Reasoning about the Bomb

A few days after the publication of the Church of England report, The Church and the Bomb , a Foreign Office spokesman replied to the suggestion that the Church has a duty to give a moral lead to the nation by saying that “giving a moral lead may be good for the conscience but it is not a valid proposition in the real world”. A somewhat more elaborate version of the morality versus reality outlook occurred in Bernard Williams’s talk on Channel 4 on 15 November (now published in New Society , 18 November). He said that something he called the Simple Moral Argument about deterrence works in the abstract but is useless for coming to any conclusions about how to live with nuclear weapons now we have them. It is the business of practical and political rationality to argue about what to do next. (Unfortunately, he went on to say, practical rationality soon breaks down amid the complexities of deterrence theory and we are left with scepticism as our only intellectual resource.) It is a fact that the apparent divorce between morality and practical reason is brought into sharp focus by the issue of nuclear deterrence. To simplify the picture somewhat: against nuclear deterrence are to be found nearly all those who give priority in international relations as in personal relations to certain inviolable moral principles; in favour of nuclear deterrence — in some form at least — are to be found nearly all those who believe that moral principles must be subordinated to “reason” or “reality”, especially in matters of security. Underlying the difference over nuclear deterrence are undoubtedly some fundamentally opposed value- choices at work, but also some fundamental confusions about the meaning of morality and practical reason.