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 shou...