In Plato’s Ring of Gyges tale, Glaucon (Plato’s older brother) challenges Socrates to defend his position that preference to being a moral being is intrinsic. The tale is of Gyges, a shepherd, who enters a cave and discovers a bigger-than-life corpse that is wearing a golden ring. Gyges removes the ring and keeps it to himself. He later learns that the ring gives him the power to become invisible, proceeds to seduce the queen, kill her husband, and become the king of Lydia. Glaucon asks would an individual be so moral that they can resist the temptation of performing an act knowing they will never get caught (“Ring”). He stipulates that if the ring were given to good and bad people the end result would be the same. Glaucon also argues that humans are moral because they are forced to by law and that they won’t remain moral if they had the means to get away with it. He also goes on to state that:
"If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice."
In the past few years, through the release of the Edward Snowden papers, we’ve had a glimpse into what the National Security Agency (NSA) can do in terms of surveillance. We’ve also seen what the first cyber warfare attack did to the nuclear centrifuges in Natanz, Iran. We now know it as operation Stuxnet.
In 2011, Iran's Natanz nuclear facility was attacked by a malicious computer worm which that crippled at least 15-20% of their centrifuges by spring them out of control. It was the world’s first digital weapon. It has been since confirmed in David E. Sanger’s book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, that is was the United States with the help of Israel that developed and execute Stuxnet. The purpose was to hinder and set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
So the question becomes: having the best technology and minds, should the US conduct cyber warfare because, of the end of the day, we are the judge, jury, and executioner? Since we legally don’t answer to anyone else for our actions, should we condone cyber warfare? Plato says we should condone it and that if we don’t we would be “wretched idiots” if we did not use the power we had. I happen to agree with Plato due to the fact that we live in a world where every industrialize nation has their Ring of Gyges. While I believe we should doing within the scope of our laws, I believe we have the right to conduct with our Rings of Gyges because we have the most to lose in regards to having our network infrastructure bought down.
The next evolutionary question that surges is: should our moral actions (spying and conducting cyber warfare) be detached from consequences? That is another point the Ring of Gyges touches on:
"This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice; –it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honored by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did."
The irony of all this is that the code for Stuxnet is out there on the internet for anyone to recode and reuse, even possibly against us. At this point, the issue now becomes: do we value justice and a what price? Will we follow justice because of its end result or because it’s intrinsic in us to do so? Do those that weld the Ring of Gyges ask for justice, or is it only those at the receiving end who are its victims call for justice? I happen to agree with Plato when he states that anyone who can get away without being punished or caught will do so.
In conclusion, human nature will do wrong if it can get away with it, but at the same time, human nature doesn’t like being at the receiving end of wrong. Since we don’t like being at the receiving end of wrong, we developed a social contract of not to wrong each other. In the case of cyber warfare, it’s now the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. And according to Plato, these contracts or accords are origin of justice in our societies.
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Plato/plato_dialogue_the_ring_of_gyges.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/confirmed-us-israel-created-stuxnet-lost-control-of-it/
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