Nuclear deterrence, part II: False threats

In my previous post, I considered the argument against nuclear deterrence that says it’s wrong to gain a disposition to do something wrong, and a disposition to engage in nuclear retaliation is a disposition to dosmething wrong. I concluded that the argument is weaker than it seems.

Here I want to think about another argument againt nuclear deterrence under somewhat different assumptions. In the previous post, the assumption was that the leader is disposed to retaliate, but expects not to have to (because the deterrence is expected to work). But what about a case where the leader is not disposed to retaliate, but credibly threatens retaliation, while planning not to carry through the threat should the enemy attack?

It would be wrong, I take it, for the leader to promise to retaliate in such a case—that would be making a false promise. But threatening is not promising. Suppose that a clearly unarmed thief has grabbed your phone is about to run. (Their bathing suit makes it clear they are unarmed.) You pick up a realistic fake pistol, point it at the them, and yell: “Drop the phone!” This does not seem clearly morally wrong. And it doesn’t seem to necessarily become morally wrong (absent positive law against it) when the pistol is real as long as you have no intention or risk of firing (it is, of course, morally wrong to use lethal force merely to recover your property—though it apparently can be legal in Texas). The threat is a deception but not a lie. For, first, note, that you’re not even trying to get the thief to believe you will shoot them—just to scare them (fear requires a lot less than belief). Second, if the thief keeps on running and you don’t fire, the thief would not be right to feel betrayed by your words.

So, perhaps, it is permissible to threaten to do something that you don’t intend to do.

Still, there is a problem. For it seems that in threatening to something wrong, you are intentionally gaining a bad reputation, by making it appear like you are a wicked person who would shoot an unarmed thief or a wicked leader who would retaliate with an all-out nuclear strike. And maybe you have a duty not to intentionally gain a bad reputation.

Maybe you do have such a duty. But it is not clear to me that the leader who threatens nuclear retaliation or the person who pulls the fake or real pistol on the unarmed thief is intentionally gaining a bad reputation. For the action to work, it just has to create sufficient fear that one will carry out the threat, and that fear does not require one to think that the threatener would carry out the threat—a moderate epistemic probability might suffice.

Nuclear deterrence, part I: Dispositions to do something wrong

I take it for granted that all-out nuclear retaliation is morally wrong. Is it wrong (for a leader, say) to gain a disposition to engage in all-out nuclear retaliation conditionally on the enemy performing a first strike if it is morally certain that having that disposition will lead the enemy not to perform a first strike, and hence the disposition will not be actualized?

I used to think the answer was “Yes”, because we shouldn’t come to be disposed to do something wrong in some circumstance.

But I now think it’s a bit more complicated. Suppose you are stuck in a maze full of lethal dangers, with all sorts of things that require split-second decisions. You have headphones that connect you to someone you are morally certain is a benevolent expert. If you blindly follow the expert’s directions—“Now, quickly, fire your gun to the left, and then grab the rope and swing over the precipice”—you will survive. But if you think about the directions, chances are you won’t move fast enough. You can instill in yourself a disposition to blindly do whatever the expert says, and then escape. And this seems the right thing to do, even a duty if you owe it to your family to escape.

Notice, however, that such a disposition is a disposition to do something wrong in some circumstance. Once you are in blind-following mode, if the expert says “Shoot the innocent person to the right”, you will do so. But you are morally certain the expert is benevolent and hence won’t tell you anything like that. Thus it can be morally permissible to gain a disposition which disposes you to do things that are wrong under circumstances that you are morally certain will not come up.

Perhaps, though, there seems to be a difference between this and my nuclear deterrence case. In the nuclear deterrence case, the leader specifically acquires a disposition to do something that is wrong, namely to all-out retaliate, and this disposition is always wrong to actualize. In the maze case, you gain a general disposition to obey the expert, and normally that disposition is not wrong to actualize.

But this overstates what is true of the nuclear deterrence case. There are some conditions under which all-out retaliation is permissible, such as when 99.9% of one’s nuclear arsenal has been destroyed and the remainder is only aimed at legitimate military targets, or maybe when all the enemy civilians are in highly effective nuclear shelters and retaliation is the only way to prevent a follow-up strike from the enemy. Moreover, it may understate what is permissible in the expert case. You may need to instill in yourself the specific willingness to do what at the moment seems wrong, because sometimes the expert may tell you things that will seem wrong—e.g., to swing your sword at what looks like a small child (but in fact is a killer robot). I am not completely sure it is permissible to have an attitude of trust in the expert that goes that far, but I could be convinced of it.

I was assuming, contrary to fact in typical cases, that there is moral certainty that the nuclear deterrence will be effective and there will be no enemy first strike. Absent that assumption, the question is rather less clear. Suppose there is a 10% chance the expert is not so benevolent. Is it permissible to instill a disposition to blindly follow their orders? I am not sure.

Threats

Here is something I've sometimes wondered about. If I have a gun, and someone is attempting to steal something (either belonging to me or another), am I permitted to point the gun at her and command her, at gunpoint, to refrain from stealing. To fill out this case, suppose that I know the thief is not a physical danger to any person: I know the thief is unarmed and gentle. I am not interested in the legal question—that differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and depends on what official role one plays. But can I morally use a threat of lethal force to prevent theft, assuming the law permits me to?

I assume that generally it is wrong to use lethal force to prevent mere theft (there are exceptions, such as cases where what is being stolen is something necessary to someone's survival). Now, pulling out the gun is offering a threat of force. Is it permissible to offer a threat that it would be immoral to carry out?

If one thinks deception is always wrong, the threatener is in the wrong. If she intends to carry out the threat, she is in the wrong since it is a threat that it is wrong to carry out. If she does not intend to carry out the threat, the threat is deceitful. However, while lying is always wrong, deceit is not. (There is nothing wrong with hanging a hat on a stick behind a bush to draw enemy fire.)

If deception is not always wrong, then one might think that with good reason it is permissible to make the threat. However, there is another consideration. It is wrong to blacken a person's reputation. But by making a threat it would be immoral to carry out, one is blackening a person's reputation—one is blackening one's own reputation, by making the other person think that one is the kind of immoral person that would use lethal force to protect property.

Still, the blackening of reputation is, perhaps, not intentional. (One may not be intending that the other person believe that one would carry out the threat, but only that the other person take herself to have reason to believe it.) So by Double Effect, the threat could, perhaps, be permitted in some cases.

If so, then it could in principle be permissible for a country to point nuclear weapons at enemy civilian centers as a deterrent, as long as the country could be sure that those weapons would not in fact be used against civilians. On the other hand, how could one be sure of that? Actually, even in the theft case, a similar danger exists: by making the threat, one creates a temptation in oneself to carry it out, and one should avoid temptation to do something immoral.