Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic
- 2 A problem about permission
- 3 Reply to McMichael
- 4 Why ain'cha rich?
- 5 Desire as belief
- 6 Desire as belief II
- 7 Dispositional theories of value
- 8 The trap's dilemma
- 9 Evil for freedom's sake?
- 10 Do we believe in penal substitution?
- 11 Convention: Reply to Jamieson
- 12 Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne
- 13 Illusory innocence?
- 14 Mill and Milquetoast
- 15 Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right?
- 16 Devil's bargains and the real world
- 17 Buy like a MADman, use like a NUT
- 18 The punishment that leaves something to chance
- 19 Scriven on human unpredictability (with Jane S. Richardson)
- Index
16 - Devil's bargains and the real world
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic
- 2 A problem about permission
- 3 Reply to McMichael
- 4 Why ain'cha rich?
- 5 Desire as belief
- 6 Desire as belief II
- 7 Dispositional theories of value
- 8 The trap's dilemma
- 9 Evil for freedom's sake?
- 10 Do we believe in penal substitution?
- 11 Convention: Reply to Jamieson
- 12 Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne
- 13 Illusory innocence?
- 14 Mill and Milquetoast
- 15 Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right?
- 16 Devil's bargains and the real world
- 17 Buy like a MADman, use like a NUT
- 18 The punishment that leaves something to chance
- 19 Scriven on human unpredictability (with Jane S. Richardson)
- Index
Summary
The paradox of deterrence, in a nutshell, is as follows. Your best way to dissuade someone from doing harm may be to threaten retaliation if he does. And idle threats may not suffice. To succeed in deterring, you may have to form a genuine, effective conditional intention. You may have to do something that would indeed leave you disposed to retaliate if, despite your efforts, he does that thing which you sought to deter. It seems that forming the intention to retaliate would be the right thing to do if, all things considered, that was the best way to prevent the harm.
Yet it may also be, foreseeably, that should the occasion arise, it would serve no good purpose to retaliate. It would just inflict further, useless harm. Then it seems that retaliating would be the wrong thing to do. Thus it seems, incredibly, that it may be right to form the conditional intention, wrong to fulfill it. That is the paradox.
What to say? We might conclude, as Kenny and others have, that after all it is wrong to form the intention. We might conclude, as Gauthier does, that after all it is right to fulfill the intention. Either conclusion seems to fly in the face of powerful consequentialist arguments – and the stakes may be as high as you please. Or we might conclude, as Kavka has and as I do, that the truth is indeed remarkable: in such a case it is in truth right to form an intention that it would be wrong to fulfill.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy , pp. 201 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999