Current research projects
I am currently working on two research projects: a book on the ethics of espionage and counter-intelligence; projected Tanner Lectures on Human Values, entitled Value, Justice and Humankind's Common Heritage
1. The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence
(Book - manuscript - under contract with OUP. Manuscript workshop on September 25 2020 - To register, see here.)
Espionage and counter-intelligence activities, both real and imagined, weave a complex and alluring story. From Julius Caesar's spies in Britain to the spies scouting medieval market towns under the cloak of their clerical habit, from Francis Walsingham's spy network to the Sun King's ciphers, from the crypto-analysts of Bletchley Park to the Cold War's intelligence war, from the NASA wiretapping scandal to the infiltration of ISIS cells by Chechen forces loyal to Putin - one could tell hundreds of anecdotes. The sources, admittedly of varying degrees of credibility, are there: books (both fiction and non-fiction), articles, special journal issues, and policy papers number in the dozens of thousands. And yet, there is hardly any serious philosophical work on espionage. This is surprising: it is odd that an issue which has proved so enduringly persistent as a practice and fascinating as an object of study should have been ignored by the one academic discipline which claims to have a lot to say on everything - indeed, which has said quite a bit on war itself, of which espionage is a handmaiden.
Granted, moral and political philosophers often make claims of the kind: `in some important sense, X is justified in harming another person Y only if the evidence at his disposal tells him that Y (e.g.) is unjustifiably harming him.' Or: `it counts in favour of a directive/decision being authoritative that it should be made on the basis of the best available evidence.' All of this seems obviously true, but what if the evidence is not available?
Faced with this problem, philosophers have tended to respond by asking whether agents are morally justified (or obliged) to do p, given that they are uncertain as to whether the facts are such as to warrant p, whether p will work, etc. My aim is different: in inquiring about espionage and counter-intelligence, I ask another though related two-pronged question, namely, what agents are morally permitted and obliged to do (a) to reduce the uncertainty under which they operate (the espionage question), (b) to protect themselves from attempts by outsiders to do precisely that (the counter-intelligence question).
In the course of the book, I address the following questions, in the context of foreign policy writ large:
1. On what grounds do members of a political community have a right that information about themselves/their political institutions/their critical infrastructure be regarded as an official secret?
2. On what grounds, if any, may a political community (via its leaders and officials) justifiably appropriate secret information about other political communities without the consent of the latter's members - in effect, spy on them?
3. On the assumption that espionage is under some circumstances morally justified, by what means may intelligence agents and services engage in it? For example, may they deceive, betray, manipulate, bribe? May they intercept communications? May they put pressure on private firms to release confidential data about their customers?
4. If a political community's official secrets are at risk of being 'stolen' by outsiders (and/or by some of its members acting on behalf of those outsiders), what counter-intelligence work may that community's intelligence services justifiably engage in to defend itself? In particular, may they deceive, manipulate, bribe their own or foreign agents as a means to uncover traitors in their midst? May they spy on their fellow citizens?
The chapters are currently as follows:
Ch 1 Setting the stage
Ch 2 Political secrets
Ch 3 Acquiring secrets: A defense of Espionage
Ch 4 Economic espionage
Ch 5 Deception
Ch 6 Treason
Ch 7 Running and recruiting spies
Ch 8 The technology of espionage and counter-intelligence
Ch 9 Mass surveillance
Draft chapters available upon request for review and comment. Please email me at cecile.fabre@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
2. 'Snatching Something from Death': Value, Justice and Humankind's Common Heritage
(To be delivered as the Tanner Lectures on Human Value, Stanford University - provisional date 2021-2022)
When Notre-Dame Cathedral was engulfed by fire on April 15, 2019, the world (it seemed) watched in horror. On Twitter, Facebook, in newspapers and on TV cables ranging as far afield from Paris as South Africa, China and Chile, people expressed their sorrow at the partial destruction of the church, particularly the collapse of the spire, and anguish at what very nearly happened - the complete destruction of a jewel of Gothic architecture whose value somehow transcends time and space. When President Trump threatened to bomb Iran's cultural sites in the closing days of 2019, in defiance of the laws of war, he elicited outrage, not just on behalf of Iranians but on behalf of the world at large: the ancient city of Persepolis, for example, is widely regarded as one the world's most significant archeological sites.
The thought that there are landmarks - some human-made, others natural, others still at the intersection of the human and the natural world - which have universal value is a familiar one. It also raises some deep concerns, not least regarding conflicting interpretations of what it means for a landmark to have outstanding universal value, and, relatedly, regarding the risks of undue cultural appropriation, particularly on the part of former colonial or quasi-colonial powers towards peoples and territories which they once held in their grip. Nevertheless, my aim in these lectures is to offer a philosophical account and defence of World Heritage's central ideal, to wit, that there is such a thing as humankind's common heritage, and that this heritage makes stringent moral demands on us.
In the first lecture, I explore in some detail the notion of humankind's common heritage (for short, humankind's heritage) and of its value. These of course are not the first Tanner Lectures to be delivered on the contradictory pulls of cultural diversity and universal heritage. Michael Walzer, Sheyla Benhabib, Thomas Hill Jr, Joseph Raz, to name but four, have spoken and written eloquently on this issue, against the background of a rich literature in the philosophy of value in general. My focus, however, is on the value of our common, and (as I shall explain in the first lecture) cultural and tangible heritage. I argue that its constitutive elements are universally valuable, and that we, all of us, have reasons to value them, precisely in so far as they are part of that heritage.
In the second lecture, I argue that the protection of humankind's heritage is a duty of justice. This is not a widely held, let alone well developed, view. Whilst the field of heritage studies is replete with claims to the effect that we owe it to future generations to preserve that heritage, the contours and grounds of our duties are left relatively unexplained. As for contemporary moral and political philosophy, at least in the Anglophone world, it has been largely silent on this particular issue. Save for a handful of seminal articles on cultural cosmopolitanism in the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s, theories of global justice pay little attention to culture. Theorists of territorial rights, for their part, accept that the state's right to exercise sovereignty within its borders is constrained by due consideration of outsiders' interests. However, when articulating those interests, they restrict themselves to resource distribution and the use of interstate violence. When they consider the value of cultural heritage, they do so in relation to minorities within the state. They do not envisage the possibility that outsiders might have very strong interests in the state's decision with respect to those landmarks which are deemed to have universal value - interests which are strong enough, in fact, to warrant protection at the bar of justice. It is that possibility which I wish to explore.
I am currently working on two research projects: a book on the ethics of espionage and counter-intelligence; projected Tanner Lectures on Human Values, entitled Value, Justice and Humankind's Common Heritage
1. The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence
(Book - manuscript - under contract with OUP. Manuscript workshop on September 25 2020 - To register, see here.)
Espionage and counter-intelligence activities, both real and imagined, weave a complex and alluring story. From Julius Caesar's spies in Britain to the spies scouting medieval market towns under the cloak of their clerical habit, from Francis Walsingham's spy network to the Sun King's ciphers, from the crypto-analysts of Bletchley Park to the Cold War's intelligence war, from the NASA wiretapping scandal to the infiltration of ISIS cells by Chechen forces loyal to Putin - one could tell hundreds of anecdotes. The sources, admittedly of varying degrees of credibility, are there: books (both fiction and non-fiction), articles, special journal issues, and policy papers number in the dozens of thousands. And yet, there is hardly any serious philosophical work on espionage. This is surprising: it is odd that an issue which has proved so enduringly persistent as a practice and fascinating as an object of study should have been ignored by the one academic discipline which claims to have a lot to say on everything - indeed, which has said quite a bit on war itself, of which espionage is a handmaiden.
Granted, moral and political philosophers often make claims of the kind: `in some important sense, X is justified in harming another person Y only if the evidence at his disposal tells him that Y (e.g.) is unjustifiably harming him.' Or: `it counts in favour of a directive/decision being authoritative that it should be made on the basis of the best available evidence.' All of this seems obviously true, but what if the evidence is not available?
Faced with this problem, philosophers have tended to respond by asking whether agents are morally justified (or obliged) to do p, given that they are uncertain as to whether the facts are such as to warrant p, whether p will work, etc. My aim is different: in inquiring about espionage and counter-intelligence, I ask another though related two-pronged question, namely, what agents are morally permitted and obliged to do (a) to reduce the uncertainty under which they operate (the espionage question), (b) to protect themselves from attempts by outsiders to do precisely that (the counter-intelligence question).
In the course of the book, I address the following questions, in the context of foreign policy writ large:
1. On what grounds do members of a political community have a right that information about themselves/their political institutions/their critical infrastructure be regarded as an official secret?
2. On what grounds, if any, may a political community (via its leaders and officials) justifiably appropriate secret information about other political communities without the consent of the latter's members - in effect, spy on them?
3. On the assumption that espionage is under some circumstances morally justified, by what means may intelligence agents and services engage in it? For example, may they deceive, betray, manipulate, bribe? May they intercept communications? May they put pressure on private firms to release confidential data about their customers?
4. If a political community's official secrets are at risk of being 'stolen' by outsiders (and/or by some of its members acting on behalf of those outsiders), what counter-intelligence work may that community's intelligence services justifiably engage in to defend itself? In particular, may they deceive, manipulate, bribe their own or foreign agents as a means to uncover traitors in their midst? May they spy on their fellow citizens?
The chapters are currently as follows:
Ch 1 Setting the stage
Ch 2 Political secrets
Ch 3 Acquiring secrets: A defense of Espionage
Ch 4 Economic espionage
Ch 5 Deception
Ch 6 Treason
Ch 7 Running and recruiting spies
Ch 8 The technology of espionage and counter-intelligence
Ch 9 Mass surveillance
Draft chapters available upon request for review and comment. Please email me at cecile.fabre@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
2. 'Snatching Something from Death': Value, Justice and Humankind's Common Heritage
(To be delivered as the Tanner Lectures on Human Value, Stanford University - provisional date 2021-2022)
When Notre-Dame Cathedral was engulfed by fire on April 15, 2019, the world (it seemed) watched in horror. On Twitter, Facebook, in newspapers and on TV cables ranging as far afield from Paris as South Africa, China and Chile, people expressed their sorrow at the partial destruction of the church, particularly the collapse of the spire, and anguish at what very nearly happened - the complete destruction of a jewel of Gothic architecture whose value somehow transcends time and space. When President Trump threatened to bomb Iran's cultural sites in the closing days of 2019, in defiance of the laws of war, he elicited outrage, not just on behalf of Iranians but on behalf of the world at large: the ancient city of Persepolis, for example, is widely regarded as one the world's most significant archeological sites.
The thought that there are landmarks - some human-made, others natural, others still at the intersection of the human and the natural world - which have universal value is a familiar one. It also raises some deep concerns, not least regarding conflicting interpretations of what it means for a landmark to have outstanding universal value, and, relatedly, regarding the risks of undue cultural appropriation, particularly on the part of former colonial or quasi-colonial powers towards peoples and territories which they once held in their grip. Nevertheless, my aim in these lectures is to offer a philosophical account and defence of World Heritage's central ideal, to wit, that there is such a thing as humankind's common heritage, and that this heritage makes stringent moral demands on us.
In the first lecture, I explore in some detail the notion of humankind's common heritage (for short, humankind's heritage) and of its value. These of course are not the first Tanner Lectures to be delivered on the contradictory pulls of cultural diversity and universal heritage. Michael Walzer, Sheyla Benhabib, Thomas Hill Jr, Joseph Raz, to name but four, have spoken and written eloquently on this issue, against the background of a rich literature in the philosophy of value in general. My focus, however, is on the value of our common, and (as I shall explain in the first lecture) cultural and tangible heritage. I argue that its constitutive elements are universally valuable, and that we, all of us, have reasons to value them, precisely in so far as they are part of that heritage.
In the second lecture, I argue that the protection of humankind's heritage is a duty of justice. This is not a widely held, let alone well developed, view. Whilst the field of heritage studies is replete with claims to the effect that we owe it to future generations to preserve that heritage, the contours and grounds of our duties are left relatively unexplained. As for contemporary moral and political philosophy, at least in the Anglophone world, it has been largely silent on this particular issue. Save for a handful of seminal articles on cultural cosmopolitanism in the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s, theories of global justice pay little attention to culture. Theorists of territorial rights, for their part, accept that the state's right to exercise sovereignty within its borders is constrained by due consideration of outsiders' interests. However, when articulating those interests, they restrict themselves to resource distribution and the use of interstate violence. When they consider the value of cultural heritage, they do so in relation to minorities within the state. They do not envisage the possibility that outsiders might have very strong interests in the state's decision with respect to those landmarks which are deemed to have universal value - interests which are strong enough, in fact, to warrant protection at the bar of justice. It is that possibility which I wish to explore.
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