In response to my recent Guardian opinion piece on the waning coverage of the military use of drones, a number of below the line commentators made the oft-levelled aside that ‘drones don’t kill people, people kill people.’ Tech writer Kelsey Atherton weighed in on twitter too arguing that drones themselves aren’t the problem, rather it’s how they are used that is the issue (see Kelsey’s Storify of our brief debate here). In a similar vein, academic Stephanie Carvin argues in ‘Getting drones wrong’ in the most recent issue of International Journal of Human Rights, that scholars and researchers should avoid “the magpie-like distraction of the ‘shiny object’ that is the drone” and instead “focus on the larger issues at stake.” Read more
Tag: Ethics
2014 Review (Part One) – Drone Wars: The New Normal
As 2014 opened mounting criticism of the US use of drones for targeted killing gave way to a long and significant pause in drone strikes in Pakistan. This together with the imminent withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan gave rise to the possibility that the use of armed drones that we have seen over the past five years might perhaps become a thing of the past, an aberration to be looked back upon and wondered at. Read more
Book Review: Precision strike warfare and international intervention
Precision strike warfare and International Intervention: Strategic, ethico-legal, and decisional implications. Edited by Mike Aaronson, Wali Aslam, Tom Dyson and Regina Rauxloh. Routledge 2015
This new collection of essays on the use of armed drones, written from a variety of academic disciplines including political science, psychology, sociology, and international law, arises out of a multi-disciplinary conference held at The Centre for International Intervention (CII) at Surrey University in 2012. The book follows on and compliments the joint CII/RUSI report Hitting the Target? How New Capabilities are Shaping International Intervention which also arose out the gathering. Read more
Review: Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military edited by Bradley Jay Strawser
Killing by Remote Control: Ethics of an Unmanned Military is a new collection of academic essays edited by Bradley Jay Strawser, a philosophy professor at the US Navy Postgraduate School in California. Strawser, as readers of this blog may remember, was interviewed by The Guardian last year and quoted as saying in relation to unmanned drones: “It’s all upside. There’s no downside. Both ethically and normatively, there’s a tremendous value.” Famously, Strawser argues that the US has a moral duty to use drones.
Most, but not all, of the authors writing in this collection are coming from a military perspective, either as former serving officers or currently employed within military teaching institutions. As Strawser notes in his introduction “none of the Read more
Are drones compatible with the idea of just war?
This is an edited version of an article by US Catholic theologians Tobias L. Winright and Mark J. Allman that first appeared in the 18th August 2012 edition of the international Catholic weekly, The Tablet (www.thetablet.co.uk) as ‘Obama’s drone wars: a case to answer. Recalling that Barack Obama spelt out his commitment to the just war tradition at the outset of his presidency, Winright and Allman, reflect on whether the growing use of armed drones is in fact compatible with the just war tradition. Reproduced by kind permission of the publishers. Read more
Reflecting on the recent rash of writing on morality and drones
There have been a number of articles published recently on the morality of drone wars, many of them suggesting that those of us with grave concerns about the growing use of drones have either got it wrong, are confused, or are just plain misguided.
Writing in The Observer, Peter Beaumont posed the question ‘Are drones any more immoral than other weapons of war?‘ After suggesting that “much of what has been written on both sides of the debate on the surrounding moral and legal issues has been ill-informed and confused” he then goes on to give a rather unhelpful summary of the international law arguments surrounding the use of force against non-state actors based on the recent paper ‘The Strategic Context of Lethal Drones’ published by the American Security Project. Read more