On Security

Chandran Kukathas
Department of Government
London School of Economics
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The purpose of this paper is to undertake a philosophical analysis of the concept

of security as it is, or might be, deployed in the study of politics. Though the problem of

security has acquired especial urgency in recent years, the issue is one that has concerned

philosophers for as long as there has been reflection on political life and the problem of

political order. It would therefore be difficult to say anything very new about security.

My concern is thus to do no more than offer a re-statement of the nature of the problem in

terms that might be useful in contemporary discussions. To this end, this paper tries to

answer two questions: what is security, and how do we evaluate its importance given that

it is, in the end, one of a number of values we might pursue? To answer the first question,

we need to establish whose security is at issue: what is the entity whose security is

ultimately the proper object of concern? To answer the second question we need to

understand how security relates to other important values, such as, for example, freedom,

justice, prosperity, friendship, and happiness—to name just a few. The first part of this

paper will focus on the conceptual question, and the second part on the evaluative

question.

The concept of security

Security is the assurance of safety or protection from danger in the pursuit of one’s

interests, including at a minimum the interest in survival. To be secure is to be assured

that one is not in danger or threatened in the pursuit of one’s particular ends. Perfect

security is probably unattainable since there is always some risk that one’s aims or

purposes will be thwarted and the pursuit of even the most basic interest in survival

endangered. Security is therefore always a matter of degree. To appreciate why this is so,
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however, it is important first to ask who or what is the proper subject of security. Whose

interests are at stake when security is at issue?

The only entities for which security matters are entities that are capable of having

interests. These are entities that have interests of their own that are not reducible to the

interests of the elements that might comprise them. The only entities that can have

interests are entities with the capacity for agency. To have agency is to have the capacity

to make a decision whether or not to pursue some course of action. There are three

possible kinds of agent: (some) nonhuman animals, individual humans, and some

collectivities of individual humans. Plants, on this account, do not have interests—even

though we can talk quite coherently about what factors or conditions are good for

plants—for they are incapable of agency. It makes no sense to speak (except perhaps

metaphorically) of the security of plants. It also makes no sense to speak of the interests

of inanimate objects, or landscapes, or forms of experience (like art or music) or the

universe, for none of these entities can act. It might be possible that certain nonhuman

animals can act and are, thus, capable of having interests. I propose, however, to leave

aside the case of nonhuman animals and the possibility of their having interests 1 (and,

therefore, a concern with security) and to focus on the latter two kinds of agent:

individual humans and collectivities of individual humans.

Human individuals are the obvious example of entities with interests. To have an

interest presupposes a capacity to have ends or purposes, and this capacity attaches only

to entities with the capacity for agency. To say that something is in someone’s interest is

1
Though see the interesting argument in Robert Goodin, Carole Pateman, and ,
‘Simian Sovereignty’, Political Theory
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to say more than that that thing is good for that person. It is to say that that thing serves

the purposes or ends that person has (or, more controversially, ought to have). So, for

example, to say that chicken soup is good for someone who is sick and malnourished is

not the same as saying that eating chicken soup is in the interest of that person. It would

not, for example, be in the interest of a devout Brahmin to consume animal products if his

most important ends involve staying true to his religious commitments—even if eating

chicken soup would be good for him when he’s sick. In his capacity as an agent he has

interests, which are conditional upon the ends or purposes he has adopted. If his aim is to

continue to live a life of religious devotion, it is not in his interest to behave in ways that

violate his convictions, even if it is in his interest to get well. Good can be absolute, but

interests are always conditional. Security is something that can matter only to an entity

that has interests, and human individuals are the paradigmatic example of such an entity.

It can, of course, make perfect sense to speak of an interest in security. To have an

interest in security is to have an interest in being assured of being able to pursue other

interests in safety or without danger to self.

Human individuals are not, however, the only example of entities with interests.

Some forms of human collectivity are also capable of having interests and are themselves

agents—entities with ends or purposes, and with the capacity to make decisions in pursuit

of those ends. Not all human collectivities, however, are entities of this kind, so it is

important to distinguish the different types. Humans gather together in a wide variety of

collectivities, ranging from families and neighborhoods to communities and societies;

from clubs and trade unions to political parties and governments. The most significant

collectivity of which individuals are a part, of course, is the state. Not all of these
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collectivities have interests of their own. The only collectivities that do are the ones we

might call associations.

An association is a collectivity of persons joined for the purpose for carrying out

some action or actions. An association thus has the capacity for action or agency, and

because it is a collectivity it must therefore also have some structure of authority through

which one course of action or another can be determined. Since authority is a relation that

exists only among agents, an association is a collectivity of agents. Other collectivities of

persons, such as classes or crowds or neighborhoods or categories (like bachelors or

smokers or amputees) are not associations, for they do not have the capacity for agency

and have no structures of authority to make decisions. A mob is not an association: even

though it appears to act, it is no more an agent than is a herd.

On this understanding, society is not itself an association, for it is not an agent. It

may be made up of or contain a multiplicity of associations and individual agents, but it

is not an association or agent. Unless, that is, it is constituted as one by an act or process

of incorporation. So, for example, Californian society is not an association, but the state

of California is: for while a society is not, a polity is an association—a political

association. In pre-civil war America, the southern states were a society, since they

amounted to a union of groups and communities living under common laws—some of

which sharply distinguished it from the North—but they did not form a single (political)

association until they constituted themselves as the Confederacy. A society is a

collectivity of people who belong to different communities or associations that are

geographically contiguous. The boundaries of a society are not easy to specify, since the

contiguity of societies makes it hard to say why one society has been left and another
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entered. One way of drawing the distinction would be to say that, since all societies are

governed by law, a move from one legal jurisdiction to another is a move from one

society to another. But this has to be qualified because law is not always confined by

geography, and people moving from one region to another may still be bound by laws

from their places of origin or membership. Furthermore, some law deals with relations

between people from different jurisdictions. That being true, however, a society could be

said to exist when there is some established set of customs or conventions or legal

arrangements specifying how laws apply to persons whether they stay put or move from

one jurisdiction to another. (Thus there was not much of a society among the different

highland peoples of New guinea when they lived in isolation from one another, though

there was a society in Medieval Spain when Jews, Muslims and Christians coexisted

under elaborate legal arrangements specifying rights and duties individuals had within

their own communities and as outsiders when in others.)

A society is different, however, from a community, which is in turn different from

an association. A community is a collectivity of people who have some interests in

common and who therefore are united by bonds of commitment to those interests. Those

bonds may be relatively weak, but they are enough to distinguish communities from mere

aggregates or classes of person. However, communities are not agents and thus are not

associations: they are marked by shared understandings but not by shared structures of

authority. A community itself does not have interests. At the core of that shared

understanding is an understanding of what issues or matters are of public concern to the

collectivity and what matters are private. Though other theories of community have held

that a community depends for its existence on a common locality (Robert McIver) or ties
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of blood kinship (Ferdinand Tonnies), this account of community allows for the

possibility of communities that cross geographical boundaries. Thus, while it makes

perfect sense to talk of a village or a neighborhood as a community, it makes no less

sense to talk about, say, the university community, or the scholarly community, or the

religious community. One of the important features of a community is the fact that its

members draw from it elements that make up their identities—though the fact that

individuals usually belong to a number of communities means that it is highly unlikely (if

not impossible) that an identity would be constituted entirely by membership of one

community. For this reason, almost all communities are partial communities rather than

all-encompassing or constitutive communities.

An important question, then, is whether there can be such a thing as a political

community, and whether the state is such a community. On this account of community,

there can be a political community, which is defined as a collectivity of individuals who

share an understanding of what is public and what is private within that polity. Whether

or not a state is a political community will depend, however, on the nature of the state in

question. States that are divided societies are not political communities. Iraq after the

second Gulf War, and Sri Lanka since the civil war (and arguably earlier), are not

political communities because there is serious disagreement over what comprises the

public. Arguably, Belgium is no longer a political community, though it remains a state.

Now, there is one philosopher who has denied that a political society or a state—

or at least, ‘a well-ordered democratic society’—can be a community. According to John

Rawls, such a society is neither an association nor a community. A community, he

argues, is ‘a society governed by a shared comprehensive, religious, philosophical, or

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moral doctrine.’ 2 Once we recognize the fact of pluralism, Rawls maintains, we must

abandon hope of political community unless we are prepared to countenance the

oppressive use of state power to secure it. 3 However, this view rests on a very narrow

understanding of community as a collectivity united in affirming the same comprehensive

doctrine. It would make it impossible to recognize as communities a range of

collectivities commonly regarded as communities, including neighborhoods and

townships. While some common understanding is undoubtedly necessary, it is too much

to ask that communities share as much as a ‘comprehensive doctrine.’ On a broader

understanding of community, a state can be a political community. However, it should be

noted that on this account political community is a much less substantial thing than many

might argue. It is no more than a ‘partial community’, being only one of many possible

communities to which individuals might belong.

Since only associations are agents with interests, the concept of security applies

only to associations. To be secure is to be assured of being able to pursue one’s ends in

safety and without danger to self. For this to be so, the entity for which security can

matter must be one with interests—one that is an agent with a capacity to determine

whether and how to pursue (or not pursue) ends of its own. A society or a community or

a crowd does not have interests or ends, being made up of individuals and associations of

individuals with ends of their own. To speak of society’s security or the security of a

community is to refer to the security of the different agents found in society rather than

2
Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, second
ed.1996), 42.
3
Ibid., 146n.
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the security of any collective. A society is not a corporate entity and has no interests of its

own. Associations are corporate entities.

Corporations, in all their variety, however, do have interests and are agents—and

therefore can be subjects of security. Corporate entities include organizations of all kinds,

from clubs and businesses to universities and churches, to provinces and states. Although

all these associations are made up of individuals, it is important to note how they differ

from other forms of collectivity such as communities or societies. The crucial difference

is that, although corporate entities are made up of individuals the corporation’s interests

and the interests of its members need not converge. The corporation may have interests of

its own. What is in the interests of the corporate entity may not be in the interests of its

members. Consider some examples. A trade union in a market with a severe labor

shortage would still have an interest in survival but it might not be in its members

interests for it to do so if the union in effect reduced the opportunities each would have as

a free agent. The union leadership in such circumstances would no doubt try hard to

retain members even if its services were of no real benefit to them. It would not be in the

interest of a company to be taken over and incorporated into another company and thus to

lose its identity altogether, even though it might be in the interest of all its shareholders. It

would not be in the interest of a university to be closed down, its assets sold off, its

faculty and staff redeployed to other colleges of higher education, and its students

enrolled elsewhere, even though this might be of benefit to faculty, staff, and students. It

would not be in the interest of a state to be divided into two or more political entities as

different parts secede to form new polities, though it might serve the interests of the

citizens for it to do so.

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Although all agents have interests, corporate entities differ from individuals in

that they really have only one fundamental end: survival. Individual agents have different

purposes or ends they might pursue, and their interest is in being able to pursue those

ends successfully. But corporate entities have no ends that are unrelated to their survival.

Their interests—in acquiring more members, or becoming wealthier, or more powerful—

serve no other end than endurance into the future. Corporations, unlike individuals, are

potentially immortal. Mere survival, however, is seldom if ever the ultimate end of any

individual; surviving is simply something that might be necessary to achieving other

goals, though it is not unusual for individuals to sacrifice their lives for ends that are not

achievable by any other means.

An important implication of these differences between human and corporate

agents is that security matters to them in different ways. More significantly, their

concerns with security might not be in harmony but in tension—or even in conflict—with

one another. Human individuals want security because they require safety to pursue their

interests and their ultimate ends. Their pursuit of those ends might not always be

compatible with the security of some corporate entities, for they might endanger the

growth, or even the very survival, of those entities.

One especially significant tension is that between the interests of the individual

and those of the political associations of which he might be a part. Whether that political

association is a local district or a province or a state, the individual may have interests

that are not in harmony with those of the association. It might, for example, be in the

interest of the polity to expand—to take in more territory and increase its membership

and financial resources—but not in the interest of its existing members that it expand. A
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larger local government might be less effective in supplying necessary services if it

grows too large; and a political association like the EU might not serve the interests of

existing members if new and poorer members are immediately eligible for economic

subsidies that must be paid for by the older and wealthier member countries.

It should also be noted that there is always also a potential conflict between the

interests of members of a corporate entity or association and the agents who act on the

association’s behalf. The agents of an association who direct or manage its operations

usually have a direct interest in its perpetuation since they benefit from it whether or not

it serves the interests of the members. This is the principal-agent problem. Thus managers

of business corporations will try to fend off hostile takeovers because they probably stand

to lose even if shareholders gain. Agents within government will typically try to protect

their departments even its their functions are unnecessary since the agents benefit from

the departments’ continued existence. A government agency charged with a security role

is rarely, if ever, going to find its management arguing that its role is redundant or that it

should be abolished or its responsibilities absorbed into some other entity better suited to

the task. In this respect, it should not be surprising when agents of the state pursue the

security interests of the state, or more precisely, of their own particular agencies within

the state, even when those conflict with the interests of individuals and other associations

within the state. It should also be noted, however, that it is not only employees of the

state who have incentives of this kind. Many others who benefit from the workings of

governments and government agencies have strong motives to encourage policies and

practices that are to their advantage. Private contractors who provide goods and services
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to the state will invariably argue that these serve the interests of the state or of the public,

when they might serve only the interests of the contractors.

To understand security, then, we need to recognize that it is a good that attaches

to agents—entities with interests in pursuing their ends. Security is enjoyed when an

agent has the capacity to pursue its ends in safety or free from threat to the successful

pursuit of those ends. But what constitutes such a threat? This question is of critical

importance because our pursuit of our ends can be impeded by a great number of factors.

Most obviously, as individual agents we can be impeded by threats to our physical safety.

Yet we might also be restricted in our efforts to secure our goals by a lack of resources,

our fear of the attitudes of others, or the high risk of failure due to economic,

environmental, legal, or political circumstances. One response to this observation has

been to broaden the understanding of security. Thus, modern discussions appeal to the

idea of ‘human security’, drawing from the 1994 Human Development Report published

by the United Nations Development Programme. In this analysis, human security requires

1) economic security (such as freedom from poverty); 2) food security; 3) health security

(meaning access to health care); 4) environmental security; 5) personal security (from

violence, for example); 6) community security (including the capacity of traditional

cultures and groups to survive); and 7) political security (including the enjoyment of civil

and political rights). 4

4
The UNDP definition has been widely discussed and has generated a substantial
literature. For recent discussions see Roland Paris, ‘Human Security: Paradigm
Shift or Hot Air?’, International Security 26: 2, 2001, 87-102; Gary King and
Christopher J.L.Murray, ‘Rethinking Human Security’, Political Science
Quarterly 116:4, 2001-2002, 585-610.
 13

The motivation for broadening the concept of security to encompass these

elements was to get away from the limitations of those notions of security that considered

only the security of states from military threats as relevant concerns. Security, it was

argued, was a matter of human well-being, and not just a matter of state survival. The

main objection to the broadening of the concept of security has been that, by making

security embrace so much it has meant that security has come to mean very little. If

everything is relevant to security, the concept of security ceases to have any independent

utility.

There is a further reason, however, for being wary of the expansion of the concept

of security. In the end, security is only one among a range of values that individuals and

other agents might pursue. The question is, given the variety of values that matter, how

are some to be traded off against the others, given that not all values can be pursued or

enjoyed concurrently all the time? If security is defined in terms of the capacity to enjoy

all, or even many, other values, it would become difficult, if not impossible to speak

coherently of trading or sacrificing one good for another. For example, it should be

possible to recognize that economic prosperity and personal safety are ends that might

come into conflict in some circumstances. In time of war, resources are diverted to

military efforts, and if the war is of long duration the population will become poorer.

Money spent on guns is not available to spend on butter or silks. Or to take another

example, laws guaranteeing political freedoms might make it possible for everyone to

speak freely and publish or broadcast a range of opinions without fear, but thereby make

it harder to control violent groups that rely on these political freedoms to recruit

followers.
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The fact that security is a tradeable good leads us then to the larger question: what

would make for a defensible theory of security? The question here is not simply a

question about the concept of security. The question now is one about how important

security is when it is considered in the context of the range of values that are important

for human flourishing.

A theory of security

There many things that have been considered important for human beings to live valuable

lives, and although there is widespread agreement on many of them, there is also

considerable controversy here. Many people hold freedom to be of fundamental

importance, and justice to be no less so. Utilitarians believe that all that matters

ultimately is human happiness, with happiness understood subjectively and without any

reference to objective goods. Believers in some religious traditions hold that piety is what

is of primary importance, although there are enormous differences of view on the issue of

what piety demands. And for others still, the preservation of the community or the

cultural tradition might be of primary importance, for the good life can only be lived in

the context of a community within which human life can have meaning. Given this

diversity of views of what values matter, where does security fit as a value that should be

pursued?

One obvious and powerful answer is that security is the most important of human

values because it is the one upon which all other values depend. For human beings to

flourish they must, above all, be safe: until they are secure, they cannot pursue other

ends, and ideals like justice and freedom are worthless without security. The most
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rigorous defender of this view was Thomas Hobbes. Human beings, in his analysis, faced

a fundamental choice: submit to a sovereign power—a political authority of their own

creation—which would preserve peace, or languish in the state of nature which was, in

essence, a state of war. Because the condition of war was so horrendous, it was in

everyone’s interest to establish a sovereign with unlimited authority and, thus, the power

to do whatever was necessary to preserve peace. Any division or diminution of the

sovereign’s power was unacceptable according to Hobbes because it risked the

breakdown of authority and relapse into war—a condition in which no one was secure.

To ensure this could not happen, each and every one was obliged to show unquestioning

obedience to the sovereign—unless the sovereign threatened the individual’s life,

whether directly by attacking him or indirectly by placing his life in danger. Security, for

Hobbes, meant not being in fear for one’s life. The threat to that security came from other

persons who were naturally inclined to compete for the same scarce goods. Such a threat

could only be eliminated by creating a greater power to hold all other persons at bay.

For Hobbes, security means safety: it means not living in fear of violent death.

Because such a death is the worst of all fates that could befall a person, no other value is

worth risking security for. So, for example, freedom cannot be invoked as a reason for

limiting the sovereign’s authority, for declarations of individual independence threaten

security. Thus the only freedom the subject may have is the freedom the sovereign leaves

him when its laws are silent and do not prohibit action. Where the law does prohibit the

subject must accept the loss of freedom. Equally, the subject cannot claim that the

sovereign’s commands are unjust or invoke justice as a reason for failing to obey political

authority. Whatever the sovereign commands is just.

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In Hobbes’s theory security is of primary importance, and the state that provides it

must therefore be established so firmly that it is immune to collapse. This means

establishing authority that is, more or less absolute—possessing the sole capacity to use

force, and bearing the right to exercise it however it sees fit. It’s not, however, that

Hobbes believes that security can only be preserved by the exercise of force. For security

to be preserved, the legitimacy of authority must be beyond question; and to bring this

about it will be necessary to educate the population so that all properly understand that

they are obliged to obey every sovereign command. Security depends on the resilience of

the state; and that, in turn, depends on people thinking rightly. The task of the state is to

preserve security by preserving itself. Whatever it does to preserve itself is warranted, for

without it there is no security.

Powerful though it is, Hobbes’s view suffers from a number of weaknesses. Most

obviously, his view falsely assumes that the alternatives are extremes: complete security

or a complete lack of it. Yet security is not an absolute good and its alternative is not civil

war: there are a great many states in between, and the choice we have is not between the

presence and absence of security but among varying degrees of security. How much

security we might want is a function of what we are willing to sacrifice to ensure our

safety.

Hobbes’s view is also open to criticism on the grounds that it assumes that the

interests of the sovereign or the state and the interests of its subjects are congruent or in

harmony. We secure the safety of the people by establishing the security of the state. Yet

as we saw earlier, the state, once established, is an entity with interests of its own; and its

interests may well conflict with those of the individuals who comprise it. Hobbes
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assumes that the state will pursue peace. But states can also act in ways that are

destructive of society and individual security. It can do so by engaging in foreign wars

that endanger the lives of its subjects and weaken the social fabric. It can do so by taking

sides with some of its subjects against others, so that rather than preserving the security

of all individuals it simply allows some groups within society successfully to exploit

other groups. For dramatic examples, think of the regimes of Saddam Hussein or of

apartheid South Africa.

For Hobbes, security is the condition of all other values. Without it, he suggests,

there can be no civilization: no arts, no letters, no cultivation of the earth, for the fruits of

all our endeavors would be uncertain without a guarantee of safety. But this view

exaggerates how much security we need to survive, and even to live moderately good

lives. Even in times of war, both civil and international, there is life: humans manage to

work, produce, celebrate, and generally live life. Though life would go better without

war, it is not always eliminated by it. The point here is not that war is good, but that

war—the condition of insecurity—is a matter of degree. Humans can flourish even with a

good deal of insecurity. This is why it makes perfect sense to trade off a little security for

other goods, such as freedom, which are important not so much for survival as for life to

be richer and more meaningful.

For Hobbes, security was the foundation of the good life. A very different view is

presented by the American philosopher, John Rawls, who argues that the foundation of

any good society is justice. If Hobbes thought security made justice possible, Rawls held

that no society could be stable and endure for long if it was not just. Justice, he famously

observed, is the first virtue of social institutions. Aside from thinking that justice was
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required as a matter of morality, Rawls held that a society could only remain stable in the

long run if its institutions were just. The task of political philosophy was to articulate a

conception of justice that could sustain the allegiance of the population and thus bring

stability to the regime that operated according to those principles.

The contrasting position, according to Rawls, was the view that social stability

could be secured by careful institutional design that kept competing interests in check.

For example, the argument put by James Madison in the Federalist Papers suggests that

social stability was the product of a balance of power: a sound constitution would arrange

matters such that the interests and ambitions of one group was checked by the interests

and ambitions of others. Stability would the result of no one group being able to gain a

permanent or long-term advantage over the others. In Rawls’s view, such a solution is

inadequate because the stability it brings is fragile, founded as it is on a happy

coincidence of circumstances. If the balance of power changes, however, stability and

social unity would be threatened. What was needed, Rawls argued, was to secure stability

and social unity in long-run equilibrium; or to put it another way, what was needed was

social institutions that were more resilient.

In essence, Rawls suggested that stability required rule by a regime that was

legitimate, and legitimacy could not be sustained without justice. An unjust society was

by its very nature unstable. In such a society, people might comply with the laws; but

their compliance was the product not of any deep commitment to abiding by the law but

simply the result of strategic calculations of what served their immediate interests. The

trouble is, in such a condition, a change in circumstances could lead quickly to different

calculations. For people to feel a deeper loyalty to society’s institutions, those institutions
 19

would have to be ones that everyone could accept as founded on an understanding that

was consistent with their ethical beliefs. In short, people, would be loyal to institutions

they saw as morally worthy—as just—but not to institutions they saw as nothing more

than the product of a political settlement or a compromise. To find security, the Rawlsian

message seems to say, pursue justice. Only justice can hold society together.

The Rawlsian argument is powerful and, in many ways, compelling. Though this

is not quite how Rawls puts it, his view brings to mind the popular slogan: no peace

without justice. An unjust peace, this thought proposes, can never endure, for it only

suppresses disaffections that will surely rise to the surface when the opportunity emerges.

Is this how we should think of security: as something that must ultimately be grounded in

justice?

The main problem with this view is that it rests on two assumptions, at least one

of which is untenable. The first assumption is that there is a correct conception of justice;

and the second is that it is possible for people to agree on what the correct conception of

justice amounts to. The first proposition might be defensible in principle, but the second

is almost certainly unsustainable. Far from justice being what unites us, justice is all too

often what divides us. Though we often converge on the same answers to moral

questions, we frequently find ourselves in serious disagreement with others over

fundamental issues. Some societies are deeply divided precisely because of such

disagreements: Northern Ireland for much of the twentieth century and the Holy Land

that is home to Israelis and Palestinians are two obvious examples. In such cases,

instability is perhaps the result of the absence of justice; but the problem is that there are
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radically different views about what justice requires. The more each community of such

societies demands justice, the less stable the society would be.

The truth in Rawls’s analysis lies in his recognition that the stability of social

institutions rests on people’s good opinion of them. And people assess those institutions

not only for their tendency to be advantageous to them personally but also for their

tendency to be morally defensible. People have a sense of justice and, as Rawls rightly

notes, this is a fundamental feature of our nature. But it does not follow from this that

institutions will secure people’s allegiance if they are in fact just. First, this cannot be so

when people differ—sometimes only a little, but sometimes substantially—about what

justice requires. Second, even though justice is important to people, it is not the only

thing that matters. Other values, such as freedom, happiness, piety, and prosperity, also

matter. Although some philosophers have proclaimed: let justice done though the earth

might perish, very few people see things that way. Since perfect justice is unattainable it

should not be pursued to the exclusion of all other ends. The key is to find some balance

among these different values that matter for human flourishing.

Yet if these two alternative theories of security, presented by Hobbes and Rawls,

are not sustainable, what theory of security should we embrace. The thinker who brings

us closest to an answer to this question is the Scottish philosopher, David Hume. Though

Hume did not concern himself directly with the problem of security, his political thought

provides us with some helpful insights. In political life, Hume thought, people were

motivated by three main considerations: interest, affection, and principle. They were

sometimes moved to act by a desire to secure particular advantages for themselves. At

other times they were moved by their love of others and would act even against their own
 21

interests for the benefit of those they cared about. And sometimes they were moved by

principle: simply by what they thought was right. At times they would act against their

own interests and the interests of those they loved if they thought some higher good or

higher ethical principle was at stake. A stable society was one that recognized this feature

of human motivation and allowed all the elements of our nature a place.

The critical problem in political life, Hume thought was to find a balance between

liberty and authority. If society was to be kept safe, authority was needed, for order was

impossible without authority. But liberty, he argued was vital for the perfection of

society. Order is not, after all, a good in itself. The lesson to be drawn from Hume for our

understanding of security is that in a world of plural values, tradeoffs are inescapable.

The goals we pursue must therefore be limited, since all ends, including as justice,

freedom and safety can only be secured imperfectly.

Security, then, has to be seen as a relative good. We should not seek it

exclusively, or even excessively, nor expect to establish it with such resilience that there

is no danger of its being diminished. What we should seek is a balance that enables us to

pursue the different ends and purposes we hold important. This is not a very precise

answer to the problem of what is security; but it is perhaps as precise an answer as the

nature of the question will allow.