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Grant comments on Rationality Quotes September 2013 - Less Wrong
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These (nebulous) assertions seem unlikely on many levels. Psychopaths have few morals but continue to exist. I have no idea what "inner balance" even is.
He may be asserting that morals are necessary for the existence of humanity as a whole, in which case I'd point to many animals with few morals who continue to exist just fine.
I know of no animals other than humans who have nuclear weapons and the capacity to completely wipe themselves out on a whim.
True, but its not clear morals have saved us from this. Many of our morals emphasize loyalty to our own groups (e.g. the USA) over our out groups (e.g. the USSR), with less than ideal results. I think if I replaced "morality" with "benevolence" I'd find the quote more correct. I likely read it too literally.
Though the rest of it still doesn't make any sense to me.
The existence of nuclear weapons should be taken as evidence that humans are not very moral. (And yet survive so far.)
Einstein is not saying that humans are necessarily moral, but rather that they ought to be moral.
Furthermore, it is arguable that nuclear weapons are not necessarily immoral in and of themselves. Like any tool or weapon, they can be used for moral and immoral ends. For instance, nuclear weapons may well be one of the most effective means of destroying Earth-directed masses such as Existential Risk threatening asteroids. They may also be extremely effective for deterring conventional warfare between major powers.
The only previous actual use of nuclear weapons against human targets was for the ends of ending a world war, and it did so rather successfully. That we have chosen not to use nuclear weapons irresponsibly may well suggest that those with the power to wield nuclear weapons have in fact been more morally responsible than we give them credit.
Perhaps. Alternatively, when faced with a similarly-armed opponent, even our habitually bloody rulers can be detered by the prospect of being personally burned to death with nuclear fire.
I've always wondered why, on discovering nuclear weapons, the leaders of America didn't continually pour a huge budget into it - stockpile a sufficient number of them and then destroy all their potential peers.
I can't think of any explanation bar the morality in their culture. They could certainly have secured sufficient material for the task.
More like our supposedly bloody soldiers, at least in some of the more alarming close calls.
I was about to say your point stands, but actually, wouldn't at least some of them have been in bunkers? I'll have to check that, now...
Consider what "the cold war" might have been like if we hadn't of had nuclear weapons. It probably would have been less cold. Come to think of it, cold wars are the best kind of wars. We could use more of them.
Yes nukes have done terrible things, could have done far worse, and still might. However since their invention conventional weapons have still killed far, far more people. We've seen plenty of chances for countries to use nukes where they've not, so I think its safe to say the existence of nukes isn't on average more dangerous than the existence of other weapons. The danger in them seems to come from the existential risk which is not present when using conventional weapons.
Indeed, I'm pretty sure that if not for nuclear weapons, some right-thinking Russian would have declared war over the phrase "hadn't of had". And very rightly so. The slaughter inflicted by mere armies of millions, with a few tens of thousands of tanks, would have been a small price to pay to rid the world of abominations like that one.
Consider what the last big "hot war" would have been like if the atom bomb had been developed even a couple of years earlier, or by another side.
The war would have been over faster, with possibly lower total number of casualties?
The war might have been over faster, but I think with a much higher number of casualties.
That's not obvious to me. Consider empirical data: the casualties from conventional bombing raids. And more empirical data: the US did not drop a nuke on Tokyo. Neither did it drop a nuke on Kyoto or Osaka. The use of atomic bombs was not designed for maximum destruction/casualties.
The actual use of the atom bomb against Japan was against an already defeated enemy. The US had nothing to fear from Japan at that point, and so they didn't need to strike with maximum power.
On the other hand, imagine a scenario where use of the Bomb isn't guaranteed to end the war at one stroke, and you have to worry about an enemy plausibly building their own Bomb before being defeated. What would Stalin, or Hitler, or Churchill, do with an atom bomb in 1942? The same thing they tried to do with ordinary bombs, scaled up: build up an arsenal of at least a few dozen (time permitting), then try to drop one simultaneously on every major enemy city within a few days of one another.
WW2 casualties were bad enough, but they never approached the range of "kill 50% of the population in each of the 50 biggest enemy cities, in a week's bombing campaign, conditional only on getting a single bomber with a single bomb to the target".
Given that neither Hitler nor Churchill choose to use the chemical weapons that they had on the enemy I don't see the argument for why they would have used atom bombs the same way as conventional bombs.
Huh? Can you unpack this for me, I don't see how it can make sense.
Start from "The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done", I guess.
Doesn't help me much. The purpose of weapons -- all weapons -- is to kill. What exactly is the moral difference between a nuclear bomb and a conventional bomb?
Not true. The purpose of some weapons is to incapacitate or subdue. For example, stun guns, tear gas, truncheons, flashbangs, etc.
More exactly, the purpose of a weapon is to use pain to change behavior--which matches a general definition of "punishment." Sometimes the mere threat of pain suffices to change behavior. In cases of mutual deterrence (or less drastic, like everyday border patrols) that's the point: to make you behave differently from what you would otherwise, by appealing merely to your expectation of pain.
No, I don't think so. But to avoid the distraction of trying to define "weapons", let me assert that we are talking about military weapons -- instruments devised and used with the express purpose of killing other humans. The issue is whether nuclear weapons have any special moral status, so we're not really concerned with tear gas and tasers.
Why are nuclear weapons morally different from conventional bombs or machine guns or cannons?
Strategic nuclear weapons - the original and most widespread nuclear weapons - cannot be used with restraint. They have huge a blast radius and they kill everyone in it indiscriminately.
The one time they were used demonstrated this well. They are the most effective and efficient way, not merely to defeat an enemy army (which has bunkers, widely dispersed units, and retaliation capabilities), but to kill the entire civilian population of an enemy city.
To kill all the inhabitants of an enemy city, usually by one or another type of bombardment, was a goal pursued by all sides in both world wars. Nuclear weapons made it much easier, cheaper, and harder to defend against.
Tactical nuclear weapons are probably different; they haven't seen (much? any?) use in real wars to be certain.
What do you mean by "restraint"?
For example, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki killed around 70,000 people. The fire-bombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 (a single bombing raid) killed about 100,000 people.
Was the bombing of Nagasaki morally worse?
They can. One of the problems that America had, going into the 80s, was that its ICBM force was becoming vulnerable to a potential surprise attack by the CCCP. This concerned them because only the ICBM force, at the time, had the sort of accuracy necessary for taking out hardened targets in a limited strike - like their opponent's strategic forces. And they were understandably reluctant to rely on systems that could only be used for city busting - i.e. the submarine force.
If you're interested in this, I suggest the - contemporary with that problem - documentary First Strike.
What I think places the atom bomb on its own category is that its potential for destruction is completely out of proportion with whatever tactical reason you may have for using it. Here we're dealing with destruction on a civilization level. This is the first time in human history when the end of the world may come from our own hands. Nothing in our evolutionary past could have equipped us to deal with such a magnitude of danger. In the Middle Ages, the Pope was shocked at the implications of archery--you could kill from a distance, almost as effectively as with a sword, but without exposing yourself too much. He thought it was a dishonorable way of killing. By the time cannons were invented, everyone was more or less used to seeing archers in battle, but this time it was the capacity for devastation brought by cannons that was beyond anything previously experienced. Ditto for every increasing level of destructive power: machine guns, bomber airplanes, all the way up to the atom bomb. But the atom bomb is a gamechanger. No amount of animosity or vengefulness or spite can possibly justify vaporizing millions of human lives in an instant. Even if your target were a military citadel, the destruction will inevitably reach countless innocents that the post-WW2 international war protocols were designed to protect. Throwing the atom bomb is the Muggle equivalent of Avada Kedavra--there is no excuse that you can claim in your defense.
Er, archery's been around since at least the Mesolithic and has been used to kill people for almost as long, if skeletal evidence is anything to go by. That's actually older than the sword, which originated as a Bronze Age weapon.
Canon 29 of the Second Lateran Council under Pope Innocent II is often cited as banning the use of projectile weapons against Christians, but as the notes through the link imply it's not clear that a military prohibition was intended in context. In any case, deadly novelty is unlikely as a motivation; crossbows had been known in Europe since Classical Greece, bows and slings far longer. And their military use, of course, continued even after the council.
Why? Your arguments boil down to "it's very destructive". Note that during WW2 at least two air raids using conventional bombs killed more people than atomic weapons (Tokyo and Dresden).
Why not? It's just like saying there's no excuse for killing. That's not correct, there are lots of justifications for killing. Again, I don't see what makes nukes special.