S. M. Amadae

This paper follows Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics to investigate the source of the purported necessity delineated in mathematical statements and proofs. It suggests that this “normativity” has a similar structure to that underlying promising, contracting, and political obligation. Whereas many philosophers have abdicated the project of defending that empirical science can yield necessary truths or universal laws,1 still it is typical that mathematical truths are conceived to be necessary. Therefore the philosopher W.V .O. Quine, although a thorough-going empiricist who attempted to defend mathematics on the grounds of sensory perception, still faced the burden of explaining “why mathematics was (and is) thought to be necessary, certain, and knowable a priori.”2 If we understand “normativity” to convey some sort of structural indispensability that may guide judgment and action, then mathematical knowledge represents perhaps the paradigmatic case of a codified, law-like system that embodies non- negotiable relations and claims, that may be intuited by the human intellect.

Given that the nuclear warfighting school of thought prevailed over the U.S. military establishment by 1980, this section analyses three aspects entailed in this approach to seek security through dominating on all levels of conflict, nuclear and conventional: competitive risk-taking, calculated ambiguity, and coercive bargaining. We can understand that defence officers and security analysts do not like to concede that threats and manifestation of destruction have an upper bound beyond which they fail to be useful or meaningful. From that perspective, this concession would be anathema to the military’s chief function of prevailing in battle. Yet this unwillingness to confront the ultimate futility of ever-escalating rounds of destruction mirrors humans’ tendency to deny our mortality, despite its present certainty.

This section examines the assumptions underlying mutualassured destruction (MAD) considered as both a state of the world and a nuclear security posture, the theoretical defence of MAD as a strategic doctrine, strategic developments in the 1970s, and arguments critics made to challenge MAD. A second section introduces the rise of the nuclear warfighting school that opposes the nuclear revolution and MAD, and supports the need to prepare to fight and win a nuclear war as fundamental to maintaining the credibility of nuclear deterrence.

For many observers, from military analysts and academic researchers to members of the public, the detonation of the atomic bombs over Japan in 1945, the subsequent development of thermonuclear weapons, and the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union represented an epic shift in military capability. The destructive power of these new weapons crossed a threshold demonstrating that humankind now had the power to destroy itself within hours, days and months of their use. This new capability, the enormous sum of resources needed to realise that destructive power, and the theories developed to integrate nuclear warheads into military strategies can be referred to as the “nuclear revolution”. The American political scientist Robert Jervis, who published The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (1989), analysed how the development of nuclear arms is revolutionary.

This book covers the following material: (1) the history of nuclear weapons; (2) the impact of nuclear weapons; (3) theories and strategies of nuclear deterrence; (4) the nuclear weapons establishment; (5) nuclear war and popular culture; and (6) nuclear treaties, alliances and arms control. The content is designed to provide knowledge about the purpose of nuclear weapons, the paradoxes of nuclear deterrence, the vast impact of nuclear weapons including uranium mining and weapons testing, as well as of military Keynesianism, the nuclear taboo, and arms control. The text offers readers many resources to pursue further studies on the topic of the role of nuclear weapons in national security.

Thomas Jonter and Emma Rosengren’s welcome article addresses the potential pathways for Finland and Sweden to continue advocating for nuclear disarmament once they become NATO members in view of their historical legacies of neutrality. It provides rich detail and analysis of the past stances and policy advocacies of these nations to identify three potential levels of ambition in their integration into NATO. Low ambition is primarily defensive of national territory. Medium ambition signifies a contribution to the defense of Baltic allies and includes the two nations joining NATO nuclear consultancies, crucially those involving conventional and nuclear planning and related military exercises. High ambition requires commitment to all facets of NATO integration, which itself entails nuclear sharing and planning. Throughout the essay an overriding theme is Finland’s and Sweden’s historical commitment to nuclear disarmament, which is illustrated by numerous examples. In presenting the histories of Finland and Sweden on nuclear disarmament, “Advocating Disarmament as NATO Members” is an important contribution to this literature.

This review essay of Economics Rules situates Dani Rodrik’s contribution with respect to the 2007–2008 global economic crisis. This financial meltdown, which the eurozone did not fully recover from before the Covid-19 pandemic, led to soul- searching among economists as well as a call for heterodox economic approaches. Yet, over the past decade, instead the economics profession has maintained its orthodoxy. Rodrik’s Economics Rules offers a critique of the economics profession that is castigating but mild. It calls for economists to use more and diverse models without becoming wedded to any single model or an overarching vision. Yet Rodrik ratifies many of the benchmark models standard to orthodox economics and provides little ground for a fundamental rethinking of the discipline. This essay analyses the conservatism underlying Rodrik’s approach, which upholds general equilibrium theory and rational expectations underlying the efficient market hypothesis. It argues that the economics discipline’s scope-creep to maintain its applicability to all human decision-making, and its acceptance of all-inclusive utility functions, crowds out moral sentiments and civic virtue. Thus. it argues that rather than urging economists simply to be more cautious in their application of models to address particular social concerns, instead economists must recognise their discipline’s inherent limitations.

Tracking and goal setting are popular approaches in the personal health and fitness industry. In this paper we use a similar approach to assist users in their journey for a more sustainable lifestyle, starting with food. We employ Action Design Research (ADR) methodology to develop an application and subsequently propose design principles for developing blockchain-based applications for assisting users on their path to eating environmentally friendly food. The path to a sustainable lifestyle can be hard as individuals often do not realize their personal impact towards achieving a net zero carbon future. To address this shortcoming, this study conducts an ADR experiment to create affordances for users to learn, create impact and realize that they are not alone in this journey thus motivating users to a sustainable lifestyle. The design principles that emerged from the project are design for categories and labels, design for measuring collective impact, and design for rewards and redemption.

This paper analyses the National Populist Challenges to Europe’s Center Right. It assesses the cases of the UK, Germany and France. It poses three questions for Europe: How will political integration be achieved and maintained? What policies will foster economic inclusion in the Eurozone? And, third, what are the best means to achieve economic solvency and growth. The paper make a case that neoliberal economic policies over the past decades have undermined some nations' public sector and have also contributed to tensions between the geographical east and west of Europe.

This chapter uncovers the complex negotiations for authority in various representations about futures of life which have been advanced by different branches of the sciences, and have culminated in the emerging concept of life as algorithm. It charts the historical shifts in expertise and representations of life, from naturalists, to mathematical modellers, and specialists in computation, and argues that physicists, game theorists, and economists now take a leading role in explaining and projecting futures of life. The chapter identifies Richard Dawkins and Max Tegmark at the forefront of the concept of life as algorithm: the first inspired by game theory as a means to study evolution; the second proposing that a materialist basis of life could place humans and artificial intelligence on an equal footing. Through close reading of their respective texts, the chapter demonstrates that both thinkers consider life as an algorithm programmed to achieve success in survival and reproduction.

As these opening quotes acknowledge, the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) represents a core puzzle within the formal mathematics of game theory.3 Its rise in conspicuity is evident figure 2.1 above demonstrating a relatively steady rise in incidences of the phrase’s usage between 1960 to 1995, with a stable presence persisting into the twenty first century. This famous two-person “game,” with a stock narrative cast in terms of two prisoners who each independently must choose whether to remain silent or speak, each advancing self-interest at the expense of the other and thereby achieving a mutually suboptimal outcome, mires any social interaction it is applied to into perplexity. The logic of this game proves the inverse of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: individuals acting on self interest will achieve a mutually suboptimal outcome. However, as this chapter illuminates, the assumptions underlying game theory drive this conclusion.

What endogenous factors contribute to minority (Red Queen) or majority (Red King) domination under conditions of coercive bargaining? We build on previous work demonstrating minority disadvantage in non-coercive bargaining games to show that under neutral initial conditions, majorities are advantaged in high conflict situations, and minorities are advantaged in low conflict games. These effects are a function of the relationship between (1) relative proportions of the majority and minority groups and (2) costs of conflict. Although both Red King and Red Queen effects can occur, we further show that agents’ increased initial propensity toward conflict advantages majorities.

This forum contribution addresses two major themes in de Goede’s original essay on ‘Financial security’: (1) the relationship between stable markets and the proverbial ‘security dilemma’; and (2) the development of new decision-technologies to address risk in the post-World War II period. Its argument is that the confluence of these two themes through rational choice theory represents a fundamental re-evaluation of the security dilemma and its relationship to the rule of law governing market relations, ushering in an era of perpetual physical and financial insecurity.

This paper analyses the National Populist Challenges to Europe’s Center Right. It assesses the cases of the UK, Germany and France. It poses three questions for Europe: How will political integration be achieved and maintained? What policies will foster economic inclusion in the Eurozone? And, third, what are the best means to achieve economic solvency and growth. The paper make a case that neoliberal economic policies over the past decades have undermined some nations' public sector and have also contributed to tensions between the geographical east and west of Europe.

The goal of this essay is to explore "the highly contested nature of [decision-making through adopting] a historically comparative and interdisciplinary approach." Internalist history of game theory treats decision theory as a science of making choices to maximize expected gain. Game theory is applied to nuclear deterrence and military strategy, building markets and designing institutions, analyzing collective action, developing jurisprudence, and addressing crime and punishment. This essay draws on recent historiography of Cold War decision-making to draw into focus the constructive aspects of decision theory to argue that the perceived need to avoid worst-case scenarios has instead contributed to a world in which the worst outcome is probabilistically assured to occur over the long duree timeframe.

This book is an edited collection of original research papers on the digital revolution of the public and governance. It covers cyber governance in Finland, and the securitization of cyber security in Finland. It investigates the cases of Brexit, the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump, the 2017 presidential election of Volodymyr Zelensky, and Brexit. It examines the environmental concerns of climate change and greenwashing, and the impact of digital communication giving rise to the #MeToo and Incel movements. It considers how digitilization can serve to emancipate women through ride-sharing, and how it leads to the question of robot rights. It considers fake news and algorithmic governance with respect to case studies of the Chinese social credit system, the US FICO credit score, along with Facebook, Twitter, Cambridge Analytica and the European effort to regulate and protect data usage.

This paper reconsiders whether rational choice and game theory represent cases of economics imperialism. It follows the work of Uskali Maki who analyzes the significance and characteristics of disciplinary imperialism in natural science and social science. "Economics Imperialism" is a term often used to describe the increasing impact and reach of economics with respect to its encroachment on other disciplines including political science and psychology. Maki provides a framework for assessing whether the influence of one discipline on another could be a case of "good imperialism" consistent with unification and greater explanatory power. The paper examines whether in the case of economics, "rational choice imperialism" is a better understanding of the question of contention. Rational choice has been used to model addiction, sex, marriage, sleep, and suicide. Applying tools offered by Maki, this paper argues that although the imperialism of rational choice over multiple disciplines provides a unified means of modeling human action, it does not demonstrably achieve deeper understanding of either individual or collective action. Furthermore, rational choice modeling may alter the human practices it analyzes if it is used in public policy. Thus although rational choice offers a means to check for deductive consistency within and among its models, it has elements suggestive of the "bad disciplinary imperialism" that Uskali provides a means to critique.

This article assesses how autonomy and machine learning impact the existential risk of nuclear war. It situates the problem of cyber security, which proceeds by stealth, within the larger context of nuclear deterrence, which is effective when it functions with transparency and credibility. Cyber vulnerabilities poses new weaknesses to the strategic stability provided by nuclear deterrence. This article offers best practices for the use of computer and information technologies integrated into nuclear weapons systems. Focusing on nuclear command and control, avoiding autonomy and machine learning is recommended as one means to reduce the existential risk of unintended nuclear conflict.

This paper examines how the concepts of utility, impartiality, and universality worked together to form the foundation of Adam Smith's jurisprudence. It argues that the theory of utility consistent with contemporary rational choice theory is insufficient to account for Smith's use of utility. Smith's jurisprudence relies on the impartial spectator's sympathetic judgment over whether third parties are injured, and not individuals' expected utility associated with individuals' expected gains from rendering judgments over innocence or guilt.

This paper explores how the Leviathan that projects power through nuclear arms exercises a unique nuclearized sovereignty. In the case of nuclear superpowers, this sovereignty extends to wielding the power to destroy human civilization as we know it across the globe. Nuclearized sovereignty depends on a hybrid form of power encompassing human decision-makers in a hierarchical chain of command, and all of the technical and computerized functions necessary to maintain command and control at every moment of the sovereign's existence: this sovereign power cannot sleep. This article analyzes how the form of rationality that informs this hybrid exercise of power historically developed to be computable. By definition, computable rationality must be able to function without any intelligible grasp of the context or the comprehensive significance of decision-making outcomes. Thus, maintaining nuclearized sovereignty necessarily must be able to execute momentous life and death decisions without the type of sentience we usually associate with ethical individual and collective decisions.

Is capitalism inherently predatory? Must there be winners and losers? Is public interest outdated and free-riding rational? Is consumer choice the same as self-determination? Must bargainers abandon the no-harm principle? Prisoners of Reason recalls that classical liberal capitalism exalted the no-harm principle. Although imperfect and exclusionary, modern liberalism recognized individual human dignity alongside individuals' responsibility to respect others. Neoliberalism, by contrast, views life as ceaseless struggle. Agents vie for scarce resources in antagonistic competition in which every individual seeks dominance. This political theory is codified in non-cooperative game theory; the neoliberal citizen and consumer is the strategic rational actor. Rational choice justifies ends irrespective of means. Money becomes the medium of all value. Solidarity and good will are invalidated. Relationships are conducted on a quid pro quo basis. However, agents can freely opt out of this cynical race to the bottom by embracing a more expansive range of coherent action.