THE anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, on 6 and 9 August respectively, come during a European war. That coincidence raises with particular force the issue of the declared deterrent purpose of nuclear weapons.
As a way into reflecting on that issue, it is helpful to consider rather more mundane examples of just how dominant a feature of our common life we have allowed deterrence to become.
When I travelled on the London Underground recently, the posters around the carriage, paid for by the TV Licensing Agency to encourage people to pay the licence fee, were all threats: “We’ve a van coming up your street”; “We’ve a database of all televisions”; “It’s a £1000 fine if you watch without one.” None expressed gratitude: “Wasn’t that a great Match of the Day yesterday; your licence feel helped us provide that”; “Thank you for supporting our journalists in providing the news you rely on.” Nothing of that kind; only threats; only deterrence.
Another memory: being driven at high speed, except when a camera came into view; deterrence encourages avoidance strategies.
What do these mundane examples tell us about the ethics and practice of deterrence?
The Ukraine invasion by the Russian Federation displays precisely those unintended consequences: the theory says that NATO’s nuclear weapon deters Russia from their use. What we observe is the actual consequence: the NATO allies themselves are the ones deterred from engaging in the conflict for fear of provoking a nuclear exchange.
Deterrence involves assessing the calculations of the person being deterred; such assessments can be disastrously mistaken, however, and often are.
So, the Illegal Migration Act (Comment, 28 July) and outsourcing to Rwanda the processing of asylum claims involve many assessments of the likely calculations of those whom the Government seeks to deter, any of which might be mistaken, or generate perverse consequences.
Will a person who is undergoing persecution or living in a war zone be deterred from making a dinghy crossing by the thought that, even if the boat doesn’t capsize, they might end up with a future life in Rwanda? Does the policy underestimate the level of desperation of those it is intended to influence, for whom sending their children in a leaky boat to an uncertain future may still be a better deal than certain death or torture where they are? And do we know the motivation of those who bring them here? Is it all avarice? Or is there some compassion involved? And, if we don’t know, how shall we know if those who arrange the small boats will be deterred?
THE theory of deterrence goes back a long way: Jeremy Bentham’s view that human beings choose to maximise pleasure and minimise pain led him to conclude, in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1907), that the deterrence is effective in proportion to the certainty of future pain, the speed with which it will be incurred, its duration, and its severity. Legislators find it easier to increase severity than certainty of detection or speed of processing; so deterrence rhetoric shouts for longer sentences and heavier fines, but they cannot make detection more certain, or processes speedier.
Advocates of deterrence usually assume its effectiveness, and rarely consider whether it is ethical to use the fear of undesirable consequences as a means of securing desired outcomes. That is to say, most of the arguments for and against deterrence make fundamentally utilitarian assumptions about the nature of the good, evaluating the virtue of any action by the calculus of pleasure and pain.
So, if the fine imposed on motorists for parking on a double yellow line comes to be regarded not as a penalty, but as a charge worth paying for the convenience of the parking place, the authorities seek to change the calculation by increasing the fine. At the opposite end of the scale, however, constantly increasing the power of the nuclear arsenal would be a hugely dangerous strategy for the hope of maintaining the peace.
The ethical question involved in the use of deterrence is, therefore, the most obvious one: is the deliberate inflicting of some kind of pain justified by the beneficial consequences of the use of deterrence? If certain undesirable outcomes are reduced by deterrence, is that sufficient ethical justification for its use?
Those are the practical and utilitarian arguments that are conventionally deployed in the discussion of deterrence. Those arguments make certain assumptions, however, about human persons as they are, or might become, as a result of the exercise of deterrence. Deterrence might “work”, but it also forms people.
Deterrence rests on the assumption that human beings calculate the pros and cons of particular courses of action, from the smallest — such as a fine for illegal parking — to the massive and lethal ones of a nuclear explosion. The expectation, that is to say, is that the human person will calculate consequences: Homo sapiens is supremely Homo calculans, and wisdom lies in the ability to come to a decision on the basis of calculating the outcomes of pain and pleasure.
iStockiStock
Clearly, deterrence on the basis of such an assumption will be thought to work best if the “calculation” can be a specific accounting of loss and gain — most of all, if that loss and gain can be expressed numerically: get a TV licence for £159, or risk a fine of £1000 if you don’t. If more people are committing a particular crime despite the threat of a two-year prison sentence, increasing it to five years should work better.
Formation into this view of the world begins early: most readers will have been told, as children, that there would be no television this evening if they did not eat their supper. They might have promised themselves that, if they had children, they would never resort to such threats, only years later to hear themselves doing precisely that; so they apply differential amounts of chocolates, or screen time, to patterns of behaviour which they wish to encourage or prevent.
SUCH thinking about the ethics of deterrence, however, ignores the formative effect of its repeated use.
There is no doubt that deterrence, the fear of unwelcome consequences, makes frequent appearances in the biblical text. The prophets announce impending doom if there is not repentance on the part of the chosen people for the evils that are the cause of the invasion, defeat, or exile that the prophet foresees.
Without question, there is much reward and punishment in the biblical text, which certainly speaks of a God whose justice requires that humankind’s choices shall have consequences. Set before humanity are “death and life, blessing and curse”, so that they may choose which they will have, in knowledge of the consequences of making a false choice.
Yet the biblical record also has another story to tell, one that seeks to place humankind in a different universe of discourse and a different arena of conduct, one in which right action is encouraged not by the fear of consequences, but by the operation of forgiveness and grace.
Offering to an enemy the other cheek to strike, or walking a second mile with the soldier who has insisted that you walk one, can hardly be said to offer immediate incentives to better conduct. While the Law, with its statement of the consequences of actions, is not abolished, it is declared to be fulfilled in a regime of incentives that take a longer view of human well-being, proposing the formation of human communities of grace rather than punishment.
If Christian faith offers that longer view of the way to human flourishing, it places a large question mark over those policy considerations that see the ethical debate — that is, the weighing of pain and pleasure — as the only parameters within which decisions about deterrence are to be made. Rather, faith should introduce into any particular policy debate the formational effects of repeated resort to deterrence, whether on individuals and their choices, or on the pursuit of large-scale objectives, such as the promotion of peace.
DETERRENCE, then, is a way of acting towards one another that most have used and experienced. What is required is not to ban it, but to point to its potentially addictive quality. “Addiction” is an apposite word, because, in all sorts of situations, we see surrender of the instrument of deterrence as leading to outcomes equivalent to a kind of social cold turkey.
We might get our children to eat their supper or write a thank-you letter to Grandma by making it a condition if they want to have a sleepover with a friend. In the process, we are also imparting a pattern of reasoning which will, in adult life, establish a norm of threat as the preferred means of inducing compliance. Even in Bentham’s terms, is the immediate pleasure of inducing compliance worth the long-term pain of making threat the default means of gaining it? And, in theological terms, is the use of threat to subvert the norms of grace and love worth it for securing grudging obedience?
If we are to be weaned from the regime of deterrence, there is one essential first step: instead of the habit of placing oneself as the one doing the deterring, let us seek to place ourselves in the narrative in the position of the one whom we are seeking to deter.
The question then becomes, whether in relation to the TV licence, or the nuclear threat, or whatever other choice we may be confronting, am I deterred? Or persuaded? Or won over by the virtue of those who are acting as I am being asked? And, from that different place in the narrative, I may be better placed to answer the further question: in the long run, faced with our habitual resort to deterrence, might not a greater practice of empathy and gratitude set us on a better path?
The Rt Revd Dr Peter Selby is a former Bishop of Worcester and Bishop to HM Prisons and Visiting Professor in Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College, London.