According to Howes, my article is wildly inappropriate application of game and so constitutes a project that is dubious at best and dangerous at worst because it invites policy makers and social scientists to use formal models to improve or perfect making it conducive to bureaucratic violence (Howes 2012, 21, 20, 23). I respond to each set of claims, starting with former, before reflecting very briefly on what these considerations have to say about place of formal models in normative political theory.Human Agency and Interrogational TortureThe application of a formal game theoretic model to interrogational torture is dangerous in Howes's sense only if game theory is even applicable to question of interrogational torture and its effectiveness, something Howes rejects in course of first section of his reply and later in his discussion of will.1 Following Scarry (1985) and others, he asserts that pain and in torture are so agency destroying, reason destroying, information destroying, strategy destroying, even world destroying that they preclude any reasonable conception of choice, preference, calculation, or strategy. As a result, torture victim does not even possess ability to know what game is being played (Howes 2012, 21) and so rational, strategic interaction is, by definition, made impossible (Howes 2012, 24).This model of utter domination (Howes 2012, 24) by torturer is almost precisely caricature of interrogational torture presumed by its strongest proponents.2 Torturers know how to inflict pain so that all room for agency, calculation, strategizing, and choice is removed. The torturer controls environment so completely, breaks victim down so thoroughly, that he or she does exactly what torturer desires. The of torturer becomes of tortured. This is exactly what designers of Bush interrogational torture program believed: they would break detainees who thought they were strong and could hold out into weak detainees who would talk. Such a model, whether in guise of television program 24, in mind of Dick Cheney or SERE psychologists, or in a work of political philosophy such as Howes's here, is a fantasy. As a result, both perspectives obscure fundamental character (i.e., what actually happens empirically) of interrogational torture (Howes 2012, 20).3In addition to beatings, burning, and waterboarding, Henri Alleg was electrocuted during his interrogation by French paratroopers in Algeria in 1957. Variously attaching clips to his finger, chest, ear, groin, and palette of his mouth, they caused in last instance his jaw to lock for a time and his eyes to feel as if they were being pushed out of his head from inside (Alleg [1958] 2006, 56-57). And yet, he recalls, stupefied as I was by blows and tortures I had undergone, one single idea was still clear in my mind: 'Tell them nothing, don't help them in any way.' I didn't open my mouth (Alleg [1958] 2006, 63).Now although Howes does not say what is left to a human being after comprehensive destructive effects of torture, nor can it be inferred from his alternative model of human action, since he offers none, he characterizes resistance to interrogational torture as the sheer force of will (Howes 2012, 22). I return to this point in a moment. I first want to point out that it is clear from torture victims' own accounts that they value things-avoiding pain, protecting information, convincing interrogator that they are innocent- and order them in particular ways. The fact that torturers may want to elicit some words or behaviors from their victims (Howes 2012, 28), as Howes is grudgingly willing to acknowledge, indicates they have goals too. Victims by their own accounts think of themselves as having at least two actions, opening or not opening mouth, to paraphrase Henri Alleg. …