Journal article
The morality of treason
- Abstract:
- Treason is one of the most serious legal offences that there are, in most if not all jurisdictions. Laws against treason are rooted in deep-seated moral revulsion about acts which, in the political realm, are paradigmatic examples of breaches of loyalty. Yet, it is not altogether clear what treason consists in: someone’s traitor is often another’s loyalist. In this paper, my aim is twofold: to offer a plausible conceptual account of treason, and to partly rehabilitate traitors. I focus on informational treason, as the act of passing secret intelligence to foreign actors without authorization. I argue that informational treason is sometimes justified, indeed morally mandatory; even when it is morally wrong, its beneficiaries are sometimes justified, indeed obliged, to make use of the intelligence thereby provided.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, 320.4KB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s10982-020-09392-5
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Law and Philosophy More from this journal
- Volume:
- 39
- Issue:
- 4
- Pages:
- 427–461
- Publication date:
- 2020-06-26
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-05-13
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1573-0522
- ISSN:
-
0167-5249
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1102519
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1102519
- Deposit date:
-
2020-05-20
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Cécile Fabre
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record