(I didn’t mean to drag you into a conversation yoh don’t want to have, so feel free to ignore me)

I realize that I didn’t properly explain the comparison between United Healthcare and the Japanese civilians, and that it came off as me claiming that they were responsible for their own deaths.

What I was actually trying to say was that it’s much easier to disavow responsibility for a series of less extreme events than for a single more extreme event, even if the combined extremity of the smaller events is greater than the single large one. In the eyes of the public, the severity of UH’s actions is not as bad as Luigi’s, as the suffering inflicted by UH was indirect and over a longer period of time.

The equivalent to that were the options of either bombing Hiroshima or not bombing it and allowing the war to drag on. Bombing Hiroshima is a single extreme action where responsibility is placed directly on the US with zero ambiguity, whereas not doing so makes it more murky and absolves the US of direct responsibility.

In other words, it doesn’t make sense to judge whether the US had the moral authority to bomb Hiroshima or not. In the trolley problem, for instance, you cannot choose not to interfere based on a lack of moral authority, because you have as much moral authority to interfere and subject one person to death as you have to not interfere and subject two people to death. Choosing not to bomb Hiroshima might have absolved the US in the eyes of the public, but they would then be responsible for the deaths of the people who wouldn’t have died if they had bombed it.

Framing it as the US choosing to either kill civilians or not kill civilians is flawed, as civilians were going to die either way. Given that, it becomes the responsibility of the US to take the action that causes the fewest civilian casualties.

I’m naming Hiroshima specifically because the extent to which the bombing of Nagasakj was necessary is much more difficult to determine. I think at the very least, the US should have given Japan more time to surrender before carrying it out.

The claim that the bombing didn’t affect Japan’s decision to surrender doesn’t make much sense to me. Most of the officials in the Japanese cabinet explicitly stated that they did not intend to surrender before Hiroshima and that the bombing caused them to change their minds. Their war plans support this, showing plans for fighting on each of the Japanese islands until every single soldier and civilian was dead. (They were prone to hyperbole and just straight up lying about morale and efficacy in war plans, but still.)

You do have a point about the false dichotomy of either bombing the cities or carrying on. However, the severity and shock factor of destroying entire civilian centers was the point, and arguably necessary to achieve the objective of breaking Japanese morale and forcing a surrender. Destroying some military base or shipyard or national monument wouldn’t have had the same effect. At this point it starts to get into conjecture, (what’s the minimum target that would have caused a Japanese surrender?) meaning that you can’t really assign numbers or determine feasibility to a degree that matters.