In 1956, an unconventional Irish-born philosopher staged a one-woman protest against the then US president, opposing plans by her university to award the man – whom she believed to be a mass murderer – an honorary degree.

The philosopher was Elizabeth Anscombe, the president Harry Truman, and the charge against him: the intentional killing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

Anscombe’s stance at the University of Oxford 70 years ago challenged a general consensus among western political leaders that using nuclear weapons to end the second World War was justified. She set out her thinking in a pamphlet still referenced today in moral philosophy: Mr Truman’s Degree.

“Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder,” she wrote.

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Anscombe wasn’t a pacifist. Killing innocent civilians “is not necessarily murder”, she said, “even if you know as a matter of statistic certainty” that such deaths will take place as a downstream effect of military force. What qualifies as murder is the intent to kill innocent people.

While Truman might argue the nuclear attack hastened the end of war and spared........

© The Irish Times