Adam Henschke

Duties to Defend: Ethical Challenges of Cyber-Defense

This chapter asks “what duties does a state have to defend its citizens from cyber-attack?” While the idea that a state has duties for its citizen’s security is not novel, the cyber-domain poses a new context for what those duties are and how they ought to be discharged. Taking the moral precepts of just war theory as a foundation, this chapter seeks to define some of those duties that the state has in the cyber-domain by asking the following questions: can a cyber-attack meaningfully be said to be an armed attack justifying military response from the defender? What forms of cyber-response are permitted? And what services and resources should a state provide to its citizens to protect against cyber-attack?

Weapons for Pacifism: Reconciling Ideas in Conflict

The very idea of a pacifist weapon seems to be an oxymoron—pacifism is the opposition to killing and war, yet weapons are designed to kill. However, given the large and primarily negative impacts of war, if we take seriously the notion of Value Sensitive Design (VSD), that the design of technologies is not value neutral, we may have a moral duty to design pacifist military weapons. This chapter looks at four sorts of weapons—a space defense system like the US “Star Wars” program, nuclear weapons, cyberweapons and “warbots”—to present a matrix of “pacifist weapons” that differ significantly in how the design of the weapons relates to the value placed on pacifism. Henschke’s analysis shows that pacifist weapons are indeed plausible, that the term is not oxymoronic, but that our underpinning notions of pacifism and design impact the sorts of weapons that pacifism might require.

Cybersecurity, trustworthiness and resilient systems: guiding values for policy

Cyberspace relies on information technologies to mediate relations between different people, across different communication networks and is reliant on the supporting technology. These interactions typically occur without physical proximity and those working depending on cybersystems must be able to trust the overall human–technical systems that support cyberspace. As such, detailed discussion of cybersecurity policy would be improved by including trust as a key value to help guide policy discussions. Moreover, effective cybersystems must have resilience designed into them. This paper argues that trustworthy cybersystems are a key element to resilient systems, and thus are core to cybersecurity policy. The paper highlights the importance of trustworthiness for resilient cybersystems. The importance of trustworthiness is shown through a discussion of three events where trustworthiness was the target or casualty of cyberattacks: Stuxnet, hacking of communications and the Edward Snowden revelations. The impact of losing trust is highlighted, to underpin the argument that a resilient cybersystem ought to design in trustworthiness. The paper closes off by presenting a general set of policy implications arising from recognition of the interplay between trust, trustworthiness and resilience for effective cybersecurity.

Counterterrorism policy in liberal-democratic societies: locating the ethical limits of national security

ABSTRACT This article considers the moral limits to national security policies. While it may seem self-evident that there are, and ought to be, limits to counterterrorism policies, there is an increasingly widespread public opinion that political leaders can, and must, do everything they can to protect against terrorist acts. Liberal-democratic societies are facing the threat of domestic terrorism, and for a political leader to say that ‘we cannot stop all terrorist acts and, indeed, neither should we’ would sound the death knell for their career. This article seeks to specify the limiting conditions around counterterrorism policy by reference to policymakers’ public justifications offered for counterterrorism policy. This article presents three normative elements that underpin counterterrorism policy to show that there are important reasons to limit counterterrorism policy, and to suggest that these limits ought to be recognised by political leaders and citizens alike in liberal-democratic societies. Having set out three limiting factors on counterterrorism policy, the article then shows that these factors do indeed play a role in UK counterterrorism policy development—that is, in recognising the justificatory apparatus for national security policies, limiting conditions ought to be found that are sensible to, and accepted by, the proponents of such policies.

Opportunity Costs: Scarcity and Complex Medical Machines

This chapter looks at the problem of resource scarcity, and the development of medical machines; in particular, the research, development and population wide implementation (RD&I) of complex medical machines. It raises a series of questions about how we make decisions regarding the distribution of scarce healthcare resources and posits that we ought to pay special attention to the distribution of resources for RD&I underpinning complex medical machines. This chapter covers some common issues in allocation of healthcare resources to then focus on the RD&I of complex medical machines as an important area requiring discussion.