Mr Truman’s Degree

‘Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder. […] I intend my formulation to be taken strictly; each term in it is necessary. For killing the innocent, even if you know as a matter of statistical certainty that the things you do involve it, is not necessarily murder. I mean that if you attack a lot of military targets, such as munitions factories and naval dockyards, as carefully as you can, you will be certain to kill a number of innocent people; but that is not murder. On the other hand, unscrupulousness in considering the possibilities turns it into murder. […] In the bombing of [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] it was certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end. And a very large number of them, all at once, without warning, without the interstices of escape or the chance to take shelter […]’

— G.E.M. Anscombe, Mr. Truman’s Degree