UN PHILOSOPHE AMÉRICAIN CRITIQUE LES BOMBARDEMENTS ATOMIQUES – JOHN RAWLS ET 50 ANNÉES APRÈS HIROSHIMA
AN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER CRITICIZES THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS – JOHN RAWLS AND 50 YEARS AFTER HIROSHIMA

Summary/Abstract: John Rawls, one of the celebrated philosophers of the 20th century, wrote an essay‚ 50 years after Hiroshima‛ in 1995, in which he argued that the two atom-bombings and to my surprise, he was extending his argument to the US’s indifferent bombings are moral wrongs and American political leaders of the time were responsible for those wrongs. I am very much impressed by and feel respect to Rawls’ spirit, but I cannot totally agree with his arguments. In this article of mine, I will give an overview of Rawls’ arguments (Section 1) and discuss them, identifying some questionable points in it (Section 2). Then I will introduce an argument that would make up for the weakness in Rawls’, which are found in Thomas Nagel’s article‚ War and Massacre‛ (Section 3). And finally I will show that we can still learn something important from Rawls’ essay in spite of the weakness I point out (Section 4).

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