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Can Assassination Ever Be the Right Thing to Do?

blurred photo of man aiming rifle

On March 10th, Facebook modified its free speech policy to allow for some calls to violence directed against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

More strikingly, a week earlier, Senator Lindsey Graham explicitly called for the assassination of President Putin.

Politically, it is ill-advised to blithely call for an assassination in the middle of a tense diplomatic situation, and Senator Graham’s actions were criticized by politicians on both sides of the aisle.

And yet one cannot help but feel the emotional impact of a Clint Eastwood-esque narrative in which all one has to do is kill some bad guy and geopolitical problems go away. Senator Graham called on the Russian people rather than the CIA, but it nonetheless raises the unsettling question: is there a (moral) place for assassination in international politics?

The question is not as far from contemporary practice as it seems. Democratic nations like Israel have utilized political assassination. Ostensibly the United States has formally banned political assassination since the signing of Executive Order 11905 in 1976, yet it makes frequent use of “targeted killing” in its international policy, usually of actors designated as terrorists, but also of Iranian General Soleimani. The straightforward reply is that these actions are unethical, but the morality of assassination is not as straightforward as one would hope and is deeply revealing about international ethics.

The intuitive ethical appeal of killing political leadership is that the harm is, in theory, localized. It has not gone unnoticed that those who declare war rarely fight in them, and the harms of war (like the harms of sanctions), tend to refract over the most vulnerable members of society. Assassinations, by contrast, suggest the possibility of getting at those responsible and few others. Defenders of ethical assassination – like political philosophers Andrew Altman and Christopher Wellman and Eamon Aloyo and military strategist Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters – invariably allude to the possibility of lesser and more targeted harms.

In their discussion of political assassination, Altman and Wellman, write “once one agrees that armed intervention is sometimes admissible, it becomes very difficult to argue consistently that assassination is always morally impermissible.” The idea here is a parity of reasoning argument. If we think a political leader is so reprehensible as to justify the brutality of armed intervention, then why not assassination? Is assassination somehow morally worse than war? For that matter, is assassination worse than oppressive sanctions?

When pushed for reasons, it becomes difficult to draw these boundaries in a principled way.

Before embarking on this discussion, it needs to be emphasized that the argument that claims “IF armed intervention is justified, THEN so is assassination” must clear an exceedingly high bar. It is perfectly legitimate to question whether armed interventions are ever ethical, especially unilateral interventions. In their account, Altman and Wellman stress that such decisions would need to be made by the international community rather than single actors, and still they worry, rightly, whether such decisions would be subject to abuse. As in the case of the assassination of General Suleimani by the United States, it is all too easy to imagine international assassinations as a mere cynical extension of national interest. Hypothetically, assassination could be justified even in cases where armed interventions are not justified, but that would require different and stronger arguments than parity of reason.

The question that follows then is: Is there anything specifically morally abhorrent about assassination that does not apply to armed intervention more generally?

One strategy to clarify the specific problem with assassination is by appeal to international law. The landmark international treaty on the rules of war, the Hague convention of 1899, declared it “especially prohibited” to “kill or wound treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army.” This sentiment against assassination has been reflected in later law like the Geneva Convention treaty of 1977. These laws concern assassination in war, but presumably assassination would not be outlawed during war time but permissible during peace time. The limitation of this response is that it grounds an ostensible ethical difference in a merely legal one, which can be changed with the stroke of a pen.

A slightly different spin is that a prohibition on assassination is needed to constitute effective international government and law in the first place – that absent this basic decency any international order becomes a nihilistic race to the bottom. As the blowback to Senator Graham’s comments shows, even talk of assassination is corrosive to serious international politics. This line of argument is more compelling, but for full strength it assumes that potential targets are (at least partially) participating in international governance, which may not always be the case. Presumably an international order would not be threatened by actions directed at those fully outside it, as long as there was internal agreement.

A second category of response is that assassination is wrong because it is the ethically wrong way to do war. The military ethics tradition of just war theory (if taken as more than an oxymoron) concerns itself with both justice in the declaration of war and right conduct in war. Right conduct is classically characterized by not targeting, and minimizing collateral damage to, civilians. This concern is reflected in prohibitions for weapons incredible in their destructive scope, like chemical or biological agents, and/or indiscriminate in their targeting, like anti-personnel landmines. However, the intuitive argument for assassination is precisely that it (in theory) minimizes collateral damage and civilian casualties, so by the standards of just war theory assassination appears more moral.

An alternative focus is the “treachery” alluded to in the Hague Convention. Modern understandings and law regarding just war are rooted in older discussions of chivalry and honor. From this perspective, the differentiating wrongness of assassination is that it is uniquely treacherous and dishonorable. Assassinations often involve subterfuge and target someone other than a soldier on a battlefield. However, the same concerns would apply to other common military tactics such as drone strikes and night raids. Moreover, if the assumption about the more limited harms of assassination is correct, forbidding assassination on the grounds of its treacherousness places the “honor” of leadership above the lives of soldiers and civilians.

The final way to characterize the wrongness of assassination is not by appeal to principle, but to challenge its claims to minimizing harms. High-profile political killings are as often the start of atrocities as the end of them, igniting retaliatory violence or wars for succession. In one of the most extensive historical investigations of political assassination to date, historian Franklin Ford concluded “[political assassination’s] demonstrable tendency has nearly always been to besmirch the perpetrator’s credentials, while undermining his chances of any lasting political success.” Similarly, another evidence-based analysis found high levels of instability and violence after successful assassination for governments without well-ordered succession – and assassinations of course do not always succeed, with failed assassination coming with their own consequences.

Even in cases of stable succession there is still no guarantee that the assassination will lead to positive change. This is the problem with the “bad guy” narrative. No matter how morally reprehensible, political leaders do not simply carry their country’s domestic and international problems around with them, to be neatly cleaned up after they fall. By focusing on singular villains we can neglect to appreciate the context behind political actions and the larger structures that maintain and exert political power. Nonetheless, especially in more dictatorial regimes, political leaders do have decision-making powers. The challenge however is to get political decision-makers to decide differently, not simply to eliminate them and let politics play out as it may.

Assassination then appears at the very least no more ethical than armed intervention, and because of its deleterious effects on international legitimacy, likely worse. It is not good ethics and it is not good politics. Nonetheless, advocates of assassination are right that there is something monstrous in the way conflicts between governments are settled via the lives of their people. As Lieutenant Colonel Peterson put it, “national behavior [of states] reminds me of those feudal squabbles in which minor nobles dueled by killing and raping each other’s serfs and burning offending villages.” Assassination, although itself impermissible, suggests an alternative vision for international ethics – thinking small. In a world of sanctions and cyberattacks, why can we not tailor these to target leadership and other influential actors more specifically? Russia is a test case, with sanctions starting to directly target oligarchs and legislators. However, not just in Russia, but everywhere, how would political decisions or actions change if every politician needed to worry about being embroiled in the conflicts they helped to create?

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Intervention and Self-Determination in Haiti

photograph of Hispaniola Island on topographic globe

Haiti is in crisis, though that fact is not new. Its president, Jovenel Moïse, has been assassinated, probably by foreign actors, after refusing to leave office following the end of his term — a term that began with a contested election. Though, this isn’t the first time that’s happened either. Haiti has been beset by conflict nearly since its founding with almost all the brief periods of “peace” accompanied by ruthless, authoritarian control either by native dictators or foreign powers. Using terminology from MLK Jr., there has never been the positive peace of liberation in Haiti, though for brief periods there has been the negative peace of iron-fisted oppression.

No one yet knows who assassinated Moïse or why they did it. However, there are some clues. The assassination was “well-orchestrated” with numerous vehicles full of upwards of 20 people storming the president’s home early in the morning while most of his guards were noticeably absent. And, Moïse had many enemies: he was unpopular, many powerful business-controlling families opposed him, and the leader of G9, the most prominent confederation of gangs, expressed opposition to his reign.

As a result of the assassination, the country has fallen into a chaos of leadership. At least three people have been claiming legitimate authority over the Haitian government: Claude Joseph, the acting Prime Minister who was fired by Moïse just a week before his death; Ariel Henry, the man Moïse appointed to replace Joseph; and Joseph Lambert, the President of the Haitian Senate who the Senate voted for to succeed Moïse. Meanwhile, the legislature is mostly empty, since the terms of all the representatives in Haiti’s lower house and two-thirds of those in the upper house expired last year and elections to replace them were not held. Because of this situation, Moïse was ruling by decree and advocating a constitutional referendum to increase the power of the presidency. Thus, when he was killed, there was no obvious authority to replace him. (Claude Joseph has agreed to hand power over to Ariel Henry, but, as NPR reports, “some lawmakers. . .  said the agreement lacks legal legitimacy.”)

Without clearly legitimate leadership, several ongoing crises in Haiti are likely to worsen: the spread of COVID-19 variants, the dysfunctional economy, and the growing power of violent gangs. The situation is unconscionable. Surely, Haiti is in need of aid and would benefit from the help of its rich, powerful neighbor, the United States, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward.

There are two main camps on this issue. Some people, mostly liberal American commentators, are pro-intervention for basically the reason expressed above: the situation is dire, requires an immediate fix, and the people of Haiti cannot do it alone. Others, including socialists, anti-imperialists, and activists in Haiti, oppose intervention, citing the long history of foreign intervention in Haiti that has only made things worse, furthering the interests of everybody except the Haitian people.

Before we turn to assessing the merits of these two positions, it’s important to appreciate some of the context since, without a sense of the history here, we seem doomed to repeat it. We’ll look at how Haiti has actually been governed, the history of intervention in Haiti by foreign powers, and why there is disagreement about who should lead the government.

Putting the Problem in Context

History of Foreign Influence in Haiti

In practice, Haiti has rarely lived up to the ideal of a constitutional republic. The Spanish and then the French colonized the island from 1492 to 1804, when Haitians declared independence. For most of its history thereafter, Haiti has been led by a local dictator (such as François Duvalier), a military junta, or a foreign occupying military (most often the United States).

The U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915-1937 and from 1994-1995 and participated in the 2004 coup d’état of Haiti’s first truly democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In the first occupation, the United States military compelled Haiti to rewrite its constitution to allow foreign ownership of Haitian land. They killed fifteen thousands rebelling Haitians. And, they introduced Jim Crow laws, reintroducing racism to the island after its founders had declared that all its citizens would be considered Black. They did all this to reinforce American business interests on the island and to strengthen the United States’ imperialist interests in the region.

The UN then occupied Haiti from 2004 to 2017, ostensibly to keep the peace. They brought cholera, killing thousands. And, there were credible reports of UN soldiers very frequently sexually assaulting the Haitians they were stationed there to protect.

And, already, it has come out that some of the Colombian mercenaries involved in the assassination were U.S.-trained, if not actually U.S.-led. The U.S. trained these Colombian mercenaries to fight against drug cartels in Central and South America, just one more example of U.S. foreign intervention with unforeseen consequences.

Given all this foreign influence and the changes those foreign influences have had on the Haitian Constitution, the constitution in Haiti is not treated with the same reverence as the United States Constitution is in the U.S. Nonetheless, for those who don’t claim to rule by sheer force (as opposed to the numerous gangs who do, and, in practice, control large parts of the capital city of Port-au-Prince) the constitution is the sole source of authority.

Origin of the Leadership Controversy

The current Constitution, from 2012, says that the prime minister assumes the role of the president should the sitting president die. Thus, Claude Joseph and Ariel Henry, both of whom claim the Prime Ministership, claim the power to serve as acting president. But, as the Haitian Times reports, “the constitution also says that if there is a vacancy ‘from the fourth year of the presidential mandate,’ the National Assembly will meet to elect a provisional president.”

Unfortunately, the National Assembly has been almost entirely empty since last year when the terms of two-thirds of the Senators expired along with the terms of all the House Deputies. Thus, the remaining 10 Senators, who are the only elected representatives in office, claim the authority to elect the provisional president. Of those ten, eight agreed on Joseph Lambert, the President of the Senate, who is the third to claim the power of the presidency. With the president assassinated, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court recently having passed away from COVID-19, and the legislature virtually empty, all three branches of government lack straightforwardly legitimate leadership.

Ethical Perspectives on Intervention

Pro-Intervention

So, what should be done about this mess, if anything? The pro-intervention camp varies in their prescriptions, but we can identify two main suggestions that repeatedly crop up: first, they support a U.S.-led investigation into the assassination. As Ryan Berg of CNN states, “The international community. . . should push for an investigation. . . lest [the perpetrators] benefit from the impunity that is all too common in Haiti.” If unelected interests can simply kill politicians they don’t like, the government isn’t much of a government at all.

Second, they recommend the U.S. or UN organize an immediate election to refill the legislature and office of the president. In Haiti, the government is responsible for running elections. But, as we’ve seen, there isn’t much of a government left. Thus, as the editorial board of The Washington Post argues,

“The hard truth, at this point, is that organizing them and ensuring security through a campaign and polling, with no one in charge, may be all but impossible.”

Anti-Intervention

The anti-interventionists staunchly disagree. Kim Ives, an investigative journalist at Haïti Liberté explained in an interview with Jacobin that the assassination was likely a response to socialist Jimmy Cherizier. Cherizier brought together nine of the largest gangs in Port-au-Prince into a single organization called G9 and advocated against foreign ownership of Haitian businesses. He made a statement on social media, saying, “It is your money which is in banks, stores, supermarkets and dealerships, so go and get what is rightfully yours.” Ives supports the “G9 movement,” as he calls it and so opposes intervention that would serve to crack down on the “crime” he sees as revolutionary. As he says, the interests of Haiti’s rich are “practically concomitant with US business interests” and so U.S. intervention would “set the stage for the repression, for the destruction of the G9 movement.”

But, you need not be a revolutionary socialist to oppose intervention in Haiti. A great many Haitians oppose U.S. intervention. They tend to give two reasons: first, foreign intervention has frequently hurt Haiti, intentionally or unintentionally, far more than it has helped; and second, as André Michel, a human rights lawyer and opposition leader demands, “The solution to the crisis must be Haitian.” Racism and classism has led outside nations to think Haitians cannot solve their own problems. But, they have always failed. As Professor Mamyrah Douge-Prosper urges, “Rather than speaking authoritatively while standing atop long-standing racist tropes, it is important more than ever to be humble, ask questions, and focus on the deeper context.”

In short, it is Haitians who know best how to fix Haiti. Its problems are largely a result of colonialism and imperialism from foreigners. France forced Haiti into debt to preserve its independence. The UN brought cholera and sexual violence. Foreign aid money has destroyed the local economy. Foreign entanglement has always been the problem, not the solution.

Resolving the Disagreement

What are we to make of this disagreement between those in favor of and those against foreign intervention? One solution is to appeal to democracy and simply do what the Haitian people want. The people of Haiti may have a right to self-determination that we must respect. The value of respecting national sovereignty as a rule might be more important than the benefits accrued from a particular successful violation of that sovereignty. Now, Claude Joseph has requested U.S. or UN military intervention. But, as we’ve seen,

Haiti’s government is currently far from representing its people.

A strictly consequentialist view would be hard-pressed to justify intervention given the damage past interventions have done. But, perhaps we nonetheless have a duty to do something. Intuitively, it seems hard to say we can just do nothing. Just because the interventions of the past have failed does not mean that this one must too. Surely it’s possible that we might learn from our mistakes. And so, perhaps a limited intervention made with good intentions and careful consideration of past errors could do good.

If you’re a socialist, you might be inclined to oppose intervention in the hope that the G9 movement prompts a real revolution. But, if you agree that the past predicts the future when it comes to the inefficacy of foreign intervention, you must also consider how past socialist revolutions have resulted in dictatorships just as bad if not worse than the governments they were intended to replace. This can be seen least controversially in North Korea, Cambodia, and the Soviet Union.

Conclusion

Regardless of which way you swing on the issue, there are several uncontroversial conclusions we can draw about the situation in Haiti:

First, there is no simple solution. U.S. intervention will not immediately make things all better, nor will simply hoping that Haitians solve their crises on their own without addressing the systemic issues that have led to the present situation. There are a mess of interested players, from wealthy business families, to the abundant political parties, and to socialist gang confederations. Additionally, there are many axes of conflict relevant to this situation: bourgeois vs. proletariat, mulattos vs. Blacks, and colonizers vs. colonized, among others.

Anti-interventionists suggest we respect the autonomy of Haitians by respecting their preferences. But, given all these divisions, there’s no real majority preference to be respected. Respecting any preference would be taking a side. And, more than that, say the pro-interventionists, why do their preferences matter if intervention would make them all better off? It’s a valid concern, but is also the argument that has been given over and over again to justify intervention from foreign nations to ill effect.

Thus, second, we must act in the context of history. Any intervention that is carried out must be done extremely cautiously in light of all the harm past interventions have done. For Haitians to succeed in resolving their problems, they must be treated as capable of resolving their own  problems. An intervention that is not Haitian-led will reinforce the belief of many Haitians that they are not the ultimate agents of their own affairs. With that consciousness, Haiti will not retain any positive changes that are made.

Finally, as we began with, the status quo in Haiti is unacceptable. Something must be done. The situation in Haiti is the complex result of the involvement of numerous nations. These nations have a duty, if not to intervene, then at least to ensure that the sort of harms they caused (and continue to cause) Haiti do not follow it into the future. For example, the French might owe Haiti the enormous debt they unfairly levied on their former colony. Likewise, the United States might be obligated to end the American property holdings in Haiti that were only possible because of the revisions the United States forced upon their constitution. And finally, it may be that colonizing nations more broadly might have an obligation to invest more in colonized nations, to make up for the damage colonization has wrought on the Global South. Haiti’s crisis is just one more example of how the consequences of colonialism and imperialism can filter down across the centuries.

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Jus ad Bellum: US, Iran, and Soleimani

photograph of General Qasem Soleimani in military uniform

On Thursday, January 2nd, the United States successfully executed high ranking political Iranian military targets that were in Iraq at the time. The United States was not engaged in military conflict with Iran (i.e., the states were not at war), and so the justification for the US’s deliberate killing of Iranian officials has been called into question and widely criticized.

Because the assassination took place on Iraqi soil, Iraq is requesting that US forces evacuate their territory. Iraq is interpreting US actions against Iran to be a violation of their territory, and now remaining in Iraq without their permission could constitute a further act of aggression.

Though Soleimani was undisputedly no “friend” of the United States, targeting him with military force is incredibly controversial, if not seen by a growing consensus as the wrong thing to do. This is because the stakes involved here are not the morality of Soleimani and his participation in a regime, but rather the appropriate reasons for bringing military force against another state. It can be widely accepted that Soleimani did not act in the United States best interests, or in the best interest of the United States’ allies, and can even be granted that Soleimani’s death may in fact BE in the best interest of the United States and its allies. However, in the realm of ethics and political theory, these considerations do not warrant killing someone.

We can see that there is a high bar of justification for these actions in two frameworks: a pragmatic framework, or a “just war,” or deontic, framework. From a practical standpoint, we weigh the harms and benefits of different plans of actions and assess the potential fallout. Consider, for instance, that Soleimani actions and attitudes had not changed over the course of decades and yet previous administrations in the US had not targeted him for assassination. This has been attributed to the rationale that such an assassination “is not worth it” – the anticipated destabilization of the relations in the region risked by targeting such a high-ranking official in Iran was too big a gamble.

Rather than an assessment of potential outcomes and consequences, the standards in “just war” theory center on the conventions governing the proper and responsible use of military-level harm (just cause, proportionality, etc.). One of the least controversial moral dictates is that harming one another is bad and that we ought not to do it without the strongest of justifications. Wars and military actions are systematic harms at a grand scale, so their justification should at least parallel the stakes involved in harming one another on the personal level.

Because Soleimani represents Iran in his role as leader of Iranian military forces, taking military action against him amounts to taking military action against Iran. [Unless the international community has decided that his regime is illegitimate or that Soleimani can be considered to be an independent agent, force against him amounts to aggression against a legitimate state – Iran.] On a Just War framework, initiating acts of aggression like these against legitimate states represent justifiable cause for war on the grounds of self-defense.

To commit an act of violence that constitutes a cause for war is judged by high standards indeed because of the stakes involved in war; wars include untold violence and suffering not only to those who willingly participate but to bystanders and those caught up in the conflict. As such, the justifiability of states’ use of military force is limited, according to Just War Theory, to a handful of reasons, the strongest of which is in response to aggression.

In casual terms outside discussions of war theory, aggression includes any hostile or violent behavior, but for political actors, it means something very specific. In international relations, “aggression” is the term used for the crime of war itself. It articulates that a state has violated the territorial integrity or political sovereignty of another legitimate state.

Just as each person has a right to the safety of their body from molestation, states have a right to territorial integrity: a right to control land within one’s border. The most straightforward way of violating this on the personal level is to assault someone and on the political level, to invade. “Political Sovereignty” notes the right a legitimate state has to self-determination, paralleling the right to autonomy that an individual has. States can set up their political organizations in terms of democracies, monarchies, etc., and have the right to run their governments without interference from other states. State A violates the political sovereignty of B when A tries to change B’s political structure. Such acts, along with territorial invasion, are the most straightforward instances of acts of aggression by one state on another and thus count as acts of war.

When someone has attacked you, common moral principles hold that you would be justified in defending yourself. Therefore, in the political sphere, if a state commits an act of aggression towards your state, you may be justified in responding with force.

Soleimani’s assassination, however, fits uncomfortably in this framework. The justification currently provided by the administration is that there was an anticipation of aggression by Iran. Soleimani and the Iranian government had not yet committed acts of aggression and therefore we were not in a war scenario. Therefore, by engaging militarily in acts of aggression, the US initiated aggression by interfering with the Iranian state.

Because there was anticipated aggression against the US, the self-defense justification can be attempted for the assassination. However, when claiming to defend yourself against an attack you only think will happen, that attack must be imminent and great. This is a difficult set of circumstances to establish and in the present case a great deal of doubt already exists.

One route to justifying the attack is to attempt to categorize it as a targeted terrorist killing rather than an assassination of a high-ranked head of state. This is an important distinction, because employees of the United States, as well as anyone acting on behalf of the United States, are forbidden from conspiring or engaging in assassinations, political or otherwise, according to Executive orders by Presidents Ford and Reagan. President George W. Bush allowed for the “targeted killings” of terrorist funders and leaders, but in a manner consistent with these executive orders, and, since 2001, that has been where executive dictation has remained.

The US has targeted many individuals under the guise of the “War on Terror” by categorizing individuals as terrorist leaders and thus not representing states. But attempts to characterize Soleimani’s execution in such terms will not protect the US’s behaviors from international scrutiny or an Iranian response. (Iran has promised retribution and declared that it will no longer abide by the terms of the nuclear prohibition deal that Trump’s administration had quit Spring 2018.) This situation is markedly different. The killing of political representatives of a foreign state outside of wartime will seem to many a straightforward act of aggression, complicating the US’s claim to self-defense.

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Computer Simulations and the Ethics of Predicting Human Behavior

A row of black supercomputer processors

In an episode of the British sketch comedy series That Mitchell and Webb Look, a minister of finance is sitting across from two aides, who are expressing their frustration at how to deal with a recent recession. They have run a number of scenarios through a computer simulation: increasing or decreasing value-added tax, lowering or raising interest rates, or any combination thereof, fail to produce any positive result. The minister then suggests adding a new variable to the simulation: “Have you tried ‘kill all the poor’?” At his behest, the aides run the simulation, and show that it wouldn’t have any positive result, either. The minister is insistent that he merely wanted to see what the computer would say, as an intellectual exercise, and would not have followed its advice even if the results had been different.

Although this example is clearly fictitious, computer simulations that model human behavior have become a reality, and bring with them a number of ethical problems. For instance, a recent article published at The Atlantic reports results of the Modeling Religion Project, a project which addresses questions about “the most compelling features of religion” by “turning to an unconventional source: computer modeling and simulation.” According to the project, some of these models “examine processes of group formation, religious leadership, extremism and violence, terror management, ritual patterns, and much more.” One such model, called MERV, models “mutually escalating religious violence,” while another called NAHUM models “terror management theory.” For instance, one recent publication coming out of the project called “Can we predict religious extremism?” provides a tentative answer of “yes.”

These and other models have been used to test out various policies in an artificial environment. For example, the Modeling Religion in Norway project is currently modeling policy decisions concerning the immigration of refugees into Norway: “Governments and organizations seek policies that will encourage cohesion over conflict,” the project outline states, “but it’s hard to know what ideas will lead to harmony and tolerance, facilitating integration between local and immigrant communities. Problems like these need a road-map that can point us towards a better future, and tools for considering all of the possible outcomes.” One study suggested that, since Norwegians have a strong social safety net, religiosity is expected to continue to decrease in Norway, since one factor that predicts higher degrees of religiosity is a feeling of “existential anxiety” (to put it bluntly, the researchers suggest that the less worried one is about dying, the less religious one will tend to be).

While such models might be interesting as an intellectual exercise, there are a host of ethical concerns when it comes to relying on them to influence policy decision. First and foremost there is the concern about how plausible we should think such models will be. Human behavior is complex, and the number of variables that influence that behavior is immense, so it seems near impossible for such models to make perfectly accurate predictions. Of course, these models do not purport to be able to tell the future, and so they could still at least potentially be useful at predicting broad trends and changes, and in that regard may still be useful in guiding policy decisions.

Perhaps an even more significant problem, however, is when the example of comedic fiction becomes disturbing close to reality. As The Atlantic reports, Wesley Wildman, one of the directors of the Modeling Religion Project, reported having developed a model that suggested that the best course of action when dealing with extremist religious groups with charismatic leaders was to assassinate said leader. Wildman was, understandably, troubled by the result, stating that he felt “deeply uncomfortable that one of my models accidentally produced a criterion for killing religious leaders.” Wildman also stated that according to a different model, if one wanted to decrease secularization in a society that one could do so by “triggering some ecological disaster,” a thought that he reports “keeps me up at night.”

Some of the results produced by these models clearly prescribe immoral actions: there seem to be very few, if any, situations that would justify the triggering of an ecological disaster, and it seems that assassination, if it should ever be an option, should be a very last resort, not the first course of action one considers. Such simulations may model courses of action that are most efficient, but that is hardly to say that they are the ones that are most morally responsible. As Wildman himself noted, the results of these simulations are only potentially useful when one has taken into consideration all of the relevant ethical factors.

One might worry about whether these kinds of simulation should be performed at all. After all, if it turned out that the model predicted that an immoral course of action should result in a desired benefit, this information might be used to attempt to justify performing those actions. As The Atlantic reports:

[Wildman] added that other groups, like Cambridge Analytica, are doing this kind of computational work, too. And various bad actors will do it without transparency or public accountability. ‘It’s going to be done. So not doing it is not the answer.’ Instead, he and Wildman believe the answer is to do the work with transparency and simultaneously speak out about the ethical danger inherent in it.

If one is indeed worried about the ethical ramifications of such models, this kind of reasoning is unlikely to provide much comfort: even if it is a fact that “if I don’t do it, someone else will,” that does not absolve one of their moral responsibility (since they, in fact, did it!). It is also difficult to tell how being transparent and discussing the ethical danger of their simulation’s proposed course of action would do to mitigate the damage.

On the other hand, we might not think that there is anything necessarily wrong with merely running simulations: simulating ecological disasters is a far cry from the real thing, and we might think that there’s nothing inherently unethical in merely gathering information. Wildman certainly does seem right about one thing: regardless of whether we think that these kinds of models are useful, it is clear that they cannot be relied upon responsibly without any consideration of the moral ramifications of their results.