Deane-Peter Baker just what it is that so tarnishes the character of the private warrior. A recent search of the main database of the philosophical work, The Philosophers’ Index, revealed no publications on the topic of private military companies, and only two journal articles over the past decade on mercenaries in general. It is generally assumed that there is something deeply immoral about mercenarism, to the extent that ‘mercenary’is unquestionably one of the more offensive descriptions we can give of a fellow human being. But what, exactly, is it about this kind of activity that validates such moral censure? On closer inspection it becomes clear that there are really two main questions here. First, there is the question of whether or not mercenary activity is bad for the world–if so, then clearly the warrior of good conscience ought not to become a mercenary. Second, there is the question of whether there is something intrinsically morally problematic about the warrior-for-hire, something that would make it wrong to become a mercenary even in a possible world in which the employment of mercenaries led to overwhelmingly good consequences for that world. Most of the ethics-related discussion of the private military industry has been around the first of these questions, and so in the interests of exploring new ground, it is the second of these questions that shall be the focus of this chapter.

Another restriction on the scope of this chapter must also be acknowledged from the beginning. The political debate over whether military functions can be ethically outsourced to the private sector exists almost exclusively against the background of the broadly liberal political principles that underpin international law. In order to remain relevant to that debate, therefore, I shall restrict the scope of my analysis by taking that same broadly liberal background as given. Thus, there may well be good arguments for or against mercenarism that emerge from within the principles of certain religious viewpoints or philosophical traditions, but those arguments fall only within the scope of my discussion insofar as they overlap with the contemporary international debate on this topic. In what follows I shall draw on the two papers on the ethics of mercenaries that were mentioned above, one authored by Anthony Coady2 and the other by Tony Lynch and AJ Walsh. 3 Following these authors I begin by considering the relevant arguments against mercenarism that were put forward by Niccolo Machiavelli. I will then turn to a consideration of the analogy that is supposed to hold between the mercenary and the prostitute, in order to assess whether or not this analogy stands up to close scrutiny.