I’ve been surprised a few times in the past week as I have seen many libertarians claiming that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. Of course, they can use the word libertarian all they wish, but the fact is that they are not friends of private property rights.

You cannot be in favor of the mass killing of innocent people and then claim to be on the side of the private property ethic without being caught up in a contradiction.

The first rebuttal to that, typically, is that they weren’t innocent. Here are two problems with this rebuttal:

1. A collective is not an actor, and thus is not a moral actor; only an individual is a moral actor.
2. “They” didn’t do anything. Those who went to fight in the war did something, but not those who stayed home. Those that were killed by the a-bombs were mostly, if not nearly all, non-murderers and non-attempted-murders. It cannot be argued consistently that it was justifiable to bomb them.

The second rebuttal, sometimes the first rebuttal but is always a response either way, is that it would have required more deaths to invade Japan than what it did cost blowing up two cities. There are also two huge problems with this rebuttal:

1. Utilitarianism is fundamentally flawed. It aggregates “utility,” “happiness,” etc., i.e., it tries to aggregate something that is subjective and not objective. There is no non-arbitrary way that we could measure and compare utility. This breaks down utilitarianism completely.
2. Even if we assume we can compare utility, it’s impossible to prove that it would have required more deaths to stop Japan by invading rather than by a-bombing them. It’s impossible because the alternative didn’t happen.

If you are going to be a supporter of the private property ethic, then you cannot view the atomic bombings of Japan in a favorable light. It would simply be contradictory to do so.