QUESTION 19Politics, the State & EthicsAugust 11, 2026

May a State Destroy What It Seeks to Protect? — VIVANT and Fighting Poison with Poison

Can secret power save citizens—or does it kill the rule of law, the state's other life?

Using the covert unit Beppan in the drama VIVANT as its starting point, this essay asks whether a state may break the law to protect the nation. Through Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Weber, Schmitt, Arendt, and Walzer—and cases from republican Rome to the CIA detention program—it searches for the conditions that can bring secret action back inside democracy.

The TBS drama VIVANT, first broadcast in 2023 and continued with a sequel in 2026, features a top-secret organization called Beppan.

TBS's official guide describes Beppan as a “secret intelligence unit of the Self-Defense Forces rumored to exist,” while also noting that the Japanese government denied its existence in a 2013 Diet response. In the story, its operatives ordinarily live as private citizens while trying to protect Japan from threats that visible policing and diplomacy struggle to handle. TBS, VIVANT: A Complete Beginner's Guide

The premise has a powerful appeal.

The enemy does not obey the law. There is no time to wait for procedure. The public cannot be told. Unless someone accepts danger out of sight, ordinary life itself may disappear.

Should the state therefore enter the same darkness as its enemies and protect the country even through illegal means?

It would be a state that fights poison with poison.

When TBS investigated claims about a real Beppan in 2023, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba said in substance that a country needs intelligence capabilities, while making clear that this did not mean it should be allowed to act illegally. The real issue, then, is not whether intelligence institutions are simply necessary or unnecessary. It is how far necessary secret activity can be kept inside the law. TBS CROSS DIG's investigation

Yet this idea contains a profound paradox.

To defend the rule of law from enemies who disregard law, the state disregards law itself.

To protect citizens from those who disregard human life, the state itself treats certain lives and rights as instruments.

To defend a free society, it cultivates a power that explains itself to no one.

Even if such a state defeats its enemy, has it also lost the substance of the country it meant to protect?

This essay's conclusion can be stated at the outset.

An extreme emergency can create a tragic situation in which breaking the law minimizes harm. But an act does not become lawful or good merely because it was done “for the country.” Still less can that possibility justify giving a permanent secret organization a general license to act illegally.

A democracy does not need to eliminate every secret.

It needs to distinguish operational secrecy, which temporarily conceals what a mission will do, from secrecy of responsibility, which conceals who ordered it, on what grounds, and who can review it.

Even a secret mission needs a national black box that can later be opened.

Starting from VIVANT, this essay examines the legitimacy of a state dirtying its hands through historical cases and philosophical arguments.

This essay discusses the central premise of VIVANT Season 1. It does not identify the fictional Beppan with any organization confirmed to exist in reality. The Japanese government has denied the existence of the alleged real-world Beppan, and this essay makes no claim that it exists. Nor does it explain or recommend methods for unlawful conduct; its subject is the ethics and control of state power.

Four Terms to Separate First — Secret Is Not the Same as Illegal

Before beginning, we need to distinguish “secret,” “covert,” “illegal,” and “immoral.”

Term	Meaning	What the term alone does not prove
Secret	Information is not available to the general public	It is not necessarily illegal
Covert or clandestine	The actor or purpose is concealed	It is not automatically immoral
Illegal	It violates current law or lacks legal authority	It is not necessarily the morally worst option
Immoral	It violates moral principles such as rights, fairness, or dignity	It is not necessarily prohibited by current law

An agency may, for example, secretly investigate a suspect without alerting that person. If it acts within legally granted powers and conditions, secrecy does not make the investigation illegal.

Conversely, history contains many laws that were formally valid and profoundly immoral, including laws that institutionalized discrimination.

We must therefore avoid two shortcuts: “intelligence work is illegal because it is covert,” and “an act is right because it appears in a statute.”

The relevant question is not simply whether something is secret.

Who granted the power?
What is the act meant to protect?
Which methods are authorized?
Who oversees it while it happens?
When an error is discovered, who can stop the act and repair the harm?

The problem posed by VIVANT lies deeper than the need for secrecy.

May a state contain a second state that decides right and wrong outside the law?

Why “Fighting Poison with Poison” Is So Attractive

If we dismiss this idea as merely cruel, we miss what makes the problem difficult.

There are at least four realistic reasons why states seek exceptional means.

01 If Only the Enemy Breaks the Rules, the Rule-Follower Is Disadvantaged

Terrorist groups, invading forces, intelligence agencies, and organized crime do not respect warrants, borders, public proceedings, or legislative calendars.

A democracy, by contrast, must gather evidence, establish authority, and coordinate multiple institutions. That slowness can sometimes endanger lives.

It creates the feeling that only one side has been sent into the fight with both hands tied.

02 Law Cannot Predict Every Future Crisis

Law is written in general rules. A crisis is concrete and arrives in unforeseen forms.

To stop a fire, authorities may have to demolish an innocent person's house before the flames spread. If ordinary property rules are followed without exception, an entire town may burn.

Locke, whom we will meet below, used just such a case to think about executive discretion.

03 Successful Security Looks Like “Nothing Happened”

When an attack is prevented, citizens see an ordinary day.

A secret service can therefore claim, “We cannot reveal the details, but we prevented a catastrophe.” The public cannot directly verify the success, while failures and harms can also be hidden behind classification.

This feature makes secret action both necessary at times and unusually dangerous.

04 Ignorance of Responsibility Lets Citizens Remain Innocent

We want peace and safety.

But we do not always want to know who was threatened, detained, or injured to produce them.

A secret organization serves not only the state but the public conscience. It lets us say, “I did not order it. I did not know.”

That is why an organization like Beppan is so compelling in fiction.

Its members accept not only danger but guilt on the public's behalf.

Yet in a democracy, can citizens remain forever untouched by what is done “in the name of the nation”?

Reason of State — Does a Country Have a Morality Different from a Private Person's?

Modern spy dramas did not discover this question.

As the modern state took shape in Europe, thinkers developed the idea called reason of state.

Lying, betrayal, and violence are ordinarily wrong. But because preserving the state is an unusually grave purpose, might rulers be governed by principles different from those that bind private persons?

Giovanni Botero popularized the term in his 1589 The Reason of State. Yet he did not simply endorse Machiavellian politics that discarded morality in the name of state survival. He tried to reconcile preservation of the state with moral government. Cambridge University Press, Botero: The Reason of State

The resulting divide remains with us.

On one side: “If the state perishes, neither morality nor law can be protected. Survival must therefore come first.”

On the other: “If morality and law are abandoned, can the power left behind still be called the same state?”

Beppan can be read as this old idea of reason of state translated into a modern screen image.

The question is whether a state's special responsibilities also entitle it to a special license of absolution.

A State Has Two Lives

When we say “protect the country,” what are we trying to protect?

A state has at least two lives.

The first is its physical life:

the lives and bodies of its people;
its territory;
infrastructure such as electricity, communications, and transport;
the capacity of public institutions to function.

The second is its normative life:

no person is detained without reason;
government is also bound by law;
power is entrusted through elections and a legislature;
courts can review violations of rights;
wrongful state acts can be remedied;
citizens can ultimately learn what government has done and criticize it.

Preventing a terrorist attack protects the state's physical life.

But permanent secret detention, torture, assassination, or unlimited surveillance corrodes its normative life.

The buildings, flag, and government may remain. Yet if government is no longer constrained by law and people are treated as tools rather than holders of rights, has the same country survived?

A state can preserve its territory while losing its constitutional self.

The weakness in the “poison against poison” metaphor is that it imagines the country as only one body.

Even if the poison kills an external enemy, once it reaches the state's other life it can begin attacking domestic institutions and citizens like an autoimmune disease.

Machiavelli — A Political Leader Must Learn “How Not to Be Good”

The sixteenth-century thinker Niccolò Machiavelli is often the first name raised when discussing the tension between statecraft and morality.

In The Prince, he argued that a ruler who behaves only virtuously can be defeated by enemies who break promises, deceive, and use violence. A prince should not depart from the good when he can avoid it, but must be able to act otherwise when necessity demands. The Prince, Chapter 18; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Niccolò Machiavelli”

For a beginner, Machiavelli's question might be put this way:

Is a doctor who refuses a painful operation in order to save a patient really kind?

If a leader exposes citizens to danger merely to preserve personal purity, that purity may be self-satisfaction.

The strength of this view is its recognition that politics carries responsibility for consequences.

But it also has a major weakness.

Almost any politician can rename the preservation of personal power “national stability.” If the person acting is the only judge of necessity, the category of “unavoidable” action expands without limit.

Machiavelli shows us the reality of emergency.

He does not give us a democratic institution that decides when an emergency exists or corrects the ruler's mistakes.

Hobbes — May a State Demand Obedience If It Cannot Provide Security?

Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the seventeenth century against the background of civil war.

Where there is no common power, people fear one another and may attack first to avoid being attacked. They therefore entrust authority to a strong sovereign in exchange for peace and safety.

For Hobbes, the state's first task was protection. He also wrote that subjects' obligation to obey lasts only while the sovereign retains the power to protect them. Thomas Hobbes, excerpts from Leviathan

From a Hobbesian perspective, there is nothing surprising about a state needing the capacity to counter invisible threats.

A state too weak to protect its citizens has failed the contract, however admirable its ideals.

But a paradox appears here too.

What if the sovereign that is supposed to protect people begins to watch, detain, and erase them without giving reasons?

Citizens may be shielded from foreign enemies while living in fear of the state itself.

A strong theory of sovereignty contains the possibility that the state created to rescue us from fear becomes our greatest source of fear.

Locke — Prerogative When Law Cannot Arrive in Time

John Locke tried to limit political power more strictly than Hobbes did.

Even so, he did not believe the executive must be forbidden from doing anything not written in a statute.

Legislators cannot foresee every future case. Sometimes following a law to the letter harms the public. Locke therefore called the executive's discretion to act for the public good, without a specific legal command and at times even against the law, “prerogative.” John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter XIV

His accessible example is the destruction of an innocent person's house to stop a spreading fire.

Ordinarily, one must not destroy another person's home. But if obeying that rule causes an entire town to burn, exceptional destruction may serve the public good.

This comes quite close to fighting poison with poison.

Locke's argument, however, carries an important condition.

Power is held in trust for the good of the people, not the ruler. If the ruler uses prerogative to enslave or destroy them, the people can judge that the trust has been violated.

Locke did not hand the executive a blank cheque.

He recognized extra-legal discretion while leaving the people as the final judges of its legitimacy.

Returning to VIVANT, the question is not only whether Beppan's members are patriotic.

If citizens know neither that the organization exists nor what it does, and never receive a chance to judge it later, can its power truly be said to have been entrusted by them?

Kant — Could the Policy Be Made Public After the Operation?

Immanuel Kant was severe toward the idea that a good result can excuse lies or violations of rights.

In Perpetual Peace, he proposed a principle of publicity: if the basic maxim of an action affecting other people's rights cannot coexist with being made public, the action is unjust. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, Appendix II

This principle should not be misunderstood.

Kant need not be read as demanding that every military operation be televised in advance. Publishing an ambush location or a source's name can make legitimate defense impossible.

We must distinguish concrete operational information from the general principle authorizing an action.

Against whom, and under what conditions, may coercion be used?
What remedy follows if the target was misidentified?
Would we accept the same principle if an enemy state applied it to our citizens?
After the danger has passed, can the policy be explained to the public?

The date of an operation can be hidden. A policy that says, “The government may eliminate an opponent on weak evidence,” cannot be publicly justified.

Kant gives us a practical question:

Even if the act must remain secret now, can its governing principle later be placed before the victim and the public?

A justice that requires permanent darkness may not be justice at all. It may be an interest afraid of discovery.

Weber — Politics Cannot Be Practiced with a Clean Conscience Alone

Max Weber described the modern state as a human community that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a territory.

In “Politics as a Vocation,” he also distinguished an “ethic of conviction” from an “ethic of responsibility.”

The ethic of conviction says, “I followed the right principle.”

The ethic of responsibility also accepts accountability for what one's conduct actually produces.

Suppose a politician preserves an absolute commitment to nonviolence but thereby fails to stop a massacre. It is not enough to say, “At least my hands are clean.”

Yet Weber did not say that consequences permit everything. Precisely because politics works with the dangerous means of violence, it requires not only passion but proportion and responsibility. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”

From Weber's perspective, the ethics of a Beppan operative are not settled by whether the person loves the country.

The operative must also count the wrongly identified target, the civilian caught in the operation, the long-term diplomatic distrust, and the precedent others will copy as consequences of the mission.

An ethic of responsibility is not an ethic of coldness. It means entering the outcomes least convenient to you on your own balance sheet.

Schmitt — The Real Sovereign Decides the Exception

The twentieth-century jurist Carl Schmitt argued that the sovereign is whoever decides on the state of exception.

Schmitt later joined the Nazi Party and offered legal and intellectual support to the Nazi regime. His biography cannot be detached from his theory so that he becomes a neutral guide to emergency power.

In ordinary times, law and administrative procedure appear to govern the state. But when law has not anticipated a crisis, the person able to make the final decisions—“this rule is suspended” and “this person is the enemy”—holds the highest effective power. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Carl Schmitt”

This sharply illuminates the problem of Beppan.

If neither government, parliament, nor courts can stop Beppan, and the unit determines both the threat and the means for itself, Beppan resembles the sovereign more closely than the state's formal constitutional institutions do.

Schmitt is best read here as a warning rather than a solution.

The actor who can suspend law “because this is an exception” can also decide what counts as an exception.

Yesterday's large-scale terrorist plot can become today's militant protest and tomorrow's criticism of government.

Giorgio Agamben later argued that the exception can cease to be temporary and become an ordinary technique of government. Giorgio Agamben, “A Brief History of the State of Exception”

The exception's greatest danger is not simply that it will never end. It is that the people who benefit from it decide whether it has ended.

Arendt — Violence Can Destroy an Enemy but Cannot Create Legitimacy

Hannah Arendt did not treat power and violence as the same thing.

For her, power arises when people act together toward a common purpose. Violence uses instruments to compel. It can supplement power when power is weakening, but it cannot manufacture consent itself. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Hannah Arendt”

A state can use weapons to stop a terrorist.

It cannot use weapons to create the trust expressed in the words, “This government is our government.”

As secret violence grows, the government depends less on the people's consent and more on what the people do not know.

That may appear efficient in the short term.

But when the violence is revealed, the state must answer not only “Did you prevent danger?” but “Why did you refuse to trust us and decide outside the law?”

For Arendt, the power to defend a country is not only the capacity to destroy an enemy.

A state's capacity to act with its citizens, explain its failures, and retain support is also part of national security.

Walzer — Sometimes Guilt Remains Even After the Right Choice

Michael Walzer confronts this problem directly in his modern political-philosophical account of “dirty hands.”

He considers situations in which every available choice leaves a moral wound.

Imagine that a politician is convinced that many citizens will be killed unless one innocent person is gravely harmed.

Harming one to save many might be required by the politician's office.

Yet necessity does not make the harm to that person harmless or reveal it to have been purely right all along.

Walzer's crucial point is that the politician cannot say, “I made the correct choice, so I am innocent.” He accepts the paradox that we may praise the good result and still hold its author responsible for the wrongful act used to obtain it. Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands”

For a beginner, it can be put in one sentence:

Having no choice but to dirty one's hands is not the same as having clean hands.

This directs the hardest question at the heroic image in VIVANT.

Even if an operative saves the country, any unlawful detention or killing must be reviewed in its own right.

We do not have to choose between the labels “hero” and “criminal.”

It is logically consistent to praise an action for saving the country and demand punishment or reparation for the rights it violated.

Indeed, if unlawful conduct is excused only when committed for the state, public officials stand above the law that binds ordinary people.

What History Teaches — Attempts to Contain the Exception, and States Consumed by It

We can now place these philosophical arguments beside historical institutions and events.

Republican Rome — Putting the Exception in an Institutional Container

The Roman Republic had the office of dictator, through which unusually strong powers could be entrusted to one person during a severe crisis.

At least in the republican ideal, this was not an ordinary ruler but a temporary office tied to a specific task and period. Exceptional power was designed as a limited delegation intended to preserve the regular order. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Carl Schmitt,” section 2

Rome should not be romanticized. In the late Republic, Sulla and Caesar used dictatorial power in forms that departed from earlier practice and became associated with the Republic's collapse.

The lesson is simple:

It is not enough to create emergency powers. Unless other institutions can enforce the mission, deadline, and termination procedure, the container has no lid.

Lincoln — Who Interprets the Constitution While Saving the Union?

When the American Civil War began in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln moved to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus requires the government, when it detains someone, to justify that detention before a court and release the person if it is unlawful. It is a central protection against secret imprisonment by the state.

Faced with rebellion and danger to the capital, Lincoln believed rapid detention was necessary. But he clashed with the judiciary over whether the power of suspension belonged to the president or to Congress. A record of an 1861 case described by the U.S. National Archives shows a judge protesting military interference with judicial process while being physically unable to overcome the president's military force. U.S. National Archives, “Sweltering with Treason”

In 1863, Congress passed legislation authorizing suspension during the war when public safety required it. National Constitution Center, “Four Cases When the Writ of Habeas Corpus Was Suspended”

This history should not be flattened into “Lincoln was right” or “Lincoln was a dictator.”

What matters is that even amid crisis there was a public conflict over authority, the judiciary's objection entered the record, and Congress later constructed a legal framework.

The legitimacy of emergency action depends not only on a leader's character but on whether other institutions can object, record the objection, and revise the policy.

Germany in 1933 — “Protection of People and State” as the Door to Dictatorship

After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg issued an emergency decree in the name of protecting “the people and the state.”

The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended constitutional protections for speech, the press, assembly, the privacy of communications, and due process. It enabled the detention of political opponents without warrants or specific charges. A temporary act of defense became a permanent foundation of the Nazi police state. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Reichstag Fire Decree”

The case breaks the assumption that illegality alone is dangerous.

A violation of rights does not become morally justified when it is given the form of a decree or statute.

Moreover, the claim that “enemies are attempting to overthrow the state” becomes more useful as scrutiny of the evidence weakens, because it can transform political opposition into a security enemy.

Poison does not enter only from outside the law. It can be administered under law's own label.

COINTELPRO — The Logic of the Foreign Enemy Turns Toward Domestic Dissent

During the Cold War, the FBI conducted covert activity under the name COINTELPRO. Its targets included not only communist organizations but the civil-rights and antiwar movements and Martin Luther King Jr.

The Senate's Church Committee, established in 1975, investigated unlawful, improper, and unethical conduct by the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies. The Senate's official history describes COINTELPRO as covert action intended to discredit and disrupt groups and individuals considered threats to the social order. U.S. Senate, “Church Committee”

The striking point is not that a secret service ran wild without any purpose from the beginning. It is that the boundaries of a mission to protect the country from communism and violence expanded.

An institution created to identify violent threats began to confuse ideas inconvenient to the government with threats to the nation.

This is a central danger of a Beppan-like organization.

If the same institution defines the enemy, assesses the evidence, chooses the methods, and classifies the results, no external friction remains to correct its errors.

Iran-Contra — A Secret Network Begins a “Second Foreign Policy”

In the 1980s, the U.S. Congress restricted military assistance to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Some officials in the Reagan administration nevertheless diverted proceeds from arms sales to embargoed Iran to support the Contras. According to the U.S. National Archives, later investigations raised questions about failure to notify Congress, destruction and concealment of records, and criminal responsibility among public officials. U.S. National Archives, “The Iran-Contra Affair”

The problem was not only whether the underlying policy was good or bad.

It was that a covert network inside the executive carried out a policy Congress had blocked, using an alternative stream of funding.

When a secret organization moves beyond gathering intelligence and begins making foreign policy, moving money, and erasing records, a “second government” forms inside the elected government.

An institution supposedly protecting the country nullifies a policy chosen by the people's representatives.

At that point, it may be protecting not the democratic state but the secret service's own vision of the state.

CIA Detention and Interrogation After 9/11 — Poison Damages Judgment Too

After the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States faced an urgent need to prevent another attack. The CIA operated a detention and interrogation program at secret sites abroad, using techniques later condemned as torture.

The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that the methods were more brutal than previously represented and that serious problems existed in the CIA's claims about their intelligence value. The CIA disputed some of the report's conclusions but acknowledged inadequate preparation, unauthorized or otherwise inappropriate techniques, and major failures of management and oversight. U.S. Senate report; CIA response

The crucial issue is not only that torture is cruel.

Under secrecy and fear, an institution can evaluate its own conduct as having “produced valuable intelligence” and filter out contrary evidence. Once an agency adopts an unlawful method, it develops an interest in proving that method effective.

The poison therefore reaches not only the detainee's body but the state's capacity for judgment.

The UN Convention against Torture states that war, threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency may not be invoked to justify torture. OHCHR, Convention against Torture

That is an essential boundary.

Recognizing discretion in emergencies does not imply that every method can be placed on a cost-benefit scale. Modern law marks some lines, torture among them, that crisis does not permit a state to cross.

In Secret, the Utilitarian Calculation Tilts

“If sacrificing one person saves ten thousand, perhaps it is unavoidable.” This sounds like utilitarian reasoning.

Utilitarianism compares happiness and harm among the consequences of actions and seeks the better overall result.

Its insistence that emergency decisions cannot ignore outcomes is important.

But in secret operations, the accounting is structurally tilted.

The Benefit “Saved” Can Be Enlarged with Hypothetical Numbers

A secret agency can claim, “Without our intervention, catastrophe would have occurred.”

Because the event did not happen, outsiders have difficulty testing that counterfactual.

The Harm Inflicted Can Be Minimized as Classified Information

Wrongful detentions, civilian casualties, diplomatic backlash, and internal objections may never become public.

The benefit column receives the largest imagined disaster. The cost column receives only the smallest disclosed harm.

The Accountant and the Beneficiary Are the Same

If the institution that approved an operation also judges its success, classifies the evidence, and interprets its legality, admitting failure threatens its budget, prestige, and possible criminal liability.

Judgment can be distorted here even without villains.

People want to believe that their own decisions were correct.

This essay calls that structure the closed-room balance sheet.

The problem is not that consequences are being considered.

It is that only the actor holds the scale on which they are compared.

Separate Operational Secrecy from Secrecy of Responsibility

Real national-security work cannot be disclosed in full and in real time.

Publishing an informant's name, an interception method, a unit's position, or the timing of an investigation could cost lives and destroy a mission.

But “therefore we owe an explanation to no one” does not follow.

There are two kinds of secrecy.

Operational Secrecy

when an operation will occur;
where the information came from;
who is assisting on the ground;
which technology or route will be used.

This can be necessary to protect both the mission and human life.

Secrecy of Responsibility

who authorized the mission;
which law and evidence supported it;
whether anyone objected;
how many civilians were harmed or people misidentified;
who independently reviewed it;
when classification will be reconsidered.

If this remains hidden forever, power is severed from responsibility.

An aircraft cockpit is not open to the general public during a flight.

But after a serious accident, independent investigators read its flight recorder and examine errors in design and judgment.

A secret operation likewise needs a national black box.

Orders, evidence, legal opinions, objections, and outcomes should be preserved in a tamper-resistant record. A small number of authorized overseers should be able to inspect it during the mission; once danger has passed, courts, legislatures, investigative bodies, and ultimately the public should be able to examine it.

Secrecy should reduce the audience, not eliminate the audience.

Seven Tests for a State Claiming Exceptional Means

How should we evaluate an exceptional act by the state?

Drawing on the philosophy and history above, this essay proposes seven tests.

01 The Catastrophe Test — Is the Threat Truly Grave and Imminent?

Mere inconvenience, declining approval ratings, diplomatic embarrassment, or criticism of the government is not enough.

The question is whether a concrete and imminent danger threatens many lives, national independence, or the survival of democratic institutions.

The vaguer the language—“subversive,” “anti-state,” “disruptive of order”—the greater the danger of abuse.

02 The Last-Resort Test — Have Lawful Alternatives Been Exhausted?

The state must explain why warrants, arrests, diplomacy, evacuation, warnings, international cooperation, or ordinary defensive measures cannot address the danger.

An illegal method is not necessary merely because it is faster, cheaper, or easier to conceal when it fails.

03 The Proportionality Test — Is the Means Excessive Relative to the Harm Prevented?

Mass surveillance of a population to prevent a single information leak is out of proportion to the danger.

The targets, duration, territory, and range of information must be minimized.

And methods that international law prohibits even in emergencies, such as torture, cannot simply be entered into an ordinary cost-benefit calculation.

04 The Discrimination Test — Does the State Distinguish Threats from Opponents?

A person planning violence is not the same as a person criticizing the government.

Ethnic, religious, or family proximity to an organization cannot by itself turn an individual into an enemy.

The more secret an agency is, the more it needs contestable, individualized evidence confirmed through multiple channels.

05 The Concurrent-Oversight Test — Is There an Outside Eye During the Operation?

Disclosure after the event cannot prevent irreversible harm.

The mission may be secret from the general public, but a small number of authorized judges, legislators, or inspectors independent of the operational unit should review its evidence and necessity as it proceeds.

An overseer who gets professional credit from the mission's success is not independent.

06 The Trace Test — Does the National Black Box Survive?

The state should record the chain of command, legal basis, intelligence used, predicted benefit, actual harm, and internal dissent.

We must distinguish an act too shameful to record from an act whose record would merely inconvenience the person responsible.

Classification should have deadlines and periodic review, followed by phased disclosure when the danger has passed.

07 The Return Test — Can the Exception End, Be Judged, and Make Amends?

Does exceptional authority expire when the mission and its deadline end?

Can a misidentified person later learn the truth, reach a court, and seek compensation?

Even if an unlawful act is ultimately judged necessary, must its authors undergo independent review and, where appropriate, submit to a public decision about punishment, pardon, resignation, or apology?

Without this final test, a “one-time necessary evil” becomes an organization's standard operating procedure.

Can Beppan in VIVANT Be Philosophically Justified?

We can now return these standards to the drama.

The courage of Beppan's members, and the fact that they appear to act for citizens rather than private gain, matter when we evaluate individual motives.

But good motives do not establish an institution's legitimacy.

Suppose Beppan:

has no clear legal foundation;
defines both threats and targets for itself;
authorizes its own detention or killing abroad;
faces no effective oversight from the Diet, courts, or Cabinet;
provides no public review of misidentification or civilian harm;
discloses neither records nor responsibility after a mission;
remains subject to permanent official denial.

Such an institution is difficult to justify inside a democracy.

It is no longer “one organization protecting the state.” It is another sovereign placed inside the state.

That does not mean all intelligence agencies and covert operations are unnecessary.

Japan's Constitution makes the Diet the sole lawmaking organ, vests executive power in the Cabinet, and makes the Cabinet collectively responsible to the Diet for exercising that power. House of Representatives, Constitution of Japan

The democratically defensible path is therefore not to romanticize an outlaw Beppan.

It is to define necessary intelligence activities as legal missions, specify powers and prohibitions, and build legislative, judicial, and independent-inspection mechanisms capable of handling classified information.

Those constraints are not only shackles that weaken operations.

They are equipment that protects an intelligence service from misidentification, internal politics, evidentiary tunnel vision, and capture by the government of the day.

A strong secret agency is not one that can do anything. It is one that can do what is necessary and later prove why it was necessary.

Answering “Oversight Will Leak the Operation”

Calls for oversight of secret action often meet three objections.

“The More People Know, the More Likely the Operation Will Leak”

That risk is real.

The answer is not immediate disclosure to the entire public, but disclosure to a limited number of specialized overseers bound by confidentiality. The Church Committee itself held many hearings in private while investigating abuse and protecting intelligence sources and methods. U.S. Senate, “Church Committee”

The choice is not secrecy or oversight.

We can design secrecy with oversight.

“The Enemy Ignores Law; If Only We Obey It, We Lose”

Obeying rules does not mean refusing every method also used by an enemy.

Infiltration, cover identities, encryption, deception, and some forms of clandestine collection can be institutionalized within domestic and international law.

Nor does an enemy's indiscriminate targeting of civilians license a state to do the same. If it does, the distinction between them disappears.

A democracy's advantage is not only that it is purer than its enemies.

It is that democracy can discover mistakes, replace those in power, remedy harm, and improve its methods.

“There Is No Time for Debate in an Emergency”

That is precisely why the categories of threat, activation conditions, authorizing officials, time limits, prohibited methods, and record-keeping rules must be settled in law during ordinary times.

If a blank cheque is written only after crisis begins, fear will draw the boundaries.

Emergency law should be prepared in peacetime so that law need not be abandoned during an emergency.

The Hardest Problem Is Not Selecting “the Right Beppan Operative”

Fiction places secret power in the hands of talented people with convictions.

Because viewers know the character's suffering, family, and sacrifice, they feel, “I can trust this person.”

Institutions cannot be designed only for protagonists.

Today's operative may be honorable; tomorrow's commander may not be.

Today's enemy may be a terrorist network; tomorrow's may be a whistleblower.

Today's prime minister may be restrained; the next may use the secret service for an election or against political rivals.

We should measure a political institution not by what happens when a good person uses it, but by whether it limits harm when used by someone acting from malice, fear, or delusion.

Before asking “whom should we trust?”, we must decide “which line must no one entrusted with power be able to cross?”

Here the dramatic appeal of VIVANT must be separated from the legitimacy of real politics.

Fiction can depict one hero overcoming institutional delay to save the country.

Democracy must build an institution that can save citizens even when the hero is wrong.

Conclusion — A Democracy's Poison Needs a Label, Dose, Expiry Date, and Antidote

A state cannot protect citizens while possessing no force at all.

Police use coercive power, the Self-Defense Forces respond to armed attack, and intelligence services gather information without notifying their targets.

Demanding a state that is harmless in every sense can leave citizens defenseless against an enemy's violence.

But the need for state force is entirely different from a license for the state to do anything outside the law.

Beppan in VIVANT reflects a wish:

Somewhere beyond our sight, highly capable and devoted people will handle danger and preserve ordinary life.

But democracy cannot treat citizens as children forever.

Citizens have the right eventually to know what was done in their name, judge it, and decide what responsibility should follow.

We cannot rule out, in logic or history, an extreme emergency in which a politician or operative saves more lives by breaking the law.

In such a case, the most honest position is not to rename the act lawful because it served the nation.

It is to say: “I judged it necessary and broke the law. Judge me for the lives I saved. At the same time, judge me for the law I broke and the people I harmed.”

That is what it means to translate Walzer's dirty hands into institutions.

If the state handles exceptional poison, it needs at least four safeguards:

a label — whose authority permits its use, and against which threat;
a dose — whether it is strictly necessary and limited in target and duration;
an expiry date — whether it ends automatically after the danger passes;
an antidote — independent oversight, records, disclosure, adjudication, compensation, and punishment.

And some poisons, including torture and intentional attacks on civilians, should never be placed in the medicine cabinet at all.

The question to ask while watching VIVANT is not only, “Does Beppan exist?”

More important is what kind of state we believe can hold secret power and remain our state.

Protecting a country means more than preserving a border and a population.

A state's keeping its promise that it, too, will obey law is itself an act of national defense.

Three Takeaways

01 A State Has Two Lives

Alongside the physical life of people, territory, and infrastructure stands a normative life made of the rule of law, rights, the legislature, courts, and accountability. Permanently destroying the latter to save the former makes it difficult to say the same country was preserved.

02 Operations May Be Secret; Responsibility May Not

Dates, intelligence sources, and collaborators may need temporary protection. But authorizers, legal grounds, evidence, harm, internal objections, and methods of review cannot remain hidden forever. Even covert missions need a national black box.

03 A Necessary Evil Does Not Become Good—or Innocent

There can be emergencies in which breaking the law reduces harm. The unlawful and immoral remainder does not disappear. The capacity to judge achievement and responsibility together, followed by review, punishment, pardon, or compensation, separates democracy from lawless secret power.

Questions for This Issue

When we say “the country,” do we mean only the lives of citizens and the territory? Or does it also include the promise that government obeys law?

If an operation prevents terrorism, should that outcome excuse unlawful detention or killing used along the way?

Who should evaluate an organization that cannot reveal its successes and can classify its failures?

Are citizens merely protected people who were not told about secret operations? Or are they sovereigns ultimately responsible for acts committed in their name?

If you were a Beppan operative, would you accept an institution that could judge your conduct after you saved the country?

FAQ

Q1. Can Illegal Conduct Be Justified If It Protects the Country?

Not automatically. Where a grave and imminent emergency exists, no lawful alternative remains, harm is minimized, and independent oversight and later review apply, an actor's choice may be morally understandable or mitigating. But the conduct does not become lawful, and international law treats some acts, including torture, as unjustifiable even in emergencies. A permanent, unsupervised organization cannot receive a blank cheque.

Q2. Are Secret Organizations Incompatible with Democracy?

Secrecy itself can be compatible with democracy. Intelligence sources and operational timing may require protection. The decisive questions are whether the organization has a legal foundation, defined missions and prohibitions, accountable budgets and chains of command, legislative, judicial, and independent oversight, later disclosure, and remedies. Its conduct may be secret from the public during a mission, but it must remain visible to multiple authorized and independent institutions.

Q3. Did Machiavelli Say “The End Justifies the Means”?

Reducing him to that sentence is inaccurate. He argued that a ruler who insists on goodness alone can lose the state and must have the realism to use morally troubling means when necessary. But he did not build modern democratic oversight or human-rights law. His insight reveals the realities of emergency; it is not a sufficient institution for preventing abuse.

Q4. What Does Walzer Mean by “Dirty Hands”?

It is the problem of a political actor who, where every option leaves a moral wrong, may have an official duty to choose the less harmful one. Choosing the better outcome does not make the wrongful means disappear. The view allows praise for the achievement to coexist with guilt, regret, punishment, and reparation.

Q5. What Is the “National Black Box”?

It is a metaphor proposed in this essay. Orders, evidence, legal judgments, internal objections, outcomes, and harms from a covert operation should be preserved in a tamper-resistant record. A limited number of independent overseers can inspect it while the operation proceeds; later, legislatures, courts, investigators, and the public can do so. It protects operational secrecy without erasing responsibility.

Q6. Does Beppan in VIVANT Exist in Reality?

This essay makes no such claim. TBS's official guide describes it as an organization “rumored to exist” and also notes that the Japanese government denied its existence in a 2013 Diet response. The drama's premise must be distinguished from institutions confirmed to exist in reality.

Q7. Does Japan Need an Organization Like Beppan?

A state needs capacities for intelligence gathering, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyber defense. What it does not need is a permanent “outlaw organization” generally licensed to break the law. Necessary institutions should have missions and powers defined by law, independent oversight capable of handling secrets, and systems to record, correct, and remedy mistakes. The need for capacity must not be confused with a need for lawlessness.

Sources and Further Reading

Except for short phrases placed in quotation marks, the philosophers' views in this article are English-language summaries rather than verbatim quotations.

Carry the question into another conversation.

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