Ethics and Security in Canadian Foreign Policy: New Dilemmas and Questions

Ethical concerns are inherent in the identification of threats, management of responses, and the maintenance of national and individual well-being. Defence, strategic and security policies have historically been merged in the context of Cold War rivalry and the prominence of traditional threats of invasion and war. A twenty-first century security policy addresses a much wider array of threats and challenges, and thus security policy is confronted with a wider array of ethical and normative concerns. A reexamination of precisely how security and ethics are and have been linked in a changing international context is an important starting point for analysis. Here it is argued that the Cold War complex of security practices and principles had particular implications for the kinds of ethical dilemmas which emerged, and that a decline in this complex leads to a reformulation of these ethical dilemmas and the emergence of new, more complex ones.