Edward Feser at X:
Unbelievably reckless and immoral. As the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe warned, the demand for unconditional surrender is a recipe for increasing rather than decreasing the tenacity of an enemy’s resistance, which will in turn tempt us to deploy ever more barbaric methods of warfare yielding ever higher numbers of civilian casualties. This was what led to the abominations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People say “If we hadn’t done that, the invasion of Japan would have been a bloodbath.” But that presupposes that an invasion aimed at securing unconditional surrender was necessary and justifiable in the first place, which it was not. That an enemy nation has done wrong does not entail a right to demand that it put itself totally under our control . . . .
Feser, drawing upon Anscombe, is making an important point. If the adversary in an armed conflict acquiesces in the demand for unconditional surrender, the adversary not only surrenders but does so in such a way as to permit the enemy to do whatever it wants to the subjugated entity, including slaughtering the latter’s entire population. This is a purely conceptual point that merely unpacks the meaning of ‘unconditional surrender.’ Call it P1.
But the leaders of no entity on the losing side of an armed conflict, least of all the Islamist entity, will agree to that, assuming that they are sane and not suicidal. Call this point P2. And so the likely, but not inevitable, effect of the demand for unconditional surrender will be to increase the tenacity of the losing entity’s resistance in almost every conceivable case. Call this proposition P3. So far, so good. Feser is on solid ground, and I agree.
But there is no necessity that the party making the demand for unconditional surrender will go on to commit atrocities to enforce compliance with the demand for unconditional surrender. In fact, the U.S. demand for U.S. — pun intended — might well be a blustery move, a feint, on Trump’s part as one might expect from such a macher who is also notoriously sloppy in his use of words. The man is a crafty transactional pragmatist who scorns the typical political and diplomatic protocols and who likes outsmarting and out-psyching his enemies.
So why is the demand for unconditional surrender immoral? How does one validly move from the conjunction of P1 and P2 and P3 to the conclusion that the demand for unconditional surrender is immoral, as Feser claims it is?
Am I missing something? (I wouldn’t put it past myself.)