power and authority. Furthermore, the breakdown of social homogeneity undermined the sense of communally shared values inculcated by religious practices and institutions.
Finally, the Protestant Reformation promoted a sense of individualism that created a tendency for religious schism, the proliferation of competing sects, and a sense of religious relativism that was only exacerbated by culture contact with non-Christian cultures. One consequence of this relativism was the separation of church and state, which found its most explicit separation in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. All of these tendencies—toward rationaliza-tion, science, and technological development; toward social differentiation and diversity; and toward religious plural-ism—promoted the declining importance of religion relative to secular factors in promoting and controlling human activities. That is, they all contributed to secularization.
In spite of such theories of secularization, it is clear that many issues associated with twenty-first-century science and technology—from abortion to cloning, from nuclear weapons to Internet piracy—are subject, even in such ostensibly secular societies as that of the United States, to religious interest-group influence. Thus, the extent to which secularization adequately describes the general trend that shapes the context in which scientific, technological, and ethical interactions occur remains open to debate. There are even some proponents of cultural diversity and advocates of alternatives to modern European and North American industrial culture, who admit the importance of seculariza-tion, but who oppose the hegemony of the modern science and technology of those cultures and argue for a reenchant-mentor resacralization of the world. These people point to such earth-centered spiritual traditions as those of Native Americans, as models that might promote a healthier and ultimately a more sustainable science and technology. SEE ALSOComte, Auguste; Modernization; Urbanization;
Weber, Max.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berger, Peter. 1969. The Social Reality of Religion. London: Faber and Faber.
Berman, Morris. 1981. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Influential updated Weberian account of secularization. Bruce, Steve. 2002. God Is Dead: Secularization in the West.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Argues that science is more a consequence than a cause of secularization, the chief driving force of which is cultural contact and a consequent awareness of the relativity of values.
Martin, David. 1978. A General Theory of Secularization. Oxford: Blackwell.
McKnight, Stephen A. 1989. Sacralizing the Secular: The Renaissance Origins of Modernity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Strong argument for the religious sources of modern science and, indirectly, of secularization.
Murphy, Howard. 1955. “The Ethical Revolt against Christian Orthodoxy in Early Victorian England.” American Historical Review(July): 800–817.
Makes the argument that many nineteenth-century intellectuals turned to science as a source of values only as a consequence of a crisis of religious faith, rather than as a prelude to religious crisis.
Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. One of many evolutionary accounts of the survival value of religion. This one emphasizes the role of religion in encouraging in-group truth telling. Stark, Rodney. 1963. “On the Incompatibility of Religion and
Science.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 3: 3–20. Updated version of the traditional positivist argument that superior scientific knowledge drives out inferior religious faith.
Richard Olson
SECURITY, CONCEPT
AND HISTORY
Security may refer to the absence of an immediate existential threat or an unacceptable risk. In contrast to safety, security is mostly concerned with intentional threats. As this preliminary description already suggests, security is hard to define. For example, one may ask: What exactly are existential threats? And what makes a threat immediate? Also of note is that the word security has different meanings in different contexts, such as in national security, personal security, social security, and environmental security.
Following is a short overview of different concepts of security in Western philosophy. This overview is not meant to be complete but serves as a base for discussing some current issues of security ethics and policy.
A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
The Latin term securitas was used by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43BCE) to translate three related concepts of Greek philosophy: ataraxie (Epicurus), euthymia (Demo-critus), and apatheia (Stoics). Although it seems unlikely that Cicero actually coined the term, he seems to be the first author who made use of securitas with regard to human existence.
Securitas is derived from s(in)e cura, which literally means “not to worry” but also “not to care.” For Cicero the concept is closely connected to living the good life, because he defines securitas as a state of being free from anxiety (Tusculanae disputationes, 5.42). While the state of securitasis linked with the tranquility of the soul for which
Security, Concept and History
116
ETHICS, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ENGINEERING, 2ND EDITIONa philosopher strives, the ancient concept of securitas should not be confused with the modern notions of subjective security. Both Cicero and Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4BCE–65 CE), who wrote more about securitas than any other ancient author, were suspicious about any kind of affects that might undermine reasonable thinking. Hence, securitas is not about feeling secure, but about remaining calm even when being confronted with evil. Unlike with the current (pro-) active understanding of security, the state of securitas was about knowing and accepting what lies beyond one’s own capabilities. Earthquakes were a prime example of something not worth worrying about because there is nothing humans can do about them. For example, Seneca in Naturales quaestiones(book 4) asked, “But if the earth itself stirs up destruction, what refuge or help can we look for?”
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588– 1679) is sometimes presented as the father of the modern active understanding of security, because in Leviathan (1651) he argued that security was something the state has to provide and maintain. But pax et securitas (peace and security”) was already being used as a slogan by the Roman Empire. It is this promise that Paul the Apostle refers to in his First Epistle to the Thessalonians: “For when they shall say, [pax et securitas]; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape” (1 Thess. 5:3). Other Christian thinkers followed Paul in his critique of the promise of security. Another famous example is the German Reformation leader Martin Luther (1483–1546), who considered feeling secure to be much more problematic than being anxious. The early Christian critique also stemmed from an understand-ing of securitas as beunderstand-ing careless.
Hobbes’s Leviathan contains yet another understand-ing of security, which he regards as beunderstand-ing essential for the existence of societies. In the absence of any “other security, than … their own strength,” people’s life is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 1929, 97). Hobbes claims that without security people live in constant fear. On first sight this appears to be an echo of the ancient understanding of securitas. But for Hobbes, true security requires that the state provide freedom from fear in a broad sense. As he writes in De cive (1651), “I [do not] conceive flight the sole property of fear, but to distrust, suspect, take heed, provide so that they may not fear, is also incident to the fearfull.” Hobbes thus implicates the distinctly modern concept of subjective or perceived security.
Yet another concept of security emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: individual security or security of the person. While “safety” is briefly mentioned in the US Declaration of Independence (1776) as a foundational principle, “security” became one of the
“natural and imprescriptible rights of man” in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). “Security of [the] person” is also presented as a human right in Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
During the twentieth century, security of the person became a key concept to protect the individual from the state, because during the nineteenth century security had become a synonym for “national security.” Most impor-tantly, individual security has become a core element of human security. Besides security of the person, a chapter in the Human Development Report 1994 titled “New Dimen-sions of Human Security” also mentions economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, community security, and political security (United Nations Development Programme 1994).
With regard to human security, the Copenhagen school of security studies has challenged the basic premise of “the more security, the better” (Waever 1995, 47). Building from the understanding of security as a speech act, the claim is that political issues can become securitized (turned into a security issue) and thus are moved outside the realm of everyday politics. Environmental security is one example given by Ole Wæver (1995). While the concept of environmental security mobilized political activity, it failed to acknowledge how environmental threats are often unintentional.
SECURITY ETHICS AND POLICY
Different concepts of security do also entail different relationships between security, ethics, and politics. Yet little has been written on security from an ethical perspective. One exception has been the discussion of ethical issues connected to computer or data security, which can be dated back to the mid-1980s (Bynum 2011). There has been a strong emphasis on the tension between electronic privacy and security, with security perceived as a “core value” (Moor 1997, 29).
With the intensification of surveillance and the introduction of new security technologies in the post-9/ 11 era, discussions about the conflict between privacy or freedom and security have become more common. With regard to ethics there are at least two different discourses: The first and dominant discourse is about how to provide and uphold security ethically. The second and more academic discourse questions the meaning of security and its character as a basic value.
A good example of the first kind is Jeffrey Rosen’s The Naked Crowd(2004), in which the author argues that it is possible to strive for a balance between security and freedom in the design of technologies as well as in setting up regulations. Rosen easily argued, for example, for application of the privacy-by-design principle to body
Security, Concept and History
ETHICS, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ENGINEERING, 2ND EDITION
117
scanners. The question is not just about using or not using a certain kind of security technology. There are also issues of how to minimize undesirable side effects and establish adequate regulations.
Unfortunately, the example of body scanners also points to the limitation of privacy-by-design, because advanced imaging technologies still identify people with nonvisible disabilities or with medical conditions as “suspicious.” This example points up the often overlooked tension between security and justice (Ammicht Quinn and Rampp 2009).
Authors such as Rosen are a little bit too optimistic about the ability to minimize tensions between security and other human values. As Mark Neocleous (2007) has pointed out, the idea of a balance between security and liberty is a myth; security is always the “real political trump card” (Neocleous 2007, 144) in Western liberalism. This dominating character of security is one reason why Wæver and others have argued in favor of “desecuritization”—that is, removing an issue from the arena of security concerns. A successful desecuritization move might also open up new ways of addressing an issue from a long-term perspective.
Helen Nissenbaum’s 2005 paper “Where Computer Security Meets National Security” is one of the few examples in applied ethics in which an explicit connection is made between ethical issues of security and security in the field of international relations.
Ethicists focusing on security technologies do not need to become experts in security studies. It might be advisable to take a two-level approach that not only focuses on how to pursue security ethically but also critically examines the underlying concept of security.
SEE ALSONational Security; Security Technologies.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ammicht Quinn, Regina, and Benjamin Rampp. 2009. “The Ethical Dimension of Terahertz and Millimeter-Wave Imaging Technologies: Security, Privacy, and Acceptability.” Proceed-ings of SPIE7306, Optics and Photonics in Global Homeland Security V and Biometric Technology for Human Identifica-tion VI, 730613 (May 5).
Bynum, Terrell. 2011. “Computer and Information Ethics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/ entries/ethics-computer/
Hobbes, Thomas. 1929. Leviathan. Reprint from the edition of 1651. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1983. De cive. The English Version. Edited by Howard Warrender. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Moor, James H. 1997. “Towards a Theory of Privacy in the
Information Age.” Computers and Society 27 (3): 27–32. Neocleous, Mark. 2007. “Security, Liberty, and the Myth of
Balance: Towards a Critique of Security Politics.” Contemporary Political Theory6 (2): 131–149.
Nissenbaum, Helen. 2005. “Where Computer Security Meets National Security.” Ethics and Information Technology 7 (2): 61–73.
Rosen, Jeffrey. 2004. The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age. New York: Random House. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 1994. “New
Dimensions of Human Security.” In Human Development Report 1994, 22–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http:// hdr.undp.org/en/media/hdr_1994_en_chap2.pdf
Wæver, Ole. 1995. “Securitization and Desecuritization.” In On Security, edited by Ronnie D. Lipschutz, 46–86. New York: Columbia University Press.
Michael Nagenborg
SECURITY TECHNOLOGIES
Following Bruce Schneier (2003, 11), security “is about preventing adverse consequences from the intentional and unwarranted actions of others.” This definition nicely captures some of the characteristics of the understanding of security in current Western discourses: (1) Security is thought of something to be provided and maintained. Security is about “doing something” (Molotch 2012). (2) Security is about preventing future events. (3) Security measures might infringe on the freedom of others.
It is common to differentiate between security and safety. Whereas safety addresses accidents, natural dis-asters, and human-made catastrophes, security deals with attacks and (serious) criminal acts. As Langdon Winner has argued in “Technology Studies for Terrorists: A Short Course” (2006), however, there is considerable overlap with regard to technology design, because any uninten-tional damage may as well be brought on intenuninten-tionally. This also holds true for disaster preparedness. Being able, for example, to provide medical support to a large number of casualties is as helpful in case of a natural or human-made disaster as it is in case of a terrorist attack.
A TYPOLOGY OF SECURITY TECHNOLOGIES
Because of the overlap between safety and security in the area of disaster preparedness, the focus of the following typology is on technologies that are being used to prevent attacks. Weapons are outside the scope of this entry, because they raise additional and different ethical issues. But the use of military technology in the context of security is briefly addressed in the final section.
Limiting the options of others is a fundamental principle in providing security. Therefore, controlling the access to places and resources (including information) has become a central security issue. For example, keys and locks allow restricting the access to a certain place or
Security Technologies
