of the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. I have not read the book, so I can’t comment on it. However, I have read the aformentioned post on Psychology Today and I am going to comment on that.

Why I claim that this is the biggest crap I’ve ever read? The author in this post argues that the dropping of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagashaki were an act of utmost compassion. His arguments are the following:

By his decision to drop two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing only 200,000 people, Harry S. Truman avoided the annihilation of an entire nation and saved the lives of 100 million people. The Japanese Army had tanks, and the Japanese Navy had airplanes, so they were not impressed with the American tanks and airplanes. Repeated carpet bombings of Tokyo in March 1945 did not faze them. The only thing that would convince the Japanese people, and, more importantly, their military leadership, of the utter American technological superiority and the complete futility of resistance were the atomic bombs, which they did not have.

They would never have surrendered had we not dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That would have necessitated ground invasion of mainland Japan by the American forces, which would have led to many, many more Japanese to be killed, up to 100 million. You are equally dead whether you are killed by a bullet or an atomic bomb. 100 million people killed by bullets, one at a time, over weeks and months, is much, much worse, by any account, than 200,000 people killed in a flash of a second by atomic bombs. 

He also says that "Just because an act happens to be atrocious does not mean that it is not simultaneously the most humane and compassionate thing to do under the circumstances. Sometimes the alternatives are much worse."

This post gave me a lot of thought. Initially I thought "WTF IS THIS GUY SAYING?!?!?!?! I MEAN, WFT?!?!!?". But then again, I remembered my post on dangerous thoughts (Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society). Maybe he is right and I just can’t see it.

Nuclear compassion baby!!

So, let’s investigate this argument.

Here Mr. Kanazawa bases his argument on the premise that we have a moral dilemma where the question is how many people will die and when. His answer is based on two things

1)Killing more people is worse than killing less, not matter whether this happens now or later

2)There was no alternative

Now, commenting on the second, I have the following things to say

1)We don’t know if there was no alternative and probably we’ll never do

2)Maybe dropping one bomb was the solution. Droping two bombs however was NOT going to change anything. Heck, they could have even dropped the bombs on an island or in the sea! My position on that is that the bomb droppings were mostly a way for the USA to show off its newfound nuclear power and to test its weaponry. But, I’m not going to elaborate on that in order to keep track with the moral and not the historical nature of the dilemma.

Now, concerning the first premise, that killing more people is worse than killing less, we see that the basis of Mr. Kazanawa’s morals are of quantitative and not qualitative nature. So, he doesn’t place life (human or not) as a a value on its own, but rather, he chooses by numbers. Not only that, but he also, makes a distinction between "us" and "them".

So, his logic is completely a utilitarian and selfish one. Better us than them, better less than more.

Better us than them

Morality was always a subject that intrigued me. Psychology has a special field on that called Moral Psychology. Moral Psychology is the empirical study of the moral development. One of the most important researchers in the field was Lawrence Kohlberg.

Lawrence Kohlberg

L. Kohlberg created a model of moral development that had 6 stages (Kohlberg’s stages of moral development). 

Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)

1. Obedience and punishment orientation

(How can I avoid punishment?)

2. Self-interest orientation

(What’s in it for me?)

Level 2 (Conventional)

3. Interpersonal accord and conformity

(The good boy/good girl attitude)

4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation

(Law and order morality)

Level 3 (Post-Conventional)

5. Social contract orientation

6. Universal ethical principles

(Principled conscience)

I believe Mr. Kazanawa to be in stage 2: What’s in it for me? Of course, this is disputable. Something else I could say about Mr. Kazanawa is that he is brainwashed by american propaganda concerning World War II, which is disputable as well. Maybe, he is a conservative, and thus insane, as Psychology Today mentions : Is Political Conservatism a Mild Form of Insanity?

As you can see, I disagree with the answer he gives in this dilemma. However, there is something very intriguing about his post I’d like to mention. It was posted on his blog on Psychology Today which is one of the largest psychology magazines. Many people are going to read this. Yet, there was no censorship. For a country like USA which, after the 9/11 attacks, has started to turn into an Orwellian nightmare like the UK, the freedom to express your opinion seems like a virtue you must fight for. Scientific magazines, like for example Scientific American, have traditionally tried to stay out of political disputes. Maybe this is the right choice, since political positions can always get in the way of science. An example of that is how many left supporters that support evolution, since it is a scientific theory and proves wrong with scientific arguments the intelligent design theory, deny its implications for the human nature. A very interesting post I found on the subject is this: Who is Against Evolution?

Consider the most striking case, the question of whether there are differences between men and women with regard to the distribution of intellectual abilities or behavioral patterns. That no such differences exist, or if that if they exist they are insignificant, is a matter of faith for many on the left. The faith is so strongly held that when the president of Harvard, himself a prominent academic, merely raised the possibility that one reason why there were fewer women than men in certain fields might be such differences, he was ferociously attacked and eventually driven to resign. 

Next consider the whole nature/nurture debate, in which the left has, for half a century or more, mostly taken a strong pro-nurture position. It is hard to see how humans could have evolved intelligence if intelligence is not heritable.

Finally, consider the question of how maleable human nature is or isn’t. It is not logically impossible that we evolved as general purpose computers, with all details determined by the program, not the hardware. But it does not seem likely, given the obvious advantages of hardwiring in whatever rules worked in the environment where we evolved. Nor does it seem plausible given that most of our evolutionary history predates human rationality, making it likely that humans retain quite a lot of pre-human traits.

Just get the !@#!@# out of here!!!

However, science is connected in many ways with politics and society as we have said many times in this blog. In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we have a case where science is directly linked with politics.

Posting a political article in a psychological magazine that expresses an extreme opinion is an act that I believe to be an act of freedom of speech, no matter what the article says. Like I said in Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society, having the same opinion as others is something that can be proven more dangerous or more useless than having an extreme opinion. Changes sometimes need to be drastic and sometimes they need utterly different views.

I can’t agree with Mr. Kazanawa, but I believe his article to promote freedom of speech, even if this was not in his intentions. His article was the incentive for this post and maybe will be for other posts, as well. Posts that express radical opinions that could only propel forward our thought. Of course, this can also lead to fundamendalism and mindless conflict. But, I want to be optimistic in that we really know where to draw the line.

Further Reading:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: A Failure of Empathy on Psychology Today. A different view on the same place.

Drugs for optimising morality, something I stumbled upon while searching for blog posts on morality 

How to Distinguish Between Duty-based Ethics and Results-oriented Ethics, a nice post concerning the basic theories of morality

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Philosophical, Socio-Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.