Teaching Strategic Intelligence in Political Transition

Scholarship on intelligence ethics centers on operations, leaving the ethics of intelligence education and capacity-building under-theorized. This article develops retrospective moral reappraisal (RMR): the delayed moral reclassification of earlier teaching as ethically compromised when political transition and new public knowledge recontextualize what that teaching may have enabled. It argues that RMR is a pathway to moral injury because the injurious event is later learning—not the original classroom act—that one’s contribution is now plausibly implicated in harm. Linking RMR to complicity and enabling under uncertainty, the article clarifies how foreseeability, professional role morality, and leverage shape responsibility without requiring causal certainty or foresight. The mechanism is rendered intelligible through an autoethnographic signal vignette from teaching intelligence at the Hong Kong Police College before the post-National Security Law period; it serves as a catalytic illustration rather than an evidentiary case study. Framed in this way, the vignette does not stand as the article’s sole evidentiary basis; rather, it functions as a catalytic illustration of a broader ethical problem inherent in intelligence training, professional socialization, and capacity-building under conditions of political change. The article concludes by proposing a decision framework for operationalizing a retrospective duty of ethical response—specifying trigger thresholds for reassessment, revising curricula for dual-use risks, and, where warranted and feasible, qualifying or withdrawing endorsement.