'As rays of light to the human soul'? Moral agents and intelligence gathering

Understanding Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century: Journeys in Shadows

Volumn , Issue , 2004, Pages 195-215

  Erskine, Toni ^a  

^a ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84906607681     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.4324/9780203504420     Document Type: Chapter

References (27)

1. Hobbes, De Cive, p. 145.
2. Michael Herman, 'Ethics and Intelligence after September 2001', this volume, p. 180.
3. Abram N. Shulsky and Gary J. Schmitt, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence (Dulles, VA: Brassey's, 3rd edn, 2002), p. 1. Shulsky and Schmitt also refer to a third category of 'organisations'. These three categories were first suggested by Sherman Kent in Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy [1949] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
4. Herman, 'Ethics and Intelligence', p. 180. Emphasis in the original.
5. M. Herman, 'Modern Intelligence Services: Have They a Place in Ethical Foreign Policies?', in H. Shukman (ed.), Agents for Change: Intelligence Services in the 21st Century (London: St Ermin's Press, 2000), p. 308. It might be that Herman is attempting to highlight a distinction between intelligence gathering and covert action in this passage. However, defining intelligence gathering negatively as not involving action is problematic.
6. Charles Cogan, 'Hunters not Gatherers: Intelligence in the Twenty-first Century', this volume, pp. 147-61.
7. Herman, 'Modern Intelligence Services', p. 298.
8. Shulsky and Schmitt, Silent Warfare, p. 168.
9. Francis Bacon, The Letters and the Life, VII, ed. by James Spedding (London, 1874), p. 477. Cited by Richard Tuck in The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 19.
10. Hobbes, De Cive, p. 146.
11. Cogan, 'Hunters not Gatherers'; Johnson, Secret Agencies, pp. 60-88.
12. Herman, 'Ethics and Intelligence After September 2001', pp. 189-91.
13. Hobbes, De Cive, p. 145.
14. Herman, 'Modern Intelligence Services', p. 290.
15. Herman, 'Modern Intelligence Services', p. 306. Somewhat incompatibly, however, Herman's more recent characterisation of this position allows 'almost any methods of collection...short of gross violations of human rights'. See his 'Ethics and Intelligence', p. 184.
16. Herman, 'Ethics and Intelligence', p. 183.
17. Herman, 'Modern Intelligence Services', p. 306.
18. James A. Barry, 'Covert Action Can Be Just', Orbis (Summer 1993), pp. 375-90 (p. 378).
19. Sir Michael Quinlan, 'The Future of Covert Intelligence', in Shukman (ed.), Agents for Change, p. 69.
20. 'Academic Freedom at the Palestinian Universities', Palestinian Human Rights Monitor, 3, 4 (August 1999). See www.phrmg.org/monitor1999/aug99-disruptions.htm. I am grateful to Jeroen Gunning for drawing my attention to this example.
21. Nancy Ann Davis, 'Contemporary Deontology', in P. Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 205.
22. Charles Fried, Right and Wrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 9, cited by Davis, 'Contemporary Deontology', p. 205. For a comprehensive discussion of the ethics of deception, see Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
23. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals [1797] trans. by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 154.
24. Godfrey, 'Ethics and Intelligence', p. 629. Emphasis not in the original.
25. O'Neill, 'Kantian Ethics', in Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics, pp. 178-9.
26. Herman, 'Ethics and Intelligence', p. 184.
27. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 179. Emphasis not in the original. This distinction is fundamental to what is generally referred to as the 'principle of double effect'. Indeed, Nagel refers explicitly to this principle in the context of the passage cited above.