Philosophers Discover the Bomb

In recent years, philosophy has been doing its best to burst out of the ivory towers into the world at large. Applied philosophers now advise hospitals on questions of medical ethics, and business corporations on the propriety of investments; professional journals and college philosophy texts have taken up suicide, euthanasia, and foreign aid with an intensity once reserved for immanentizing the eschaton. But the hottest ticket in academic philosophy these days is “nuclear ethics.” Trendy philosophers are queuing up to pass judgment on the rectitude of atomic weapons, or, more precisely, of America’s atomic weapons. Their verdict? The U.S. must either unilaterally disarm or drastically curtail its war-fighting capacity.

As an academic discipline, nuclear ethics is rather peculiar. In the first place, the moral issues of nuclear war (about which philosophers might presume to speak with some special authority) are rather obvious. Everyone knows that turning Earth into a radioactive wasteland is a bad idea and everyone (well, save a few philosophers) agrees that being conquered by the Soviet Union is also an unpleasant experience. The great question in strategic policy is ultimately practical: how can we keep from becoming either red or dead? Thus, coming up with the right defense strategy involves knowing a great many facts and very little specialized philosophy. But nuclear ethicists plunge ahead, dressing up naked political opinions in philosophic garb. Nuclear weapons do pose a few intellectually intriguing puzzles and Gregory Kavka probed one of these in “Some Paradoxes of Deterrence,” virtually the only interesting paper in the entire “nuclear ethics” canon. In promising to destroy the USSR should it attack us, the U.S. threatens to do something that would be pointless should the Soviets actually attack. Yet the threat itself is far from pointless, because it deters a Soviet attack. Thus, planning to do something wrong can itself be right if the act of planning has independent beneficial results—contrary to the common-sense assumption that the morality of intentions is to be evaluated solely by reference to what is intended.

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Michael Levin

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In recent years, philosophy has been doing its best to burst out of the ivory towers into the world at large. Applied philosophers now advise hospitals on questions of medical ethics, and business corporations on the propriety of investments; professional journals and college philosophy texts have taken up suicide, euthanasia, and foreign aid with an intensity once reserved for immanentizing the eschaton. But the hottest ticket in academic philosophy these days is “nuclear ethics.” Trendy philosophers are queuing up to pass judgment on the rectitude of atomic weapons, or, more precisely, of America’s atomic weapons. Their verdict? The U.S. must either unilaterally disarm or drastically curtail its war-fighting capacity.

As an academic discipline, nuclear ethics is rather peculiar. In the first place, the moral issues of nuclear war (about which philosophers might presume to speak with some special authority) are rather obvious. Everyone knows that turning Earth into a radioactive wasteland is a bad idea and everyone (well, save a few philosophers) agrees that being conquered by the Soviet Union is also an unpleasant experience. The great question in strategic policy is ultimately practical: how can we keep from becoming either red or dead? Thus, coming up with the right defense strategy involves knowing a great many facts and very little specialized philosophy. But nuclear ethicists plunge ahead, dressing up naked political opinions in philosophic garb. Nuclear weapons do pose a few intellectually intriguing puzzles and Gregory Kavka probed one of these in “Some Paradoxes of Deterrence,” virtually the only interesting paper in the entire “nuclear ethics” canon. In promising to destroy the USSR should it attack us, the U.S. threatens to do something that would be pointless should the Soviets actually attack. Yet the threat itself is far from pointless, because it deters a Soviet attack. Thus, planning to do something wrong can itself be right if the act of planning has independent beneficial results—contrary to the common-sense assumption that the morality of intentions is to be evaluated solely by reference to what is intended.