This is Philosophy Bites with Meenage of Warburton and Me, David Edmunds.

This episode of Philosophy Bites is sponsored by the new European newspaper, the leading

pan-European politics and culture periodical.

States have practiced espionage for millennia, but philosophers have had very little to say

about it.

Until now, by going undercover and infiltrating the deep state, I've managed to establish

that Cecil Farb is a political philosopher, Oxford, and author of Spying Through Glass

Darkly.

Cecil Farb, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure.

The topic we're going to talk about is the ethics of spying.

Now, that's an unusual topic for Philosophy.

Maybe we could just begin by saying what spying is.

So I think of spying in the context in which I'll write about it, which is the context

of foreign policy conducted by political communities, in general, and states in particular,

as the practice of trying to acquire secrets about other states, other political communities,

which we think they don't want us to have.

That's how I think of espionage, which is not very controversial, it's a standard definition.

So why do people need to do this?

Well, they need to do this because they are concerned with protecting the interests

of their citizens.

...