PART II - GOVERNMENT

Summary

At work here is the law of the instrument [that is, game theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma]: give a small boy (or a researcher) a hammer and he will find things that need hammering. As Kaplan (1964, 29) points out, often the problem is not that some techniques are pushed to the utmost, but that others may, in consequence, be ignored.

Robert Axelrod, 1970

Because it captures the structure of a recurring sort of social predicament, there can be no doubt but that the prisoner's dilemma model is bound to be of use to policy-makers … This complexity in co-operative predicaments probably means that the state will often be necessary to select and then reinforce one of the available resolutions. However much we relish the invisible hand, we may still require the strong arm. The lesson is as old as Hobbes, but there is no reason here for surprise. So, after all, is an appreciation of the prisoner's dilemma. Due to the inherent failure of individuals’ ability to cooperate, third-party enforcement must be invoked.

Philip Pettit, 1985

It is easy to appreciate how an American president, even the most conscientious, would be impaled on the horns of the intractable nuclear security dilemma. By all indications, the nuclear security dilemma should be resolved by assuring reciprocal cooperation backed by potential devastating retaliation, in keeping with the classical liberal adage of war for war and peace for peace. However, rational strategists considered the threat to harm millions of innocent people once deterrence had already failed to be both immoral and irrational. In 1978, Gregory Kavka, who contributed the most rigorous philosophical analysis of this problem at that time, had little to offer President Jimmy Carter to place the strategy of mutual assured destruction on firm ground, save that he should leave the role of issuing credible deterrent threats to agents who were either less than moral or less than rational with the hope they would never be carried out. In 1980, Kavka renewed his efforts to defend the minimum deterrence of MAD against the countervailing war-fighting posture of NUTS. He recommended that the United States should disambiguate its intentions from those characterized in the Prisoner's Dilemma model of the nuclear security dilemma and arms race by clearly demonstrating the intention to cooperatively avoid nuclear war.