ONLY UNDER AN ABSURDIST DEONTOLOGY WOULD THREATS BE IMMORAL AND PREVENT ACTION FROM BEING TAKEN TO SAVE LIVES. No Moral Nukes. Robert E. Goodin. Ethics, Vol. 90, No. 3 (Apr, 1980), pp. 417-449. Published by The University of Chicago Press. Stable URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380581 Threats are, after all, one thing, and actions, the real things, -quite another. Using nuclear weapons and thereby killing millions or hundreds of millions of citizens of the Soviet Union and other countries would be wrong even if threatening to use them is not. If the United States can prevent something as awful as nuclear devastation from occurring to its citizens (or to those of any other country) by threatening to use its nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, it is surely a most fastidiously unattractive deontological morality that insists that the mere threat, by itself, is forbidden even when introduced to prevent such amorally wrong outcome. Policies of threats that work to prevent massive indiscriminate nuclear destruction are in such a context morally proper.
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