[Book Reviews] "Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying"
I really enjoyed James Olson's highly disturbing "Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying". Written by a former CIA chief of counterintelligence, it presents a series of ethical dilemmas based on realistic scenarios that diplomats, spies, and case officers encounter. After each question, you get the answers of a series of people -- former CIA, academics, military officers, students, clergy, doctors... people from several different walks of life. Olson finishes up each section with a discussion of CIA history or policy, insofar as he is allowed to talk about it, and a nod to recent or current situations where such a dilemma might come up. It's a useful tool for elucidating your own moral stance on difficult issues that many people don't spend a lot of time thinking about. It's also very uncomfortable.
Aside from being profoundly reminded of the arguments we had in grad school, one of the things that I found most interesting was that I was so bad at predicting what kinds of people would take what moral stances. (I wasn't alone... Olson acknowledges in his closing statement that it is inherently a difficult problem, and social role or standing a poor predictor of someone's moral reasoning.) The only regular responder that I was able to consistently call was the rabbi, and him because he spells out Jewish law at the beginning and I could construct a behavioural model from that. There were an unsurprisingly large number of "my country, right or wrong!" straight-up nationalists which I found difficult to deal with... I don't inherently believe that being a US citizen versus not is morally relevant, though I acknowledge the difficulty of constructing legal frameworks of statehood which do not depend upon that. But to my ethical thought, it's being a sentient life that's morally relevant; where you got born doesn't dictate how well or poorly you ought to be treated. There is a substantial minority of sampled Americans (and, I suspect, residents of other places) who disagree with me there.
Perhaps the most frustrating answerer in there for me was a lawyer -- he kept trying to apply American legal constructs such as having a reasonable expectation of privacy to situations which are inherently violating the law, and that drove me nuts. Espionage is illegal in most every country, the CIA does it anyway, we have already gone off the rails of respecting legal frameworks here. While I think it is useful to consider what laws are being cheerfully smashed and what the consequences for that would normally be when planning your operation, trying to use respect for the rule of law as your moral framework for guiding the CIA is roughly like applying the Boy Scout code to a maximum security prison. These people are not going to follow those rules, or they wouldn't be there. You are not in camp. It's just not happening.
My inner sociologist was rather surprised at some of the collective opinions -- many people thought that having an CIA agent running with journalistic cover was acceptable, but having them run with missionary cover was appalling. But running them with other NGO cover was back to tentatively okay again. Like many exercises in sociology, it tells you a lot about the people you're polling. I was rather surprised at the places where I myself was well outside of the norm in what I considered fair play, but in summary I think my ethics are consistent. (And I'd be a terrible director of the CIA. "What? No. No. NO. No. That one is fine. No.") I am far more a humanist than I am a patriot. But every so often, you get one of those scenarios where you're fine with it and everyone else is appalled and considers that action morally unacceptable, and that really makes you think about how we create our social rules. One of the other continually troubling things to me was how many intelligence officers justified doing the most appalling things to other diplomats or agents with "X was in the game, they knew the risks". To me, the decision to become a source or an intelligence officer is not the same as moral consent to torture, drugging, etc. (I mean, you know it might happen, but that doesn't make it okay! Pragmatic risk assessment and moral culpability are different.) I'm definitely sending Dad a copy of this one for the holidays this year; we can argue. [grin]
This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/248799.html and has
comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.
Aside from being profoundly reminded of the arguments we had in grad school, one of the things that I found most interesting was that I was so bad at predicting what kinds of people would take what moral stances. (I wasn't alone... Olson acknowledges in his closing statement that it is inherently a difficult problem, and social role or standing a poor predictor of someone's moral reasoning.) The only regular responder that I was able to consistently call was the rabbi, and him because he spells out Jewish law at the beginning and I could construct a behavioural model from that. There were an unsurprisingly large number of "my country, right or wrong!" straight-up nationalists which I found difficult to deal with... I don't inherently believe that being a US citizen versus not is morally relevant, though I acknowledge the difficulty of constructing legal frameworks of statehood which do not depend upon that. But to my ethical thought, it's being a sentient life that's morally relevant; where you got born doesn't dictate how well or poorly you ought to be treated. There is a substantial minority of sampled Americans (and, I suspect, residents of other places) who disagree with me there.
Perhaps the most frustrating answerer in there for me was a lawyer -- he kept trying to apply American legal constructs such as having a reasonable expectation of privacy to situations which are inherently violating the law, and that drove me nuts. Espionage is illegal in most every country, the CIA does it anyway, we have already gone off the rails of respecting legal frameworks here. While I think it is useful to consider what laws are being cheerfully smashed and what the consequences for that would normally be when planning your operation, trying to use respect for the rule of law as your moral framework for guiding the CIA is roughly like applying the Boy Scout code to a maximum security prison. These people are not going to follow those rules, or they wouldn't be there. You are not in camp. It's just not happening.
My inner sociologist was rather surprised at some of the collective opinions -- many people thought that having an CIA agent running with journalistic cover was acceptable, but having them run with missionary cover was appalling. But running them with other NGO cover was back to tentatively okay again. Like many exercises in sociology, it tells you a lot about the people you're polling. I was rather surprised at the places where I myself was well outside of the norm in what I considered fair play, but in summary I think my ethics are consistent. (And I'd be a terrible director of the CIA. "What? No. No. NO. No. That one is fine. No.") I am far more a humanist than I am a patriot. But every so often, you get one of those scenarios where you're fine with it and everyone else is appalled and considers that action morally unacceptable, and that really makes you think about how we create our social rules. One of the other continually troubling things to me was how many intelligence officers justified doing the most appalling things to other diplomats or agents with "X was in the game, they knew the risks". To me, the decision to become a source or an intelligence officer is not the same as moral consent to torture, drugging, etc. (I mean, you know it might happen, but that doesn't make it okay! Pragmatic risk assessment and moral culpability are different.) I'm definitely sending Dad a copy of this one for the holidays this year; we can argue. [grin]
This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/248799.html and has
comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.