A Case for 'Assured Destruction'

...It requires the practitioner to commit himself to carrying out mass murder should circumstances arise that he may not be able to prevent...

...In 1944, John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern proved that in situations where your return depends on the free choices of others, the best strategy to pursue may be a "mixed" one in which your action at each point is determined by flipping a coin...

...He recognizes that an actual second strike would add enormously to the terrible devastation, but the prospect of this is essential to deterrence...

...Three-quarters of Kavka's book is devoted to an analysis of nuclear deterrence...

...Kavka disputes noneof this...

...He shows that they neither reduce the chances of nuclear war nor limit the expected destruction should one occur...

...Though the acts prescribed by Assured Destruction are irrational and immoral, he submits, the system that prescribes them is not, since it is the best hope for preventing the outbreak of nuclear war...

...Assured Destruction, of course, is a system everyone loves to hate...

...To get the million, a rational agent must here somehow induce in himself asuspension of rationality...

...Their classic answers-that injustice breeds disharmony in the soul, and that a rejection of the social code is a rejection of one's own nature as a political animal-still have force today...

...Axelrod's computer tournaments were won by the strategy of "Tit-for-Tat" ("cooperate with cooperators, exploit exploiters, and never be the first to exploit"), but Tit-for-Tat was victorious only because the multitude of alternative strategies beat each other...

...He states theses clearly, defines his terms, searches for counterintuitive consequences, and surveys the opposition fully and fairly...

...Moreover, they assumed moral rules would be obeyed only if they could be understood as in some sense redounding to the individual's advantage...

...The remaining quarter of the book is devoted to the nuclear arms race and to Kavka's favored remedy, the process of bilateral arms control...

...Viewing God as a supreme end but not as a supreme agent, they weren't confronted with the notion...

...But on the empirical side, Kavka does not adequately answer those critics who maintain that, taking into account the USSR's current needs and the full panoply of U.S...

...Kavka illustrates this point with an example in which an eccentric billionaire offers a million dollars to anyone who, at midnight, can form an intention to drink a noxious liquid at 8 a.m., the money to be irrevocably turned over at 1 a.m...

...To clinch his case, he must still demonstrate that Assured Destruction is the strategy that maximizes expected benefits...

...Yet if the system is beyond reproach, the men who operate it cannot be...

...The maximization model has dominated the social sciences ever since Francis Hutcheson first spoke of " the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers " in the 1720s...

...to deliberately (attempt to) corrupt himself...

...He leans heavily on theoretical work by Michael Taylor concerning the development of cooperation, as well as on Robert Axelrod's quasi-empirical investigation, but I doubt that these studies will bear the burden Kavkaputs on them...

...Not even Solomon, Maimonides reports, could fathom the rule about the red heifer (Numbers 19:1-10...

...If there is anything left to save in the United States after a nuclear attack, Assured Destruction puts it at risk by provoking third strikes and by raising the chance that the nuclear winter threshold will be crossed, if it hasn't been already...

...The concept of rationality as control of the passions and subordination of one's life to a natural pattern lost face with the collapse of essentialism in the 17th century, and the new utilitarian ethical theories of the 18th century were based on the idea-arising, appropriately, in Scotland-that both the rational and the moral consisted in the maximization of a quantity...

...Had they heard about divine imperatives, the Greeks would have rejected them as absurd...

...This is no easy matter: We cannot even imagine all the relevant contingencies, let alone assign probabilities to them...

...Kavka suggests that given these uncertainties, the best strategy to adopt is the one minimizing the likelihood of disaster...

...maintaining enough missiles for minimal deterrence involves a much smaller chance of nuclear holocaust...

...Kavka develops decisive arguments against schemes for counterforce weapons or strategic defenses...

...A moral agent in analogous circumstances would have to conclude that "it would be morally right...

...This is not the place to discuss the logical details of Kavka's chapter on choice under uncertainty...

...In applied ethics, the most splendid illustration by far is Moral Paradoxes of Nuclear Deterrence, by the young University of California philosopher Gregory Kavka...

...Yet utilitarian theorists like David Hume, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick all sensed that there might be better ways to obtain, say, the most pleasure than by trying to obtain the most pleasure...

...Another drawback, perhaps less serious, is that the model assumes rational/ moral actions are those directly aimed at maximization...

...Kavka's book teems with powerful arguments and wonderfully imaginative examples...

...Lest my compressed summary of his reasoning give the impression that the author, who is fighting cancer, is a theoretician lacking emotional engagement with the horrors of nuclear war, I quote the Preface: "During the period in which this book was written, I suffered both long-term and short-term radiation effects...

...And Moral Paradoxes of Nuclear Deterrence, whether or not one agrees with its conclusions, is a provocative and original contribution to a critical debate...

...conventional forces, there is little cause to think nuclear disarmament would lead to Soviet global hegemony...

...They will scarcely be mollified by his remark that "I am encouraged by my assessment of what is likely by the fact that a number of knowledgeable people I have discussed it with...

...It offers no insight into the essentially bipolar superpower confrontation that exists today...

...Taylor's solutions to the dynamic cooperation problem only work when the future is discounted at a very low rate, and that is hardly the case in American politics with its four-year time horizon...

...It guarantees that every first use of strategic weapons will be followed by a second, so that every nuclear war must become a holocaust...

...Demonstrating that principles which grew up to preserve the social order should be observed as a matter of self-interest in each and every case was a formidable intellectual project, yet the mainstream Greek philosophers never shrank from it...

...This notion of rational irrationalism was elaborated in the 1950s by Thomas Schelling in papers on bargaining and diplomacy, and by Daniel Ellsberg in lectures on the theory and practice of blackmail...

...Althoughithasservedwell in many ways, it has never met the challenge of reconciling individual interests with social requirements, the main task of moral theory in the Hellenic agenda...

...In the subsequent history of moral philosophy, the link between morality and rationality has been threatened but never successfully severed...

...Recently the range of the subject has been further extended in a series of fascinating books by Jon Elster...

...In our own time, the maximization model has been revised to take account of indirect routes to the optimal result primarily as a response to the development of game theory...

...If you take moral principles to be a set of divine commands, and if you insist-as the Book of Job insists-that God's will is inscrutable, then you will not always grasp the reasons behind your moral code, nor will you have any assurance that following it will be in your best interest...

...Since coins don't think, the demonstrable superiority of mixed strategies to "pure" ones shows that sometimes rational agents can get the best outcome only by submitting to nonrational forces...

...By this criterion, he asserts, deterrence based on Assured Destruction is superior to unilateral disarmament: Relinquishing our nuclear arsenal would entail a substantial chance of Soviet world domination...

...My own experience of radiation-caused sickness has reinforced my prior belief in the moral necessity of humankind's avoiding nuclear war and attaining nuclear disarmament...

...Reviewed by Douglas ? Lackey Professor of philosophy, Graduate Center, City University of New York One of the things distinguishing the bits of our moral tradition originating in Athens from those having Jerusalem as their source is that the Greeks assumed a direct tie between morality and rationality, whereas the Jews did not...

...Of the many possible systems, the author prefers "minimum" deterrence, or using nuclear weapons only for second strikes...

...In theoretical ethics, an impressive example of game theory-inspired ideas at work is David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement...

...It was inevitable that the new strategic rationality would also germinate original work in ethics, but the harvest has been slow in coming...

...That is not because intending to do something wrong is itself wrong-this axiom of traditional moral philosophy is one Kavka explicitly rejects...

...Heeven presents ingenious arguments against proposals that seek to evade Assured Destruction's moral rough spots-like those of James Sterba, Anthony Kenny and McGeorge Bundy-by denying the need for a commitment to retaliate when attacked...

...Recovering from these, even to the limited (and perhaps temporary) extent I have, has been extremely difficult...

...Rationality, however, has its own history, and as the concept evolved (or devolved), moral theories of Hellenic parentage perforce followed suit...

...Rather, it is because "a rational and morally good agent cannot (as a matter of logic) have (or form) the intention to apply the sanction if the offense is committed...

...Suppose we agree with Kavka that the moral and rational paradoxes of deterrence dissolve under the new logic of success by indirection...

...Even those who believe that drinking the liquid is well worth a million dollars could not, as rational agents, actually intend to go through with it knowing the money would be safely in their pocket seven hours before they drink a drop...

...In spite of his own misfortune, Kavka has resolutely continued to address public issues...

...agree with this assessment...

...Some attention to the work of Hannes Admoneit and other students of Soviet crisis behavior is in order, even if this is extra-philosophical labor...

...Along with strategists Robert Art and Robert Jervis, Kavka is out to defend Assured Destruction, and he is certainly the first philosopher to do so in depth...