Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare: The Ethical Paradox of ‘Universal Diffidence’

Abstract

In lieu of the present range of rival and only partial ethical accounts, this essay proposes an underlying interpretive framework for the cyber domain as a Hobbsean state of nature, with its current status of unrestricted conflict constituting a ‘war of all against all’. The fundamental ethical dilemma in Hobbes’s original account of this “original situation” was how to bring about the morally required transition to a more stable political arrangement, comprising a rule of law under which the interests of the various inhabitants in life, property and security would be more readily guaranteed. Hobbes described opposition to this morally requisite transition as arising from ‘universal diffidence’, the mutual mistrust between individuals, coupled with the misguided belief of each in his or her own superiority. His is thus a perfect moral framework from which to analyse agents in the cyber domain, where individual arrogance often seems to surpass any aspirations for moral excellence. With this framework in place, it is briefly noted that the chief moral questions pertain to whether we may already discern a gradual voluntary recognition and acceptance of general norms of responsible individual and state behaviour within the cyber domain, arising from experience and consequent enlightened self-interest (As, for example, in the account of emergent norms found in Lucas (The ethics of cyber warfare. Oxford University Press, New York, 2017)), or whether the interests of the responsible majority must eventually compel some sort of transition from the state of nature by forcibly overriding the wishes of presumably irresponsible or malevolent outliers in the interests of the general welfare (the moral paradox of universal diffidence).