Week 5 Blog, Virtues of Politics

“Their very goodness in part is revealed through their discomfort, sorrow, and remorse. Their virtues then . . . are burdened.”

In the part of the passage where this quote was taken from, Tessman is speaking about how “ordinary (but good) politicians” must get their hands dirty sometimes to do what they feel is the virtuous thing to do. I chose this section in particular because it was specifically dealing with political powers, and I would like to analyze through a historical lens. History, especially American history, is riddled with this notion of having to do bad for the greater good. One of the most prominent is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During WWII, there was the belief that no matter what, the Japanese would not stop fighting until they were dead due to their loyalty to Japan. Because of this belief, in 1945, President Truman’s military advisors told him that if they were to continue fighting the Japanese, the war would last another year and it would cost the lives of another 100,000 U.S. soldiers. This turned out to be one of the main reasons Trueman decided to drop the A-bomb as well as napalm bombs on Japan. By August 10, 1945, around 273,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki had lost their lives (this doesn’t consider the countless others who died years later as a result of the bombs dropping), and four days later, Japan surrendered. Truman was then praised for how quickly he was able to end the war.

Now, I’m not here to say whether it was right to drop the bombs, but it raises the questions “How does one justify acts such as the dropping of the A-bomb?”, “To what extent can one get their hands dirty for the possibility of others or themselves having a ‘good life’?”, and finally “After performing acts in which someone has to dirty their hands, can they still lead a ‘good life’?”