What Do You Do When Every Choice Is Immoral?

Moral ambiguity and the responsibility of leaders

I visited Normandy several years ago – a trip I strongly recommend for anyone. I was choked up the entire time that I spent in the American Cemetery, located on the bluff above Omaha Beach, where the casualties among the landing force were highest. Later I went down to the beach. It was low tide; the invasion force had landed at low tide to maximize the amount of material the landing craft could deposit on the beach. I walked down to the waterline and turned around, giving me the same view that those soldiers had as they emerged from the landing craft. The Higgins boats they used were basically plywood boxes with an outboard motor – no protection at all. And when those soldiers emerged from their floating plywood boxes, they faced a heavily fortified hillside only a few hundred yards away.

I realized then the moral weight that Eisenhower carried as he and his staff planned and then ordered the invasion. Knowing what the soldiers would face, the Allies sought to land so many troops within a few hours that enough of them would survive to hold the beachhead. The decision carried the knowledge that thousands of these soldiers would die.

A recent exchange in the Wall Street Journal reminded me of what I felt when I stood on Omaha Beach. In early August, the Journal printed an essay by distinguished historian Andrew Roberts, titled “The Case for the Atom Bomb.” It appeared 80 years after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought about the surrender of Japan, ending the Second World War.

Some days later, a letter to the editor strongly objected to Roberts’ view, arguing that “the practical reasons for using the bomb ignore the ethical principle that a moral end doesn’t justify the use of immoral means.” The writer’s view is that dropping the atom bombs was immoral “principally because the means used were deliberately intended to cause the death and injury of tens of thousands of civilians.”

How could one not share the writer’s abhorrence of the act and its consequences? And I affirm the principle he states – that “a moral end doesn’t justify the use of immoral means.”

But I think there’s something missing from this perspective. The presumption is that there was a moral choice that those decisionmakers could have made.

I don’t seek to justify the morality of the decision to drop these bombs. But what if all the other choices were morally worse? Tens of thousands died; but Truman and the leaders around him were convinced that the alternative was hundreds of thousands, even millions, of deaths.^[i]

One could make a distinction between the moral implications of military versus civilian deaths. Since the destruction of cities centered on civilians, it presents a different test than that of ordering soldiers into battle.

It’s a difficult question, but one other dimension we need to consider is Truman’s responsibility. He was President of the United States, a nation provoked to war by an adversary that had launched a devastating surprise attack. His first responsibility was to the people whom he led, and to end a horrific war, if possible, without more loss of American lives. I would argue that more Japanese civilians also would have died if it came to an invasion of the Japanese islands, but considering how to minimize casualties for your enemy was not Truman’s responsibility.

And yet he carried the moral weight of the decision. If he is wrong, it’s a burden he must carry for life. From what I’ve read, Truman always believed that his decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right one, though confidants recorded that he hated the idea of what he had done, using an immensely destructive weapon to kill thousands of unarmed people.

Do you think that both are possible? That Truman could believe he made the right decision while abhorring its consequences? I think it possible; in fact, from what I’ve read, I think that Truman held exactly these two seemingly opposed views at the same time.

The American cemetery at Normandy

We have lived easy lives, morally speaking, since 1945. We have never, since then, faced something that threatened our existence, except for imaginative conceptions posited for a distant future. With nothing at stake but our own comfort and our own preferences, our politics have descended into a profound unseriousness. We can’t imagine it ever to be necessary to make decisions with the moral freight of dropping an atom bomb. And even though we live in an increasingly dangerous world, it has not changed our habits of thought. No crisis has spurred us to action. But though we have been on a remarkable vacation from history, we have not reached the end of history. Hard, serious, consequential choices lie ahead.

Sometimes a fallen world presents leaders with nothing but bad options, and yet the leaders still must choose. This is not a plea for moral indifference; rather, it demonstrates the true moral seriousness required when we make hard decisions with life-and-death consequences. We never have complete information; we never fully escape our own biases; and so we can never be sure that we are doing the right thing, even if we are ordering men and women to their deaths.

There can be times when it may be impossible to lead without incurring guilt at some level. Some Christians will conclude that faith requires us to stand away from responsibilities that carry such moral risk. And those who reach that conclusion should indeed step away; it is a far greater sin to take on a responsibility that you are unwilling to fulfill.

But I don’t think that all Christians are called to be hapless, passive bystanders, criticizing those who lead while unwilling ourselves to dirty our hands with the responsibility of leadership. Jesus made a distinction between being “in the world” and “of the world.” Though our true home is elsewhere, we are inextricably in the world. The command to love our neighbors carries an obligation to care for their wellbeing. How can we ask our neighbors to carry a responsibility for us that we are unwilling to carry for them?

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^[i] I recognize that some historians have questioned the validity of these assumptions. Downfall, Richard Frank’s outstanding volume on the last days of the war looks at this question in great depth, and concludes that Truman’s assessment was the right one. No argument about events 80 years in the past can be definitive, but I find the contra argument very weak.