THE DEONTOLOGISTʼS ARGUMENT IS INCORRECT IN FOCUSING ON THE INTENT INSTEAD OF ACTUAL RISKS Jeff McMahan. Deterrence and Deontology.” Ethics, Vol. 95, No. 3, Special Issue Symposium on Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence (Apr, 1985), pp. 517-536. This example brings out quite vividly the way in which the Deontologist's Argument has gone wrong. It shows, I think, that it is a mistake to locate the wrongness of deterrence in the supposed intrinsic wrongness of the conditional intention rather than in the fact that following a policy of deterrence normally entails a risk of deliberately using nuclear weapons. Thus the argument implies that nuclear deterrence is wrong in cases, such as the present one, in which there is no possibility that possessing nuclear weapons for purposes of deterrence will lead to their being used, while it does not imply that the policy is wrong in other cases, such as that of Incertia, even though in those cases the policy carries a substantial risk that the weapons will be deliberately used.
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