Security Ethics: Commerce and Crime in a Polycentric World

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Frontmatter

2. Chapter 1. State of the Question

   Graham James McAleer

   Abstract

   “Once again we live in a world that has suffered an end of enlightenment, as the strategies formulated after 1945 to prevent civil and international violence, fanaticism and chaos from breaking out again have gradually failed or been abandoned.”

3. Chapter 2. As the World Gets Messier and Messier

   Graham James McAleer

   Abstract

   I take the title for these introductory remarks from John Mearsheimer who used this phase sharing a panel with Francis Fukuyama at Cornell in 2014.

4. Chapter 3. Three Aims

   Graham James McAleer

   Abstract

   Adam Smith boils down business to the axiom of natural price: the maintenance of the person and the recompence of the risque he runs. Not exclusively, but Security Ethics: Commerce and Crime in a Polycentric World is about the vivid end of that risk, the literal end. All business concerns managing risk, but what are the peculiar moral burdens and requirements of risk management in volatile criminal and political conditions? Kaplan believes that we are headed for a period of “comparative anarchy,” when business will be forced to operate in spaces and times where unified government is only fitfully present.

5. Chapter 4. Roadmap

   Graham James McAleer

   Abstract

   Each core chapter has a question guiding the argument and a statement of the upshot for the common good. Core chapters typically have a location, too: an area of the world that is significantly marked by a type of criminality or instability. In addition, most chapters have a specific industry in view from which are drawn true crime examples.

6. Chapter 5. De Vitoria and Pirates

   Graham James McAleer

   Abstract

   Here are just a few ways private industry layers national security in the US. FedEx is at the forefront of private industry cooperation with government for counter-terrorism purposes. FedEx has its own police force (licensed by the state of Tennessee) and is a member of the US Federal government’s task force on anti-terrorism.

7. Chapter 6. Locke and Body Snatchers

   Graham James McAleer

   Abstract

   The outraging of the body is big business, and always has been. Even prehistory was not immune. Forensic evidence has revealed the likelihood that the hand paintings in Neolithic caves that we marvel at were made with severed hands that had had some digits “surgically” shortened.

8. Chapter 7. Hume & Extortionists

   Graham James McAleer

   Abstract

   The previous chapter concerned dignity and modern-day body snatchers. Kidnapping comes in many varieties. In 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped nearly three hundred schoolgirls from Chibok, Nigeria. These girls were kidnapped for the purpose of forced marriages. Besides the human horror, this famous case helps illustrate the issue at the core of this book, the problem of business where state sovereignty is at question.

9. Chapter 8. Adam Smith and Counterfeiters

   Graham James McAleer

   Abstract

   Making knockoffs is not new. In Plato’s Laws, counterfeiters are said to short-change the gods and are to receive a whipping, the frequent outcome of which was death (917d). In the year 1000 AD, the most coveted make of sword in the West was of German manufacture, the Ulfberht. Over a hundred swords of this brand have been found in Viking graves in Scandinavia, and as far away as the Volga. So prestigious was this brand, with its name inlaid on the blade that fakes proliferated, the copycats often misspelling the name.

10. Chapter 9. Bakunin & Gunrunners

    Graham James McAleer

    Abstract

    A theoretical take-away from the book so far is that natural law thinking, with tweaks, edges into anarcho-capitalism. This chapter discusses the other spur of anarchism, anarcho-communism or anarcho-syndicalism. This book is about managing crime and instability. We have looked at cases where business fights back against crime (vigilantes against cartels) and cases where, in the face of criminal risk, the role of business is to solidify moral order (hospital managers’ vigilance regarding supplies in the Red Market). Future chapters also explore the role of business in generating stability.

11. Chapter 10. Huizinga & Robbers

    Graham James McAleer

    Abstract

    One of the greatest of all philosophy books is René Descartes’s Meditations. Written in Holland in 1641, almost all undergraduates exposed to philosophy read the Meditations. It is an epochal work, a brilliant affirmation of rationality, but, in my opinion, it is another book written in Holland that has its thesis confirmed at every turn. Johan Huizinga’s 1938 Homo Ludens proposes that civilizations are built from play, not reason.

12. Chapter 11. Ross & Partizans

    Graham James McAleer

    Abstract

    Let’s quickly take stock and see what’s up next. Chapter 5 looked at business security in the absence of government (pirates). It also discusses something more nuanced: with state sanction, firms going out looking for violence in the hope of profiting (privateering). To assess the morality, use was made of the natural law theory of homicide. Chapter 6 documented Locke’s modification of that theory and, alongside anthropology studies, argues that human dignity requires hospital managers be hypervigilant about their insecure supply chains in the Red Market.

13. Chapter 12. Schmitt & Smugglers

    Graham James McAleer

    Abstract

    It beggars belief that homemade subs smuggle drugs across the Atlantic, but it is true. Built in the forests of Brazil, narco-submarines have been interdicted by Coast Guard off Central American shores and, after transatlantic voyage, Spain.

14. Chapter 13. Kolnai & Spies

    Graham James McAleer

    Abstract

    The epigraph suggests that when it comes to securing systems and digital property, companies—even in the West—are on their own. Sam Antar, the accountant behind the Crazy Eddie fraud of the `80’s, is now a forensic consultant for the FBI. He seconds Cunningham: on account of the increased sophistication of corporate practice, business is the Wild West, the state barely present, or comprehending the systems in play. As Hume pointed out long ago, refinement means value, and so it is no surprise spying is booming. Thriving also because of the way this sophisticated information is housed.

15. Chapter 14. Petraeus & Saboteurs

    Graham James McAleer

    Abstract

    The following reasoning is routinely heard on the college quad. Nature is being destroyed by corporate plunder and most environmentalism is naïve, believing a little tinkering with our technology will arrest the destruction. Naïve because the driver of corporate plunder is Western technoscience, the reigning capitalist worldview that thinks of nature instrumentally.

16. Chapter 15. Security Ethics at the Enlightenment’s Eventide

    Graham James McAleer

    Abstract

    As briefly seen in the last chapter, by logic philosophical positions can be either univocal, equivocal, or analogical. For the principle underlying security, two options are closed from us. If an approximation of the liberal hope for universal democratic commercial order ever existed, the unipolar moment of American-led globalization has passed.

17. Backmatter