Can Torture Be Justified?

Torture requires careful definition, because of the degree to which its definition often entails its moral condemnation. Torture involves the deliberate infliction of (intense) pain for coercive or punishment reasons. While emphasizing that the act of torture is indeed naturally seen as repulsive and ideally should not take place, I offer a non-utilitarian argument to ethically justify torture in specific kinds of interrogative cases. This argument closely examines the moral isomorphism between cases of immediate and delayed self-defense, showing that in both cases lethal force is justified. I further show that, once one’s life is forfeit, one’s other rights pertaining to the defense of one’s intended victims are likewise forfeit. As such, any form of interrogative torture necessary to procuring relevant information from persons involved in a lethal attack upon innocent persons is ethically justified. However, that an action is strictly ethically justified does not entail that it ought to be generally adopted. Several potent constitutional and sociological concerns are raised and considered.     

Risk pooling in a two-period,two-echelon inventory stocking and allocation problem

The object of this article is to investigate the risk-pooling effect of depot stock in two-echelon distribution system in which the depot serves n retailers in parallel, and to develop computationally tractable optimization procedures for such systems. The depot manager has complete information about stock levels and there are two opportunities to allocate stock to the retailers within each order cycle. We identify first- and second-order aspects to the risk-pooling effect. In particular, the second-order effect is the property that the minimum stock available to any retailer after the second allocation converges in probability to a constant as the number of retailers in the system increases, assuming independence of the demands. This property is exploited in the development of efficient procedures to determine near-optimal values of the policy parameters.     

Search and the introduction of improved technologies

Modeling R&D as standard sequential search, we consider a monopolist who can implement a sequence of technological discoveries during the technology search process: he earns revenue on his installed technology while he engages in R&D to find improved technology. What is not standard is that he has a finite number of opportunities to introduce improved technology. We show that his optimal policy is characterized by thresholds ξ_i(x): introduce the newly found technology if and only if it exceeds ξ_i(x) when x is the state of the currently installed technology and i is the number of remaining introductions allowed. We also analyze a nonstationary learning‐by‐doing model in which the monopolist's experience in implementing new technologies imparts increased capability in generating new technologies. Because this nonstationary model is not in the class of monotone stopping problems, a number of surprising results hold and several seemingly obvious properties of the stationary model no longer hold. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

Class scheduling algorithms for Navy training schools

The problem of developing good schedules for Navy C-Schools has been modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem. The only complicating feature of the problem is that classes must be grouped together into sequences known as pipelines. An ideal schedule will have all classes in a pipeline scheduled in consecutive weeks. The objective is to eliminate the nonproductive time spent by sailors at C-Schools who are waiting for the next class in a pipeline. In this investigation an implicit enumeration procedure for this problem was developed. The key component of our algorithm is a specialized greedy algorithm which is used to obtain a good initial incumbent. Often this initial incumbent is either an optimal schedule or a near optimal schedule. In an empirical analysis with the only other competing software system, our greedy heuristic found equivalent or better solutions in substantially less computer time. This greedy heuristic was extended and modified for the A-School scheduling problem and was found to be superior to its only competitor. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 45: 533–551, 1998     

The Imperfect Peace: Explaining Paramilitary Violence in Northern Ireland

This article examines why paramilitary campaigns in Northern Ireland have continued despite the current peace process. In advancing three instrumental explanations of paramilitary violence, the author provides a useful analytical framework which shows that while organizational interpretations are dominating the public discourse, republicans and loyalists continue to use paramilitary violence as a strategic means of threat and coercion. Furthermore, even though policy implications are not discussed in detail, it will be demonstrated that the dominance of organizational imperatives has resulted in excessive leniency by the state, which - in turn - has contributed to the fragility of the peace process.