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.

The need for a fine-grained deontology

It’s tempting to say that what justifies lethal self-defense is a wrongful lethal threat, perhaps with voluntariness and/or culpability added (see discussion and comments here).

But that’s not quite right. Suppose that a police officer, in addition to carrying her own gun, has her best friend’s gun with her, which she was taking in to a shop for minor cosmetic repairs. She promised her friend that she wouldn’t use his gun. Now, you threaten the officer, and she pulls her friend’s gun out, in blatant disregard of her promise, because she has always wanted to see what it feels like to threaten someone with this particular gun. The officer is now lethally threatening you, and doing so wrongfully, voluntarily and culpably, but that not justify lethal self-defense.

One might note here that the officer is not wronging you by breaking her promise to her best friend. So perhaps what justifies lethal self-defense is a lethal threat that wrongs you. But that can’t be the solution. If you are the best friend in question—no doubt now the former best friend—then it is you who is being wronged by the breaking of the promise. But that wrong is irrelevant to your lethal self-defense. Furthermore, we want an account of self-defense to justify to a general account of defense of innocent victims.

One might say that lethal self-defense is permitted only against a gravely wrongful threat, and this promise-breaking is not gravely wrongful. But we can tweak the case to make it be gravely wrongful. Maybe the police officer swore an oath before God and the community not to use this particular gun. That surely doesn’t justify your using lethal force to defend yourself against the officer’s threat.

Maybe what we want to say is that the kind of wrongful lethal threat that justifies lethal self-defense is one that wrongs by violating the right to life of the person threatened (rather than, say, being wrong by violating a promise). That sounds right to me. But what’s interesting about this is that it forces us to have a more fine-grained deontology. Not only do we need to talk about actions being wrong, but about actions being wrong against someone, and against someone in a particular way.

It’s interesting that considerations of self-defense require such a fine-grained deontology even if we do not think that in general every wrongful action wrongs someone.

Forcing and threatening

Suppose the state thought it had good reason to force me to undergo a medical procedure that I believed to be immoral. The state would have two kinds of options:

1. Threaten me with a variety of serious threats such as deprivation of employment and educational opportunities, fines or imprisonment if I refused to cooperate with the procedure.

2. Force me to undergo the procedure by physically holding me down and performing the procedure.

Intuitively, the threat option seems like the “nicer” option, at least if the threats fall short of imprisonment. And the force option clearly violates standard principles of consent in medical ethics.

But what has struck me was this interesting fact: depending on the details of the case, I might well prefer being forced to being threatened. For if I am threatened, there are two possibilities: either I resist the threat or I give in. If I resist, then I have to suffer the serious losses that were threatened. And if I give in, then I have to live with the knowledge that I have violated my conscience. But if I am forced, then my conscience is clear, I do not suffer any of the threatened losses, and if the procedure is one that is in fact medically beneficial, I get the benefits of the procedure. (And note that it is quite possible to believe a procedure to be immoral while knowing that it is medically beneficial. For instance, one might reasonably think that it is immoral to accept an organ transplant from a prisoner who was compelled by an evil state to yield the organ, even though one knows that the transplant would be beneficial.)

Of course, if asked, I couldn’t very well say: “Please force me.” For that would be consent to a procedure I believed to be immoral. But nonetheless I might prefer the force option. In such a case, it’s hard to say that the threat option is “nicer”. Indeed, it might impose much greater hardship than the force option.

So from the point of view of a state that thinks the procedure is intrinsically permissible and necessary for the public good, it seems that there is good reason to prefer the force option, in that it might impose much less hardship. But this seems paradoxical. It seems obvious that the threat option is better, especially for non-punitive threats that are “naturally” tied to the refusal (“We won’t employ anyone who medically could be vaccinated but refuses to be”), even though the force option seems the better one for both the person being forced and for the rest of society (since it’s more effective).

Perhaps the way out of the paradox is that it is so important for us as a society to maintain the requirement of consent for medical procedures that forcing people to undergo a medical procedure should be avoided except in the most extreme of cases (such as when the very existence of society is at stake), and hence even though the short-term consequences of forcing are better than those of threatening—including morally better for the person being forced who isn’t tempted to violate conscience—forcing should be avoided. But this isn’t a complete solution. For normally we think threats also vitiate consent. But perhaps they vitiate it less?

Alternate possibilities and forcing someone to choose something

Standard counterfactual-intervener Frankfurt stories require two ingredients: (i) a sign telling the intervener what the agent would choose were she not interfered with and (ii) a way for the intervener to make the agent choose what the intervener wants. There has been a lot of discussion in the literature on the first ingredient and not enough on the second.

For one might argue as follows:

1. (Premise) If x freely chooses A over B, then x could have chosen B over A instead.
2. (Premise) If it is possible to force someone to choose A over B, then (1) is false.
3. Therefore, it is not possible to force someone to choose A over B.

Here, (2) follows from the Frankfurt cases, assuming there is some solution to the sign problem (I think the best bet might be to insist that the sign does not need to be infallible to rule out an ability-entailing "could-have"—cf. this piece by Harrison). And (1) is a reasonable version of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP). It is worth noting that PAP is really very plausible. Testimony to its plausibility is that for several centuries even compatibilists tried very hard to preserve it.

Now, most people working on free will accept that it's possible to force someone to make a particular choice. But I think this may be mistaken.

As a warmup, observe that ordinary threats don't do the job if one understands the contrastive nature of choices—that a choice is a choice of one option over one or more others. Suppose I am deliberating between Pad Thai and Green Curry Chicken. I love both, and it's a hard (but insignificant) choice. Now, threatening my life can make me choose Pad Thai. But it doesn't make me choose Pad Thai over Green Curry. Rather, it makes me choose Pad Thai and life over Green Curry and death. So it doesn't force me to make one of the two choices open in the original choice situation—it replaces those two options with a new pair of choices that is much easier to choose between.

Now, one might think that brainwashing could force me choose Pad Thai over Green Curry Chicken. But I am not so sure. Brainwashing could make me be utterly disgusted at Green Curry Chicken and unable to consider eating it. If it did that, however, I wouldn't be choosing Pad Thai over Green Curry, because Green Curry wouldn't be an option for me. (When I choose to wear a shirt in the morning in the summer, I don't choose a shirt over a fur coat—the latter option does not enter into the deliberation.) A less extreme form of brainwashing could make me very likely to choose Pad Thai over Green Curry Chicken, by accentuating my liking for the former or creating an intense dislike for the latter. But I see no reason to think this would make it impossible for me to choose Green Curry Chicken, unless it made me not see any value in choosing Green Curry Chicken over Pad Thai. And if I saw no value at all in Green Curry Chicken over Pad Thai, I wouldn't be choosing between the two. It would not be choice, but a shoo-in. If I went for Pad Thai, it would no more be a case of my choosing Pad Thai over Green Curry Chicken than in this world I choose to eat Pad Thai over eating a chopstick. Similarly, God and the saints in heaven do not choose good over evil.

Maybe you're not convinced by what I've just said, but it's at least not absurd. And I think the folk do have some intuitions in favor of (3). That no one can make you choose something is prima facie a pretty plausible sentiment. We are willing to abandon it when we think about threats and brainwashing, but if those cases can be handled—and I think they probably can—then (3) remains ultima facie plausible. And (1)-(3) provides additional reason to believe (3).

I think (3) is fairly plausible if choices are necessarily exercises of a non-natural causality. But, interestingly, (3) could be true even if naturalism is true. Suppose, along the lines of Kane's view, that a choice of A over B is constituted by the collapse of a quantum state a|A>+b|B>, mixed between a state |A> favoring A and a state |B> favoring B, with both a and b non-zero. The state can collapse into the pure state |A> or into the pure state |B>, and which way it collapses determines which intention you form. Now, there is a difference between a mixed quantum state collapsing into a pure state, and a mixed quantum state being changed into or replaced with a pure state. A physical process can perhaps force a change of a mixed state into a particular pure state, but likely that change wouldn't count as a collapse, just as a non-gravitational process can make a particle be attracted to another, but it wouldn't count as gravity. As far as I know, it is quite reasonable to say that no physical process could force a particular mixed state to collapse into a particular pure state. Could a non-physical process force a mixed state to collapse in a particular way? I doubt it. It seems essential to the nature of the collapse of a|A>+b|B> that its probabilities be governed in the right way by the weights a and b, while if some non-physical process forced a transition from a mixed state to a particular pure state, the probabilities of the transition wouldn't seem to come from the weights a and b of the mixed state in the way they do in collapse, but from the nature of the forcing process.

The question whether God could force a quantum state to collapse in a particular way is a difficult one. But it's not obvious that both: (a) God's causing a transition from a mixed to a pure state would count as determining or forcing or the like (here a very insightful paper by W. Matthews Grant is relevant); and (b) the transition would still count as a collapse.

Even if free choices are not naturalistic or are naturalistic but are not collapses, nonetheless the collapse case gives us a picture, I think, of how something could be such that it couldn't be forced without destroying its nature. Someone can force me to transition from a state of being undecided between A and B to being decided for A, but not all such transitions are choices, and on the view I am defending, none of the forced ones can be choices.

If the above is right, then (1) can be strengthened by omitting "freely" in its antecedent. All choices have alternate possibilities. I once heard Nuel Belnap remark, after a talk on free will by a job candidate, something along the lines of: "I always thought the matter was simple. To make a choice, you have to have choices."

If (1) holds without "freely" in its antecedent, this leaves the interesting question whether all choices are free, or is it merely that all choices have alternate possibilities. I think the claim that all choices are free may be correct, but needs to be correctly understood. Some choices have severely constricted alternatives, and choices are contrastive in such a way that the alternatives need to be mentioned to fully describe what was chosen. The ordinary murderer can choose to shoot x over leaving x alone. The person brainwashed into murder may only be able to choose to shoot x over stabbing x. Both are in some sense freely choosing to shoot x, but what they are responsible for depends on the fuller story about what they are choosing over. (If shooting x is less cruel than stabbing x, then the brainwashed person may actually be praiseworthy for shooting x—for he is shooting x instead of stabbing x.) And I am inclined to say that what they are doing is different. I should also add that a fuller description of the choice would be that one chooses to do A for R over doing B for S, where R and S are bunches of reasons that one is impressed by.

Note: I am not claiming here that choices are the only thing one is responsible for. Though they may be the only cases in which one assumes responsibility.

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.