You Tube Theology

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the atomic devastation of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, which helped bring about the end of the Second World War. In this episode, Daniel Strand interviews Marc LiVecche about his new book project defending the bombing. Offering a moral defense rooted in just war casuistry, they discuss such issues as sovereign responsibility, the nature of the Japanese regime, consequentialism, and much else. LiVecche defends the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, argues that the bombing met the requirements for proportionality and discrimination, an0d interrogates proposed alternatives to the bombing. Through it all, they maintain that while the atomic attack was a horror, it was, all things considered, morally right.

Marc LiVecche is the executive editor of Providence. From the summer of 2018 to fall of 2020, he was the McDonald Research Scholar at the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, & Public Life at Christ Church, Oxford University. For the 2020–21 academic year, he will be a research fellow at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the US Naval Academy.

Daniel Strand is a professor who teaches courses on the just war tradition, ethics and leadership, and contemporary political ethics. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University (2015–19) in the History Department and the Program in Political History and Leadership. Strand’s research interests include the political and moral theology of Augustine of Hippo and the Augustinian tradition, ethics and foreign policy, the just war tradition, bioethics, and moral theory. He is the author of the forthcoming Gods of the Nations (Cambridge University Press), a historical study of Augustine’s political theology in The City of God. He has published articles and book chapters on Augustine of Hippo, Hannah Arendt, and the ethics of euthanasia. He is a contributing editor at Providence. He received his BA from the University of Minnesota, MDiv from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and PhD in religion and ethics from the University of Chicago.

Transcript available at: https://providencemag.com/video/true-north-ep-1-moral-horror-defense-bombing-hiroshima/