ABSTRACT
The immorality of deterrence is more obvious than the facts that are summoned to argue the issue of deterrence on strict consequentialist grounds. This chapter argues that the teleological arguments being used to justify deterrence are unsound. In comparing nuclear deterrence and unilateral disarmament, the utilitarian seems trapped between the Scylla of a smaller risk of a worse disaster and the Charybdis of a greater risk of a smaller disaster. Clearly, the logic of nuclear deterrence as self-defense parallels the specious reasoning of threatening to kill innocent third parties as a means of preventing attack against oneself. Kantian morality clearly condemns deterrence policy as the immoral intention to use others as a mere means to one's ends. Gregory Kavka has argued that teleological moral theories justify one in framing the conditional intentional to wage nuclear war in order to prevent nuclear war from occurring if the expected consequences of so doing are the best.
