Topics Ethics

Question Is it unethical to work in intelligence, as say, a spy, where one's job might involve lying to others, listening to others' conversations, and in general, misleading people?

Accepted:
June 25, 2009

Comments

Such work is surely often unethical or downright wrong -- for the reasons you suggest and also for the additional reason that such work may well be used by others to commit great crimes (e.g., to single out for torturous interrogation French citizens suspected of having ties to the Résistance). But your question, I think, is whether such work is unethical, or wrong in itself. To this my answer is no, for two separate reasons.

One reason derives from what I call the "sucker exemption": in some cases, ordinary moral constraints on one's conduct toward others are weakened or canceled by how these others are behaving or have behaved. If you have various agreements with another person, for instance, and he turns out routinely to violate these agreements whenever it suits him, then you are not morally required to honour your agreements with him when it does not suit you. Similarly here, it may not be wrong to spy on spies or, more generally on people who themselves flout serious moral constraints.

I hasten to add that this cannot be a blanket permission to treat suspected transgressors in any way we please. First, we need a high degree of confidence that the other is indeed a constraint violator. Second, our constraint-violation must be proportionate and related to the other's constraint violation (so the other's violating his agreements with you does not justify your beating him up, for example). Third, our constraint violation may not be permissible when it would adversely affect third parties (e.g., by spying on a spy we will often also spy on his innocent contacts -- but see next paragraph). Fourth, our constraint violation must not be fortuitous: there should be a plausible reason for it (as when by spying on a group of people we may be able to prevent or solve or punish a serious crime, something that we could not accomplish otherwise). -- I add these cautions because we have in recent years massively violated these four provisos in our treatment of suspected terrorists and suspected resisters to our occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Another reason derives from the harm that spying might prevent (or the good it might accomplish). To be sure, this is implicit in the fourth proviso to the sucker exemption above. But it has force also outside the sucker exemption, that is, it can justify spying on perfectly innocent people. Thus, to give an obvious example, it would have been alright surreptitiously to tap the phones of French citizens in occupied France in order to learn something about German troop movements in their local area and thereby to hasten the defeat of the Germans. More controversially, it would be permissible to spy on an innocent secretary in order to obtain access to his boss's life-saving pharmaceutical invention, which this boss wants to hold back in order to obtain a higher price later when the pandemic disease will have become much more widespread.

Now, "working in intelligence" raises yet further issues because the hired spy may not be given full information about her assignments ("need to know") and may not have the freedom to turn down assignments on a case-by-case basis. Taking on such a job requires a high degree of confidence that one's prospective superiors have carefully thought about, and are committed to observe, the limits on spying as sketched above. From what I know, I would place such a high degree of confidence in only a handful of national intelligence services. Shrouded in a cloak of secrecy, the operations of an intelligence service are fully understood only by a few top officials who may not have much of a prudential incentive to keep these operations morally decent. They get rewarded for results and very rarely punished for abuses. Putting oneself at the service of such people, one is likely to become involved in wrongdoing.

Question Is it unethical to work in intelligence, as say, a spy, where one's job might involve lying to others, listening to others' conversations, and in general, misleading people? Accepted:June 25, 2009

Question Is it unethical to work in intelligence, as say, a spy, where one's job might involve lying to others, listening to others' conversations, and in general, misleading people?

Accepted:
June 25, 2009