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Scholars have always loved war, whether it's chemists and
engineers discovering more efficient ways to kill large numbers of people or
social scientists, theologians and philosophers debating when, why and how to
fight. Philosophers in particular have long thought about violence; Plato was
likely not the first thinker to understand that what goes by the name of
"justice" is often merely the violence and thievery practiced by
those holding the reins of power. For Plato, their ability to continue to rule
depended on imposing upon the weak the very rules they routinely break to
maintain their position.
Plato argued that a well-functioning society could exist
only in so far as philosophers and warriors were its "guardians" (the
latter under the former's watchful gaze). To ensure justice prevailed under
this system, the guardians would live in poverty and share all their
possessions in common, even their children.
Sadly - at least for some philosophers - society hasn't
progressed in quite the way Plato had hoped.
War, drones and justice
Most philosophers today accept the argument by the seminal
inter-war philosopher Walter Benjamin that violence cannot be understood or
judged except "in its relation to law and justice". Arguments about
whether a war or the means with which it's fought are "just" in the
past century have been increasingly grounded in international law, particularly
international humanitarian law and the imperative of protecting civilians who
are inevitably caught in the crossfire of conflicts, whether civil or
international.
While there are certainly many conservative philosophers who
write prolifically in support of their definitions of "just war" (the
philosophical underpinnings of President Bush's idea of "preemptive
war" is among the most recent examples of this oeuvre), the profession as
a whole can be said to skew towards a more anti-war sentiment. This view is
epitomised by a 2003 statement released by members of the American Philosophical
Association against the US invasion of Iraq. It argued that launching a
preemptive war without the threat of an imminent attack "stretches the
meaning of preemption beyond reasonable bounds and sets a dangerous precedent
which other states may feel free to follow".
Today, the most vehement debates surrounding the use of
force by the United States no longer surround the invasion and occupation of
Iraq, but rather the use of remotely piloted aerial vehicles - more commonly
known as "drones" - by the US, as one of the most important weapons
in its ongoing war on terror. The use of drones has caused an uproar not just
in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and the occupied territories,
where they are routinely used to kill suspected militants, but also among
ethicists and the international legal community.
And now, at least one philosopher, Bradley Jay Strawser, has
taken up the challenge of offering a viable justification for the use of
drones. A recent hire at the Naval Postgraduate School, his arguments have
caused enough of a stir to warrant a profile and opinion piece in the Guardian.
Strawser now claims that the Guardian profile in fact misrepresented some of
his views; but after reading two of his published papers on the subject, the
profile in fact underplays the glaring problems in his arguments. When applied
to US policy more broadly, they reveal just how far into a moral and ethical
quagmire the United States has sunk under the Bush and Obama administrations.
All things equal?
Before moving to the Postgraduate School, Strawser worked at
the Navy's Centre for the Study of Professional Military Ethics and Oxford
University's Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC). Among the
research sponsored by ELAC are projects exploring "Automated, Intelligent
Combat and Decision Support Systems for Command and Control" and the more
prosaic issues related to determining how law, norms and institutions can
prevent armed conflict in a contemporary reality - in which the supposedly
"rigid dichotomies" of international law and Just War Theory have
become "increasingly difficult to apply".
These themes weigh heavily in Strawser's work, in particular
in a 2010 article titled "Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited
Aerial Vehicles", published in the Journal of Military Ethics in 2010, in
which he details his argument in support of using drones. The paper attempts to
make two primary arguments. First, it claims that "remotely controlled
weapons systems are merely an extension of a long historical trajectory of
removing a warrior ever farther from his foe for the warrior's better
protection. UAVs are only a difference in degree down this path; there is
nothing about their remote use that puts them in a different ethical
category".
Strawser's second argument is that the use of drones is
ethical, both because they reduce the risk to the "just war fighters"
involved in operating them and, as important, lower the number of innocent
civilians killed in strikes compared with other forms of attack. Specifically:
"Other things being equal," he writes, "using such technology
is, in fact, obligatory," if it can reduce the risk to the person on the
"just" side who is controlling the vehicle. In other words, if you
can avoid putting a soldier or pilot at risk by using a missile fired from a
ship or drone that would have the same effectiveness as one fired from a plane
overhead or the ground nearby, you have a moral obligation not to put the
soldiers in harm's way.
The important caveat for Strawser is that "their
employment is done as part of a fully justified war effort meeting" in
terms of both abiding "by both jus ad bellum [when one can engage in war]
and jus in bello [laws of war] criteria". Here Strawser makes his most
important claim, that the use of UAVs is morally justified precisely because
they "actually increase the pilot's ability to discriminate" between
legitimate targets and, to borrow a phrase from that great theorist of
violence, Peter Clemenza, any "pain in the ass innocent bystanders"
who might be in the vicinity of the target area.
Strawser's entire argument rests on this claim, he admits,
because if he can't demonstrate that drones produce lower civilian collateral
damage than other weapons, their use becomes much harder to justify - even if
they do protect the "just warfighter" back in Virginia. We might
imagine, then, that he has provided proof of his claim that in fact the use of
drones produces lower casualties than do other weapons systems.
What precisely is Strawser's evidence? Shockingly, it
consists of a since deleted web brochure by an Israeli drone-maker, Rafael
Armament Development Authority, a quote by an Israeli pilot about how the
drones help him avoid civilian casualties contained in the document (one might
wonder why this didn't set off at least a few alarm bells) and an unpublished
conference presentation that uses a "database combining reports from a
variety of sources" to argue that drones in fact produce a far lower
civilian casualty ratio than other methods of attacking militants.
That's it. A publication on one of the most important
strategic political issues of the day, which is helping to shape the
government's justification of drone strikes - indeed, Strawser admits that he
was hired by the Navy Postgradate School in good measure to help advance this
argument - actually bases its most fundamental argument on Israeli military
industry propaganda and an unpublished conference paper. What's more, Strawser
doesn't bother addressing the numerous studies that have shown the opposite,
whether it's a Brookings Institution report that "suggests that for every
militant killed, ten or so civilians also died", or the New American
Foundation study which argues that approximately 32 per cent of casualties are
civilians.
Nor does Strawser address in his Guardian interview and the
follow-up op-ed the recent revelation by the New York Times that the Obama
administration uses a formula for counting the number of militants killed that
is "deceptive" (in the words of worried government officials) and
counts any able-bodied adult male hit in a strike as a combatant. (Al Jazeera's
The Listening Post recently did a story on the issue of civilian casualties,
available here.)
We have to ask, is this really what counts as serious
scholarship in the field of military ethics, never mind philosophy more
broadly? One would imagine such a discipline would demand even more rigorous
empirical evidence to back up any ethical claims, considering the stakes
involved.
International law sidelined
But beyond this, there is the much larger issue of
international law and whether the United States can legally kill people outside
of recognised battle fields in conflicts that have not been authorised by the
United Nations Security Council. Strikingly, the phrase "international
law" doesn't even appear once in Strawser's Military Ethics article,
despite the fact that it is inseparable from the larger issues of whether drone
strikes are justifiable. Nor does the UN, or the most relevant chapters and
articles of its charter. Not surprising, the administration adopts a similar
tactic to Strawser's when confronted with challenges about its use of drones,
offering "legal conclusions, not legal analysis", when asked to justify
their use.
Drone designers seek
non-violent uses
Perhaps most important, the focus of Strawser's work is
almost entirely on the "just warfighter". How the drones impact
affected populations - what it feels like to live with the terror of the
constant buzzing of drones, never knowing when one of its "precision"
missiles might hit your house or car just because it contains a few adult men
with beards - along with children and the elderly - is, at least in the
intellectual context he's operating in, irrelevant.
One reason this is so might well owe to the fact that
Strawser specifically "reject[s] the moral equality of combatants",
one of the cornerstones of Just War Theory, which has long refused to
adjudicate the morality or permissibility of an action based on a judgment as
to which of the parties to a conflict is "just" or
"unjust". Such a determination is impossible once you step out of the
moral universe of the individual sides, because each side will naturally claim
its cause is just.
Yet without offering any justification for such a change in
one of the most fundamental components of Just War theory, Strawser declares
that "the warrior fighting for a just cause is morally justified to take
the life of the enemy combatant, whereas the unjust fighter is not justified,
even if they follow the traditional principles of jus in bello such as only
targeting combatants and the like, to kill the justified fighter. Thus, there
is no chivalrous reason for a just combatant to 'equal the playing field' or
'fight fair'".
In another article titled "Walking the Tightrope of
Just War", Strawser declares even more directly that "a soldier's
side must have just cause for her to be capable of acting justly in war. The
presumption of moral symmetry between soldiers is thus abandoned".
Strawser arrives at this conclusion by comparing the
determination of just causes for engaging in war with whether or not an
individual can justly kill someone who attacks him or her without warning.
"For each of the kinds of relevant knowledge, the epistemic difference
between personal self-defence and war is a matter of degree not kind," he
declares in "Moral Predators".
Strawser seems unaware that people are not the same things
as nations (perhaps they're the same as corporations, but that's a different,
though related issue). You might be able to "stand your ground" in 24
states in the US, but considering how much death and destruction countries can
unleash on each other, the requirements of following international law are
crucial to preventing even greater hostilities when the potential for conflict
appears on the horizon.
Indeed, Strawser actually seems clueless about this
difference in "Walking the Tightrope", where he declares his support
for an "evidence-relative" versus "fact-relative" view of
"moral wrongdoing and permissibility". In other words, as long as you
think you're in the right when you attack - say, you have this evidence from
someone named Curveball saying that Iraq has WMD, if it turns out the evidence
was wrong after the fact, you don't have to feel too guilty, never mind worry
about facing international sanction and even a tribunal at The Hague. It,
might, we can assume, be nice to say you're sorry, and promise to be a bit more
careful next time.
Thankfully, the use of drones - whether based on facts or
merely evidence of supposed wrong-doing (or thinking about wrong-doing, or just
playing the wrong first-person shooter video game, which the NSA apparently
determines is evidence enough that you want to harm the US) is, at least for
now, not an option for most people. But soon enough, the same people who refuse
to leave their homes unarmed will be travelling around with armed drones
hovering over them or their cars, ready to attack anyone who unexpectedly comes
to close to or raises its owner's pulse or blood pressure. Think George
Zimmerman versus Trayvon Martin in the outer ring of the seventh circle of
Hell, and you will have an idea of what life will be like, not in Afghanistan
or Yemen, but in Texas or Colorado, once weaponised drones become only slightly
more expensive than the remote controlled helicopter your child keeps bothering
you to buy.
Strawser's arguments may seem ill-conceived when put into
the context of a real-world setting, but as you read his work, it becomes clear
that he's in fact not operating in the real world at all. Instead, at least in
his "drones" article, he's operating out of a place called
"Beta-world-Zandar" (that's what he calls it in "Moral
Predators") and other "future worlds", who are inhabited by
imaginary men named "Tom". Reality gets relegated to the endnotes of
his article, where he admits that "there are many in the United States
military community itself who do not question the efficacy of UAV usage but
rather have principled worries concerning their use such as those mentioned
above".
I'm not sure where Beta-world-Zandar is, but Strawser
clearly believes he's working on a "hot topic" in his professional
universe. Indeed, his giddiness seems to have gotten the better of him during
the interview for his Guardian profile, in which he explained of the use of
drones: "It's all upside. There's no downside. Both ethically and
normatively, there's a tremendous value." Those words clearly looked worse
on the page than they sounded coming out of his mouth, because in the op-ed he
wrote subsequent to the publication of his profile, he declared:
"Unfortunately - if understandably, given the complexities of the matter -
I consider some of my views were misrepresented. Most disturbingly, I was
reported to claim that 'there's no downside' to killing by drones. In fact, the
majority of my work on drones is dedicated to elucidating and analysing the
serious moral downsides that killing by remote control can pose. The Guardian
has graciously offered me this space to set the record straight."
Of course, he doesn't deny that he actually said what was
written, merely that is was "disturbing" - and rightfully so. But
again, rather than "setting the record straight", he merely repeats
his claim that drones kill fewer civilians than other options. He goes on to
reiterate that "my claim about drones is entirely conditional: they should
be used only if the mission is just. As with all conditional claims, if the
antecedent is false, then the entire claim is invalidated".
But this is of course disingenuous. Neither the media nor
the Navy would be paying any attention to Strawser if the drone debate was
merely about whether, "other things being equal", it was no worse to
kill someone with a drone than with a gun or cruise missile. Instead, the very
power of drones - their seemingly godlike omnipresence, omniscience and
omnipotence - sows confusion, even among philosophers who should know better.
Thus Strawser argues that "the kind of change I'm
proposing may already be occurring. Take NATO's present counter-insurgency
(COIN) operations in Afghanistan. NATO forces engage the last vestiges of
al-Qaeda quite differently from the way in which they engage Taliban fighters.
The former they attack 'with prejudice' and, where possible, kill via drone
airstrike. The latter they engage more cautiously, avoid high death tolls and
use extreme restraint to avoid non-combatant causalities".
In fact, hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in
US drone strikes on suspected Taliban members, and this leaves aside the even
bigger problem of how a person gets defined as being "Taliban" and
whether being a Taliban, whatever that may be, is in and of itself enough to
warrant one's being blown to bits on the hunch of a drone operative in
Virginia, or in some cases, the White House.
What would Kant say?
Strawser considers Immanuel Kant among his greatest influences.
Thus his homepage contains a well-known quote from the master moralist, who
declared that "morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make
ourselves happy, but how we make ourselves worthy of happiness". Kant
certainly felt that philosophers should impact important public debates,
arguing that if political leaders would heed their - or at least his - advice,
a truly peaceful world order could be created.
But he also knew well how far humanity remained from the
minimum level of civilisation or morality required to achieve what he termed
"perpetual peace" ("We are civilised - perhaps too much for our
own good - in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves
as having reached morality - for that, much is lacking", he famously wrote
in his Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View).
But for this to happen, individuals and states would need to
behave according to the "categorical imperative", which states that
one should only "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you
can at the same time will that it become a universal law". It's not the
Golden Rule (in fact, it’s far more universal because its standard is set at
the level of society, not the individual). It's a powerful moral constraint on
actions which might negatively impact other people, including the use of new
technologies to kill people in faraway lands who quite possibly haven't done
anything to harm you.
The implications of the categorical imperative for US drone
policy couldn't be more clear. As ACLU National Security Project Director Hina
Shamsi writes, the US must ensure that its use of drone strikes "comports
with international law, or it will set a dangerous precedent that could be used
tomorrow by nations with less respect for the right to life in particular, and
human rights in general".
If philosophers are going to join the kill chain and help
formulate policies for the use of violence by their countries' militaries, it
would be nice if they spent a little less time thinking about how things work
on Beta-world-Zandar where "just warfighters" can ply their trade
with complete moral confidence, and more time helping to figure out how to
transform the fundamental policies of governments on this planet towards
supporting a global political economy that encourages peace, democracy and
sustainable development. That shouldn't be too much to ask from a tradition
that, for 2,500 years, has interrogated the most fundamental questions about
human nature and society.
Mark Levine is professor of Middle Eastern history at UC
Irvine and distinguished visiting professor at the Centre for Middle Eastern
Studies at Lund University in Sweden and the author of the forthcoming book
about the revolutions in the Arab world, The Five Year Old Who Toppled a
Pharaoh.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and
do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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