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Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University of Wellington. Vol. 24, No. 5. 1961

Ethics of Nuclear Warfare

Ethics of Nuclear Warfare

The ethical objection to nuclear weapons assumes either that nuclear weapons are evil in themselves or that, although not evil in themselves, their effects are such that they have no possible legitimate use.

Firstly, no Material Thing is Evil in Itself. One cannot impute morality to an earthquake or a volcano, or for that matter a thumbscrew. Moral goodness depends on individual motive, and being subjective, is objectively indeterminable, while moral rightness is determined by objective principles, but both refer only to acts and not to material things.

Secondly, for the Effects of Nuclear Weapons to Render their use Immoral there Must be a Qualitative Difference Between these Effects and those of "Conventional" Weapons While there is None. Although the morality of the mass bombing raids on some targets in the last war is questionable, it is a fact that more people died and were maimed in several of these raids, e.g. those on Leipzig, Cologne and Tokyo, than in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and morality is certainly not determined by the number of aircraft used, be it one or a thousand.

What about the children born deformed as a result of irradiation, and those living perhaps far away, who are injured? Their misfortune is tragic, but does not vitally affect the issue. The case of these "neutrals"—victims remote in time falls into the province of the "principle of the double effect." This principle of morality provides that where an action gives rise to both good and evil effects, without the good effects arising from the evil effects, the action is morally justified if the good results outweigh the evil. Rarely has a military operation not entailed injury to innocent civilians, but in this respect nuclear weapons are no different from their "conventional" predecessors.