A minor diversion in the disruption of Australia's relations with Indonesia has been the entanglement of political commentators. Many have wriggled on the hook of their conviction that international relations are an ethics free zone in which the only guiding star is national self interest. But that does not stop them from launching a raft of ethical judgments.
Many assert, for example, that because everyone spies on everyone else in their national self interest, it is all right for Australia to do so. And because everybody knows that everyone spies on everyone else, it is not all right for those spied upon to be upset. about it. But they admit that it may be in the national interest, and so all right, to profess anger when it becomes known that you are spied on.
Most assert that it would not be in the national interest, and so would be wrong, for government leaders caught out spying to admit it, to apologise, or to promise not to do it again. (Why apologising and promising would be wrong is a little puzzling. If international relations are an ethics free zone, it would surely be okay in the national interest to make an apology you don't mean and promises you don't intend to keep.)
Almost all commentators agree that it is all right for governments to conceal from their people and parliaments the fact that they are spying on them and on world leaders. This is in the national interest. But it is wrong, treacherous and roguish for people in the know, like Edward Snowden, to let other people know that the government is spying on them. This is not in the national interest. Just why Snowden can be blamed for not acting in the Australian national interest when he is from the United States and living in Russia is left unclear.
All this diverse moralising comment on an ethics free zone sounds gloriously muddled. But it is coherent if you assume that the security state and its disciples create and enforce its own ethics. That position is a little totalitarian, of course, and its weaknesses in practice can be seen in the current spying affair. So it is worth asking whether we might do better to name ethical principles on which international and national politics can rest. Ethics free zones are sown with landmines.
An ethical approach to spying, lying and handling secrets should begin by reflecting