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Deterrence and Moral Theory*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
Introduction
Issues in public policy have been challenging and remaking moral theory for two centuries. Such issues force us to question fundamental principles of ethics while they cast doubt on our ability to generalize from traditional intuitions. No issue poses more remarkable difficulties for moral theory than nuclear weapons policy. Because the consequences of their deployment and therefore possible use could be grievous beyond those of any previously conceivable human action, these weapons frame the conflict between outcome-based, especially utilitarian, and action-based deontological moral theories more acutely than perhaps any other we have faced. Just because nuclear weapons may bring about the most grievous outcome imaginable, they elevate concern with outcomes over concern with actions. More generally, they wreak havoc with the focus on the morality of individual choices and actions, set limits to the notion of intention and the doctrine of double effect, call into question the so-called just-war theory, and overwhelm the intuitionist basis of much of ethical reasoning.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Authors 1986
Footnotes
*
I wish to thank David Copp, Thomas Donaldson, J.L.A. Garcia, Richard Miller, Christopher W. Morris, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Susan Moller Okin, Charles Silver, Steven Walt, students and faculty at the weekly lunch of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in November 1984, and participants in the seminar on Practical Reason at the University of Chicago and in the 1984 Amintaphil conference at Notre Dame University for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
References
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3 Unfortunately, our vocabulary here is not as perspicuous as we might wish. I am not happy with the distinctions as I have drawn them. I wish to highlight the difference between judgments of actions as kinds tout court and judgments of outcomes. In the latter, what is of interest in motivating behavior is also actions, but the character of the action that matters to us is the effects it has, not its type as determined by some other criterion. In The Rejection of Consequentialism: A Philosophical Investigation of the Considerations Underlying Rival Moral Conceptions (Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1982), Samuel Scheffler speaks of agent-centered versus consequentialist moral theories.
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