Ethics and Cyber Conflict: A Response to JME 12:1 (2013)

Abstract

This article responds to several recent moral (as contrasted with legal) evaluations of cyber conflict appearing during the past several years. The principal (but not exclusive) focus is on articles recently published in this journal. Including those collected in a recent special issue of JME (12:1/January 2013), guest edited by Bradley J. Strawser. The author distinguishes moral from legal issues in cyber conflict under current international law, and examines claims (like those of cyber expert, Randall Dipert) that neither international law nor just war tradition is any longer sufficient to govern the utterly unique objects and events taking place within a peculiar sort of domain that knows no boundaries, and where conventional constraints (like transparency and accountability) are wholly absent. Other issues covered include recent cyber conflicts, and whether the sort of harm suffered there, or likely to be inflicted during a broader cyberattack (including that resulting from long-term espionage and sabotage) would ever justify the use of conventional force in retaliation. While the JME special issue is not found to break any substantially new ground, taken in a wider context it charts the substantial progress that ethicists, moral philosophers and political theorists have made in catching up with the substantial legal analysis that have attended the advent of serious acts of malfeasance in the cyber domain during the past decade.

Key Words:

• Ethics
• cyber conflict
• sabotage
• espionage
• virtual harm
• privacy
• anonymity
• Snowden
• surveillance
• retaliation
• cyber security
• preemptive self-defense

Additional information

Notes on contributors

George R. Lucas

Recently retired from the Distinguished Chair in Ethics in the Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the U.S. Naval Academy, George Lucas is currently a professor of ethics and public policy at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His essay on Edward Snowden and NSA cyber surveillance was just published in Ethics & International Affairs (28:1), and his book, “Military Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2015, with a foreword by General John R. Allen, USMC (retired).