The recent release of documents by Wikileaks on the Iraq war has renewed questions about the ethics of the enterprise.
Wikileaks routinely publishes documents that governments and corporations regard as confidential. The spontaneous responses to Wikileaks are either bolshie pleasure at seeing the powerful embarrassed or serious concern that authority is being flouted. I own to the first. But like any initial response, this is unreliable and needs to be tested.
Two clearly opposed responses to any issue usually suggest that rights are in conflict. That is true also in this case. First, governments need a measure of confidentiality in order to do their work. Much government business demands building relationships and gathering information. In making peace, for example, governments will need to speak secretly with their enemies. They can only do this if the communication remains secret on both sides and respects the safety of the parties to the conversation.
Governments also need people to volunteer the information on which good policy can be based. This can only happen if the government guarantees confidentiality.
On the other hand, citizens also need to be adequately informed of their governments' actions and their consequences. Governments are responsible to their people, who in turn must own their government's actions. So the people must be given an accurate account of what they are asked to own.
These conflicting abstract considerations must be set within the broader context of the ways in which particular governments relate towards their people. Generally modern governments try to portray in a favourable light their policies and their implementation. They do this by concealing unfavourable aspects and by controlling access to information.
In military campaigns like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, they offer simplistic accounts of the reasons for going to war, underestimate the number of people who are killed, injured and otherwise harmed by the war, and exaggerate the differences between the way in which they and their allied forces conduct the war and the way in which the enemy forces behave.
So their citizens receive a sanitised version of the damage done to people, a simplistic and over-optimistic account of its likely result, and a representation of the war as between goodies and