An enormous image of a child whose family was killed in a drone attack has been placed in a field in northwest Pakistan by a shadowy artist collective that has no name. Either that or Yahoo! has not seamlessly assumed the duties of a news-gathering organization. The point is that somebody put a big picture of an orphan in a field to shame drone operators. That somebody also created #NotABugSplat, which encourages people to think about the civilian casualties of drone attacks as something other than the operator slang from which #NotABugSplat is derived.
Here’s a thought experiment: tomorrow night, the President appears on television with a marine who spotted a Taliban chief standing next to three kids in Pakistan and heroically fired an incendiary missile into the group. Does the public love that guy?
The public might not love that guy, which is why he doesn’t talk about civilian casualties. Of course I am speaking of the President. The other guy, who actually has to fire the missile that burns up terrorists and an arbitrary number of kids, has an even bigger incentive not to talk about civilian casualties. He wants to retain the ability to fall asleep, so he refers to dead people on the other side of the world as bug splats.
Or maybe he doesn’t—I can’t find any evidence that drone operators say “bug splat,” partly because those search terms have been swamped by this orphan picture story. It’s a compelling story, because it directly engages what’s so creepy about drones: they do not make the act of killing ethically different, but they make it easier to do.
I don’t think that anyone is arguing that it’s ethically okay to kill people with drones in situations where it’s not okay to kill them with guns. When we calculate the ethics of killing, method doesn’t enter into it: it’s no less ethical to kill people with a hatchet than it is to lure them into an airtight box that depressurizes while you are in Vegas. Some cruel or inordinately gradual methods of killing people are ethically worse, but a wrong killing cannot be made right by how you do it.
So the whole point of drone warfare is not that it’s good to kill these people because they can’t kill us. The point is that it’s good to kill these people, and drones make it much, much harder for them to kill us. The argument for drone warfare is that it saves American lives.
But does it also make it easier for Americans to kill people—people like old ladies and children, whom soldiers would find it impossible to kill in person? By “impossible,” I don’t mean tactically. A US Marine has the training and equipment to defeat an old lady in combat. But would raking her, her granddaughters, and Anwar Al-Awlaki with machine gun fire be something he found it viscerally possible to do?
You can substitute “ethically” for “viscerally” in that sentence, and it pretty much says the same thing. We evaluate our ethics with logic and reason, but it would be tough to argue that we derived them that way. It’s not like we were gleefully murdering our neighbors and kin, developed ethical reasoning, and then deduced that killing was wrong. The prohibition against killing is rooted in instinct and socialization, and viewing the world through a screen diminishes both. The internet has proven that.
So let us accept two propositions:
- Killing someone with a drone is not ethically superior to killing someone in person.
- Drones make it easier for us to kill people.
Taken together, these premises suggest that drones increase our likelihood of killing without substantially altering how much we should do it. Unless you think that the human revulsion toward killing is way too strong, and ethics actually dictate that we kill people in lots of circumstances where conscience says no, it follows that drones probably lead us to kill people unethically more often.
Is that a machine we want to build? It’s important to remember that drones are a technique, and we can stop using them to kill terrorists and/or Pakistani kids whenever we want. If they are not only making it safer for Americans to kill people abroad but also making it easier for us to do that when we shouldn’t, we should stop using them. There is a name for someone who loses his compunction against killing people when he finds a position of safety.
If you enjoyed Dan’s link, you’ll probably enjoy this one:
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201311/drone-uav-pilot-assassination?currentPage=1
“For decades the model for understanding PTSD has been “fear conditioning”: quite literally the lasting psychological ramifications of mortal terror. But a term now gaining wider acceptance is “moral injury.” It represents a tectonic realignment, a shift from a focusing on the violence that has been done to a person in wartime toward his feelings about what he has done to others—or what he’s failed to do for them.”
The guy in Attempt #1’s article lives in Missoula.
I find drone warfare morbidly fascinating. It’s like some sort of horrific Milgram experiment from 1984… orders from some distant, inscrutable authority figure, everything cloaked in excruciatingly neutral and dissociative war-speak, “target this building,” “weapon release,” “terminal guidance,” “please continue,” and guys sitting in chairs execute the orders against human beings on the other side of the world.
I think the ethical dilemma is not one of how easy it is to kill, but rather how difficult it is to kill back. Insurgents and terrorists use terrorist tactics precisely because the balance of power is asymmetrical; they have their livelihoods and lives taken away from them by people with superior technology and resources, on orders from people so far in geography and ideology they might as well be aliens. How many science fiction stories have been written where technologically superior alien overlords kill and destroy, directed from some mothership in orbit? And how many of those stories end with the populace pacified and accepting of the order imposed upon them, realizing the superiority of the aliens’ way of life? Having not read all the science fiction ever, I still can reasonably assume that the number is close to zero.