Reflections on the various articles which will be published in the criminal law and philosophy dedicated to my retirement.
Reflections on the various articles which will be published in the criminal law and philosophy dedicated to my retirement.
In this paper, I respond to Lars Christie, David Omand and Stephen Ratner for their thoughtful comments on my book Spying through a Glass Darkly. In that book, I provide a philosophical defence of espionage and counter-intelligence activities. I have little to say about how best to implement the moral norms I defend so that they can help guide intelligence officers’ actions, in the world as we know it here and now. Relatedly, I have little if anything to say about whether domestic and international law should reflect and entrench those norms. These are the gaps which David Omand’s and Stephen Ratner’s contributions seek to fill. First, though, I consider Lars Christie’s probing objections to my views on the ethics of deception.
In a recent book, Ann Whittle develops a view of freedom and responsiblity according to which their attribution to agents is sensitive to the speakers' contexts. This review provides a summary of the main argument, and briefly mentions some points that will be of interest in further developing the view.
Cecile Fabre’s Through a Glass Darkly offers a compelling account of the ethics of espionage drawn from both interpersonal morality and democratic and cosmopolitan political theory. Yet the spying that her theory finds permissible or prohibited does not map onto the spying that states undertake and that international law either explicitly or implicitly authorizes. That law allows or tolerates significant spying to promote compliance with diverse international legal regimes as well as advance other important public order values — well beyond that allowed under Fabre's theory. This disconnect represents a challenge for her theory and ideal theory generally. This essay identifies these gaps and considers alternative approaches to addressing them. It argues that the political morality of spying should be explored through institutional moral reasoning that takes account of the actual practices, expectations, and institutions that states have created; it then offers a set of criteria for the international political morality of espionage. The essay concludes with a discussion of a key feature of all espionage, namely the secrecy of the methods used — as opposed to their goal of find others’ secrets. International law is both pushing transparency in many areas yet still allowing secret conduct by states, and these practices should also inform a theory of espionage.
I am very grateful to Rachel Barney and Christian Miller for their helpful and challenging comments on my book, Emotion and Virtue (Princeton, 2020). My response aims first to clarify and then to fortify my position on some of the many excellent points they raise in this symposium.
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