The Morality of Cyberattacks
Tom Simpson ( Blavatnik School of Government )
- 17:00 18th June 2014 ( week 6, Trinity Term 2014 )Tony Hoare Room, Robert Hooke Building
This talk enquires into conditions under which cyber attacks are permissible. More specifically, I undertake two tasks. First, I address the kind of harm that is caused by a cyberattack. Existing proposals claim that the harm consists in violation of sovereignty or destruction of information. I argue that the harm is violation of property rights, and show the practical implications of this claim. Second, I address the difficult question of whether offensive cyberattacks are permissible by states against other states and non-state actors. Under conditions where conventions of their use are unsettled, I argue that they are.
Speaker bio
Tom Simpson is the Associate Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, and a Senior Research Fellow at Wadham College, University of Oxford. His doctorate was sponsored by Microsoft Research and he served formerly as a Royal Marines Commando.Share this:
