Let's Revisit Edward Feser

We've entered the anniversary period for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), but there's been little of the usual handwringing this year, at least in what I've seen. Edward Feser, the neo-Thomist philosopher who sometimes posts on how, at least in his view, just war doctrine makes these attacks intrinsically evil, hasn't posted directly on the subject this year. I've done more thinking about this in recent months, and I think this might neveretheless be a good time to revisit the questions he raises.

What may be the most succinct outline of his views, at least as far as I understand them, is at a post on his blog, Happy Consequentialism Day! on August 9, 2010. Although he provides a link to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy's definition of consequentialism, he himself has little to say about it other than it

is, as David Oderberg has put it, “downright false and dangerous, an evil doctrine that should be avoided by all right-thinking people.” And the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, accordingly, as evil as consequentialism is.

Well, we've got that out of the way, huh? But with nothing else to do one recent afternoon, I went looking for a better definition, and I found at Wikipedia on one hand,

Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act (or in some views, the rule under which it falls) will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative. Different consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods, with chief candidates including pleasure, the absence of pain, the satisfaction of one's preferences, and broader notions of the "general good".

But on the other, it goes on to say,

The term consequentialism was coined by G. E. M. Anscombe in her essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" in 1958. However, the meaning of the word has changed over the time since Anscombe used it: in the sense she coined it, she had explicitly placed J. S. Mill in the nonconsequentialist and W. D. Ross in the consequentialist camp, whereas, in the contemporary sense of the word, they would be classified the other way round. This is due to changes in the meaning of the word, not due to changes in perceptions of W.D. Ross's and J.S. Mill's views.

So the whole idea of "consequentialism" dates only from 1958, and any effort to place earlier philosophers like Mill in any sort of "consequantialist" school is going to be dodgy. Certainly they never identified themselves as such, or indeed indicated that they in some way opposed it -- they never had any idea it existed. This is only the start of the problem. At the Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy link Feser supplies above,

There is disagreement about how consequentialism can best be formulated as a precise theory, and so there are various versions of consequentialism.

. . . Consequentialism does not itself say what kinds of consequences are good. Hence people can agree on consequentialism while disagreeing about what kind of outcome is good or bad.

So people can agree on consequentialism while disagreeing on what it is, except that as David Oderberg has helpfully observed, it's downright false and dangerous, an evil doctrine. I think this can be parsed as, "if you disagree with Edward Feser on the intrinsic evil of the atomic bombings, you're a consequentialist, case closed." But nobody can really define a consequentialist outside of that. If you say X, you agree with J S Mill, and you're a consequentialist, but nobody knows if Mill is a consequentialist or not.

But there are other problems. Feser mentions "natural law theory" four times in his post, but he never enumerates what it is. On the other hand, the Catechism of the Catholic Church does codify it in paragraph 2309:

The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the “just war” doctrine.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

Let's look at the language this statement uses. It prefaces the conditions with a reference to "the gravity of such a decision", viz, to go to war. This is an implicit recognition that, as General Sherman put it, "war is hell". It isn't just soldiers who suffer in any war; their families lose their fathers, brothers, husbands, and breadwinners. Civilian populations in the path of armies have suffered catastrophic depredations in all wars throughout history.

This is implicit before the Catechism even lists conditions. It assumes that "those who have responsibility for the common good" recognize that this is going to happen if they go to war at all. But the third and fourth conditions introduce a need to balance the factors: there must be serious prospects of success, and especially the evil to be eliminated must be greater than the evils that will inevitably result from going to war at all.

The catechism specifially calls for the "evaluation of these conditions". Isn't this a form of consequentialism? Feser says,

[I]t is never, never permissible to do what is intrinsically evil that good may come – not even if you’d feel much happier if you did it, not even if you’ve got some deeply ingrained tendency to want to do it, not even if it will shorten a war and save thousands of lives. Never.

It may be intrinsically evil deliberately to kill innocent civilians. The problem is "deliberate". For millennia, "those who have responsibility for the common good" must have recognized what happens to civilians in the path of an advancing army, even when there were no aircraft to drop bombs on cities. The scriptural accounts of sieges make it absolutely plain that when they end, women, children, and animals are slaughtered. Natural law theory in CCC 2309 is simply saying that civil and military authorities must factor this into their deliberations, and this is within their prudential judgment.

So, what is prudential judgment? The Catholic Answers site quotes the Catechism:

Prudence is the virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it. . . . With the help of this virtue we apply moral principles to particular cases without error and overcome doubts about the good to achieve and the evil to avoid (1806).

The site goes on,

Because prudence is concerned with choosing the good, a prudential judgment does not reflect a merely subjective preference. So we can be held morally accountable for the judgments we make in these matters.

But unlike principles of doctrine and morality, the Church has not definitively taught which specific answers the faithful should embrace when it comes to implementing moral principles—like justice or care for the poor—in the public sphere.

So for starters, the Catechism has presumably left the choice to use nuclear weapons to the US civil and military authorities, which is to say Truman, Marshall, King, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Oppenheimer, and others. In the words of CCC 2309, they had "responsibility for the common good". Wait a momwnt. Isn't this impllicitly saying that Truman, Marshall, King, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Oppenheimer, and others were tasked with providing a better outcome than the alternatives? The alternatives they saw in mid-1945 would have been:

• The likelihood that the Japanese would continue genocidal policies in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia for as long as the war would continue
• The recognition by the military authorities that continuation of the war past 1945, with expected high casualties in an invasion of Japan, would seriously reduce public support
• The likelihood that the Japanese would use suicide tactics and enlist elderly men and civilian women and children to sacrifice themselves to resist an invasion
• The Allied war aim was "unconditional surrender", which implied there would be no negotiations that might allow Japan to retain territories in China and Southeast Asia that it had invaded.

Aren't these the specific factors that the US civil and military authorites were tasked with balancing, whether the use of nuclear weapons would "produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated"? These were non-trivial decisions, made with the full underatanding of wartime exigencies. But let's go back to the Wikipedia definition of consequentialism:

Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act (or in some views, the rule under which it falls) will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative.

Isn't this implicit in CCC 2309, which tasks the civil and military authorities with making the prudential judgment of whether the evils of, say, continuing the war after 1945 outweigh the evils of one or more nuclear attacks? I would go as far as saying that CCC 2309 is consequentialist!

I started out some years ago admiring Feser's arguments generally, but especially on the morality of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, I've begun to see a sloppiness and lack of rigor that have troubled me about US academics since my days in graduate school. He refers to "natural law" or "just war theory", but he never ties himself to a specific definition of either. Nor does he define "consequentialism", a neologism that seems to resist any specific definition in any case. In fact, I would call it a hypostatization, an attempt to give a concrete existence to an abstraction. I've been there before in graduate-level classrooms, and I'm afraid I've come to think Feser is nothing special.

This also reminds me a little of Robert E Lee, who certainly in his lifetime heard many critiques of his generalship at Gettysburg. When one individual came up to him and said, "General, here's what you should have done," Lee answered, "Why didn't you tell me that before the battle?"