Abstract
This chapter addresses the topic of drone use via some larger discussions about the moral relevance, if any, of distance. We ask whether the fact of this distance between the agent(s) of harm and the harm(s) caused has any moral relevance, and, if so, what and how? There are two dimensions to this question. One concerns the moral relevance of distance to our actual moral obligations: Does geographical distance per se affect what we are morally obligated or morally permitted to do? The second concerns the effect of distance on the way we perceive our moral obligations and permissions: Does geographical distance, either per se or in conjunction with other factors, affect how we view our moral situation? Does distance influence how we think or feel about what we are morally required and/or permitted to do?
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- 1.
There has been much debate about using the terminology of “drones.” Sometimes they are referred to, inter alia, as remotely piloted aircraft/vehicles (RPA/Vs). For convenience we will stick with “drones.” In this paper we will confine ourselves to issues raised by armed drones that are under the direct control of human operators. So-called autonomous drones raise additional problems. For background, see Sifton (2012); see also, more generally, Blom (2010). Many countries now possess drones, including weaponized drones (loaded with remotely guided Hellfire missiles). To date, the major drone manufacturers have been Israel and the United States, though China is now moving into the rapidly developing market. See Wong (2013).
- 2.
A critical difference, though, is that medical technologies are directed at saving lives, not terminating them. One might allow greater ethical latitude for failure in the former case than in the latter. See note 44.
- 3.
- 4.
Basically, that is likely to be a matter of a “resources/damage” ratio, discounted by so-called collateral damage. See, e.g., Raskin and West (2008). For statistics, see Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
- 5.
- 6.
For example, drones cost substantially less than conventional fighter jets, though, when other factors are taken into account, the financial advantage is not as great as often suggested. See Boyle (2012).
- 7.
For example, by virtue of not endangering one’s own soldiers, drones are easier to sell politically. Or, on the other side, the public outrage in communities that experience drone targeting may undercut their political value. Also included may be issues of transparency/secrecy and whether drones might lower the threshold for entry into war. These claims are given extended discussion in the section on “Asymmetric Unfairness” (5) and (7).
- 8.
For example, whether the use of drones by the CIA violates international law (O’Connell 2012). In the United States, despite a presidential initiative (under Obama) to do so, Congress has been reluctant to shift responsibility for the CIA’s drone program to the military, thus shielding much drone use from public scrutiny.
- 9.
Apparently there are approximately 64 bases distributed across the United States, some of which control drones in other parts of the world. Of these bases, 12 are used to operate Predator and Reaper drones, the armed UAVs with which this essay is concerned (Public Intelligence 2012). Of course, not all drones are operated from the United States. Some are operated from much closer sites, such as Djibouti and Saudi Arabia.
- 10.
We will refer to the pairs of people who sit in cockpits as “operators,” though they comprise a pilot (on the left) and a sensor operator (on the right). The pilot controls the drone and fires the weapon; the sensor operator handles the visuals, including zoom and infrared capabilities.
- 11.
The phrase “lethal force short of war” is somewhat vague, but Ford (2013) provides a working account of the territory over which it ranges.
- 12.
There is an insightful discussion of Aristotle, Hume, and Diderot in Ginzburg (1994).
- 13.
“What difference is there to a blind person between a man urinating and a man bleeding to death without speaking? Do we ourselves not cease to feel compassion when distance or the smallness of the object produces the same effect on us as lack of sight does on the blind. Thus do all our virtues depend on our way of apprehending things and on the degree to which external objects affect us! I feel quite sure that were it not for fear of punishment, many people would have fewer qualms at killing a man who was far enough away to appear no larger than a swallow than in butchering a steer with their own hands.” For Diderot, the relevance of distance is a matter of visualization rather than distance per se, though his point is that insofar as distance affects what we see, it also affects our moral perceptions.
- 14.
Sometimes, in some contexts and to some extent in those contexts, photographs, though they depict humans or animals only visually, may have visceral effects. (That is why photographs of abused animals and children are often used by charitable organizations in their written and televised solicitations of funds to prevent and/or treat such abuse. The photographs trade on the emotional resonance that certain photographs are likely to have in those who view them. Sometimes, however, again, depending on context, photographs may leave one emotionally unaffected.) This may have some relevance to Lévinas’s claims about the importance of the eyes and face. See the section on “The Significance of Face”.
- 15.
Compare Diderot’s remark about the blind person’s inability to appreciate the moral difference between the nearby person who is urinating and the one who is bleeding to death, which draws on the importance of vision to knowledge and hence to the moral sentiments that are triggered and the responsibility we bear. We need, in addition, to keep in mind the difference between epistemic distance over which we have no control and culpable ignorance.
- 16.
This is not to say that associative nearness constitutes a necessary condition for positive emotional affect. Those who run foreign charities are well aware of – indeed, they count on – the extent to which most of us are emotionally drawn to the plight of children, however distant their origin, place of residence, or foreign their ethnicity. (The vulnerability and guilelessness of children move us in a way that has little parallel with our response to adults to whom we are not related by blood, country, tradition, or custom.) This is evident in the many references made to the number of children who are killed, injured, or traumatized by drone strikes (as well as by other calamities that befall them).
- 17.
Hume notes, problematically: “Our servant, if diligent and faithful, may excite stronger sentiments of love and kindness than Marcus Brutus, as represented in history.” However, he immediately continues: “we say not upon that account, that the former character is more laudable than the latter. We know, that were we to approach equally near to that renown’d patriot, he would command a much higher degree of affection and admiration. Such corrections are common with regard to all the senses; and indeed ‘twere impossible we cou’d ever make use of language, or communicate our sentiments to one another, did we not correct the momentary appearances of things, and overlook our present situation” (1896: III.3.1). Hume saw the effects of temporal distance on moral sensibilities as greater than those of spatial distance and of the distant future as greater than the distant past. See the discussion in Ginzburg (1994: 57).
- 18.
Frances Kamm has devoted considerable effort to disentangling arguments and reviewing them, usually critically. However, she does think that whereas distance per se is sometimes relevant to our duties to aid, it is not relevant to our duties not to harm. For a selection, see Kamm (2000, 2004). For critiques of Kamm, see Igneski (2001) and Orsi (2008).
- 19.
Several years ago, there was a vigorous debate in Israel over a decision that, to minimize the loss of Israeli soldiers’ lives, greater risks were to be taken with respect to apparently noncombatant populations. That was said to be militarily and morally justified. But others argued that it was worse to increase the security of one’s own military if it increased the risk to noncombatant “enemy” populations. See Kasher and Yadlin (2005a, b), Fotion (2005), Perry (2005), Haydar (2005), Kasher and Yadlin (2005c, 2006), Ramose (2008), Robinson (2008), Margalit and Walzer (2009), Kasher and Yadlin (with reply by Margalit and Walzer) (2009), Yaari (with reply by Margalit and Walzer) (2009), and Luban (2014).
- 20.
There is an argument, developed by Jai Galliot (2012: 355), that the asymmetrical frustration caused by drone use might lead the groups on whom they are used to adopt desperation tactics or what he calls “evoked potential”: “the possibly spontaneous, dangerous and sometimes morally questionable responses likely to be provoked/evoked by radical technological asymmetry.” We are not convinced that one should factor this into a moral argument about what to do.
- 21.
- 22.
We must assume, of course, that the amount of benefit is not greatly disproportionate to the harm (If the benefit is great, say, of preventing the certain starvation of hundreds of people, that may affect the morality of choosing to inflict a slight harm on a few persons).
- 23.
This connects up with an ongoing and long-standing debate about the moral significance of a distinction between omissions and commissions, whether the former have any causal significance and whether (and if so under what circumstances) they should be enforceable. We leave this debate to one side; though see Kleinig (1986).
- 24.
Some, particularly Thomas Pogge, have questioned that division. According to Pogge, the plight of the distant needy is to some extent caused by those in western countries. See, e.g., Pogge (2002, 2005). The causal argument might be run in a number of different ways, but the general idea is that the desire for commodities, and cheap or profitable commodities, has created an exploitative economy that is seriously harmful to people in Third World countries and that we therefore have a strong moral responsibility to alleviate their situation. So here is an argument that despite physical distance there is a causal connection between what we do and what they suffer that overcomes any attempt to make a moral argument out of distance. There has, however, been a vigorous debate over Pogge’s alleged causal link. See, e.g., Steinhoff (2012) and Patten (2005).
- 25.
It would not follow that one owed everything to one and nothing to the other; if we are thinking in distributive terms, it might be a question of more or less rather than all or none.
- 26.
Bernard Williams offers an example of two drowning people, only one of whom a bystander is able to save, and one of whom is his wife. Williams claims that the person who ponders which person he should save, given that he can save only one, is a person who has “one thought too many” (1981: 18). Williams’s position derives from the preeminent (even if not always overriding) role that our deepest personal attachments should have in our determinations about what we should do. For Williams, allowing spatially distant needs to weigh as (or even more) heavily in our moral deliberations about what we should do as the needs of those associatively closer to us threatens to alienate us from ourselves. See his remarks in Smart and Williams (1973: 116). Of course, contra-Williams, we might raise the question of whether one should always give priority to the projects with which one is most closely identified without regard to the nature of those projects, a question that does not impugn Williams’s concern that an undifferentiated utilitarianism would invariably discount or ignore the very special importance of “our deepest personal attachments.”
- 27.
Here we need to recognize the great diversity of situations: from protecting convoys of one’s own soldiers to targeting suspected terrorists. In some cases there will be important issues associated with targeted killings. In other cases, there will be important issues about due process, at least where the targets are citizens of the targeting country. See note 45. See also McNeal (2014) and Miller (2014).
- 28.
A personal example of how spatial distance “naturally” contributes to depersonalization: When the World Trade Center was attacked on 9/11, one of the two authors of this paper was about a mile away, the other about three short blocks away. Both of us observed objects falling from the topmost stories of the 100-storey northern Twin Tower. But only one of us had a vivid perception of these objects as human beings and so was confronted by the unbearably horrific conditions within the burning building that must have driven them to jump to what they must have known was their certain death. The psychological and emotional impact of what we saw was, on each of us, very different. Clearly, distance mattered to how we saw what we saw (not that, in our own case, one of us depersonalized the objects so much as failed to have a strong sense of them as persons).
- 29.
Although the notion of a moral hazard has its home in the business world, especially that of insurance, where it points to the potential for an insurance policy to breed carelessness, it is more generally applicable to a context in which the details of that context may affect our conduct in morally deleterious ways.
- 30.
- 31.
It can also occur when drone operators come to see themselves simply as functionaries rather than as individual moral agents (mere cogs within the organization with a job to do).
- 32.
“Engagement in terror-related activities” needs precising. It may take a number of forms each of which raises its own questions. Abdul may be doing no more than advocating terrorism, or conspiring with others to engage in terror-related activity, assisting others who are more centrally involved, on his way to perform a terrorist act, in the process of performing a terrorist act (burying an IED on the road), and so on. Arguably, not all of these justify killing and therefore do not justify killing by means of drones.
- 33.
Not all detachment may be immoral. We may hope for a professional detachment by those tasked with killing others – a sense that, though the role they have is a supremely serious one, they are not only morally comfortable with it but also able to approach it with an unclouded mind. Might we compare this with a physician who can professionally work on a body that has been ravaged by disease or injury not by depersonalizing it but through the development of a needed professionalism? See the report on Col. D. Scott Brenton in Bumiller (2012): “‘I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,’ Colonel Brenton said. [But] When the call comes for him to fire a missile and kill a militant – and only, Colonel Brenton said, when the women and children are not around – the hair on the back of his neck stands up, just as it did when he used to line up targets in his F-16 fighter jet. Afterward, just like the old days, he compartmentalizes: ‘I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy,’ he said. ‘I have a duty, and I execute the duty.’”
- 34.
Lévinas (1961). The face, for Lévinas, is not just a face but the other’s “living presence” (66), which makes a moral demand of us (201, 207) and “forbids us to kill” (1985: 86). In recent times, Lévinas’s views have been controversially appealed to in the French debate concerning face-concealing clothing such as the niqab. See Patton (2014).
- 35.
The view that Lévinas puts forth here concerning the moral significance of face may inform the work of those who, in trying to help desperately needy persons by seeking donations of funds for this purpose, try to shorten the psychic distance between us and those for whom the funds are sought by presenting their faces to us in dramatic images on TV, in vivid photographs in brochures, or in graphically and movingly detailed descriptions in solicitation letters. It is hoped that the haunted, sad look in the eyes of those presented to us will not only move us to act but also move us to feel obligated to help.
A somewhat different use of the same psychological phenomenon can be found in an early argument in the abortion debate: the “windowed womb.” See Wertheimer (1971). Cf. those US states that require women seeking abortions to view a sonogram before proceeding with their abortion (Guttmacher Institute 2017).
One other matter: When we are talking about distance and drones, we are not simply talking about surveillance. If Alan and Alice are in Nevada and keeping an eye on what may turn out to be terror-related activities in Afghanistan, that need not be too problematic. There are also issues of privacy (seeing what people are doing on their rooftops), and we might argue in that case, as we tend to in some others, that security and privacy may sometimes have to be traded off. The fact that Abdul is believed to be engaged in terror-related activities justifies some infringements on his privacy. So it pays to keep in mind that what is at issue in the case of Predator drones is the targeted killing for which they are used. Abdul is not merely being surveilled but he is being surveilled with a view to killing him if it is determined that he is engaged in terror-related activities. Moreover, given the specific capacity of drones, there is a desire to kill him with minimal damage to innocent others, and so he may be surveilled for an opportune time when he is alone and vulnerable.
- 36.
As we will suggest, the prevalence of burnout among drone operators may provide some if inconclusive empirical support for this. See note 40 and surrounding text.
- 37.
Some of Grossman’s theses, esp. his thesis about the link between arcade games and violence, viz., that arcade games erode our (natural) inhibition against killing, have been hotly contested. The thesis considered in this essay is rather different, viz., that the use of drones reduces killing to an arcade game played by the drone operator.
- 38.
This point harks back to Stanley Milgram’s experiments (1974). Although Milgram was primarily concerned about the power of authority in relation to conscience, distance significantly affected the experimental subjects’ willingness to inflict pain.
- 39.
This diffusion of responsibility, however, may be a further source of depersonalization. If mistakes are made, whose fault is it? Anyone’s? The fog of war? See the section on “Fragmenting Responsibility”.
- 40.
- 41.
As the technology improves, the scenes will become more graphic. See, e.g., Kopstein (2013).
- 42.
Despite the secrecy around the US drone program, various operators and ex-operators have also spoken about their experiences, and they have for the most part confirmed the psychological and moral cost of drone piloting. See, e.g., Klaidman (2012), Power (2013), Linebaugh (2013), and Asaro (2013). As noted earlier, there is an argument to the effect that those pilots who are unmoved by the lives their work will destroy have developed capacities for professional compartmentalization that would serve them as well in other combat situations. See the remarks of Col. D. Scott Brenton in Bumiller (2012). It has led to suggestions that drone operators should be eligible for special military awards. See generally, Wikipedia authors, “Distinguished warfare medal”; see also Lubold (2014), AAP (2013), and Wood and Harbaugh (2014). Ironically, given the criticism of drone piloting, the US Air Force is struggling to find sufficient drone operators (Drew and Philipps 2015). On the matter of recognition, a compromise has since been reached.
- 43.
The problem may be intensified if some of the moral constraints on killing are increased in “short-of-war” contexts. See note 11.
- 44.
Heart transplant technology, which in its early uses resulted in many failures and in many deaths, might be cited in this connection. But the pioneering heart transplant surgeons, though subject to a considerable amount of public criticism when they failed, as they often did, were at least trying to help people who, given the state of medicine at the time, had no other realistic options. That is very different from drone operators who, because of flawed intelligence, blow up a wedding party rather than a convoy of terrorists or who are mistakenly led to target some poor villagers collecting scrap metal rather than Taliban burying land mines. Ironically, the psychological pressure may be intensified by a factor that we note later: the fragmentation of responsibility. If things go wrong, the drone operators may be left feeling that they have not acted as a result of their own best judgment, but rather at the behest of others, though it was their act that ended the innocent life (Brandt 2013).
- 45.
Sometimes “due process” arguments are advanced that are different from those we advance under this heading. One is that unless people pose an imminent threat, we should be trying to capture them and bring them to justice rather than eliminating them. The other arises if the alleged terrorist is a citizen of one’s own country. See the debate over the drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki (Mohamed 2011; Coll 2012).
- 46.
Though that story (I Sam. 17) is about David’s triumph in an unequal and unfair contest. Moreover, it is instructive, because much of the story of asymmetric warfare is a story of the little guy who beats the big guy (Arreguín-Toft 2001). The issue in the present context is whether the asymmetry creates some form of unfairness.
- 47.
It needs noting that McMahan’s claim about the moral inequality of combatants at war with one another has not gone unchallenged. The doctrine of the moral equality of combatants whatever we might want to say about the countries that send them to fight is fairly well entrenched in (even if not original to) Just War theory. Even if we take as given that soldiers fighting for a country will feel patriotic toward that country and that the patriotism they feel may not be unthinking but morally self-reflective, it is (except in special circumstances) generally risky to view and therefore hold individual soldiers responsible for the decisions of their governments to go to war. We may not want to say that soldiers fighting on the wrong side of an unjust war are justified in killing those whom their government has declared as the enemy, but we would probably see these soldiers, at least generally speaking, as morally excusable for doing so. For (sometimes partial) defenses of the moral equality of combatants, see Walzer fourth edn. (2006), Zupan (2006), and Ceulemans (2007–2008). See also Steinhoff (2008) and Lang (2011).
- 48.
What if it is the drones that make the difference between loss and victory for the unjust participant?
- 49.
The spike in drone use occurred when Barack Obama became the US President and was not unrelated to his concern about military deaths of US soldiers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Drones were rushed into service ahead of important technological and intelligence safeguards and capabilities.
- 50.
This also reflects a concern that many have that drone warfare succeed in large measure because it is carried out against an enemy that is not capable of retaliating in like measure. Were a drone warfare conducted against an enemy with similar capabilities, would it be conducted as readily or in the same way?
- 51.
- 52.
Capture, for example. The fact that acting on these lists is seen as a presidential prerogative based on classified evidence adds a further dimension to the concern. In his 8 years in office, US President George W. Bush authorized 44 such strikes. President Obama authorized 239 in his first 3 years. They subsequently diminished. Nevertheless, the theory of preemptive strikes, which underlay many of these decisions, was quite contentious.
- 53.
This is one of the problems emanating from the fact that the CIA has been the primary US agent for drone warfare. There is thus relatively little transparency and accountability.
- 54.
Although this charge might seem to emanate from oppositional sources, it is also heard within military circles: drone operators lack the macho qualities of real soldiers – they have been referred to as “cowardly button-pushers” (Abé 2012).
- 55.
The argument is not a new one. In Don Quixote, a paean to “chivalry,” the Knight of La Mancha inveighs against the invention of “the devilish instruments of artillery” whereby “a cowardly base hand takes away the life of the bravest gentleman” by means of a bullet “coming nobody knows how or from whence,” Cervantes Saavedra (1993, vol. 2: 318). Old or new, the argument could probably be employed about other forms of long-distance or aerially directed combat. Indeed, direct physical contact with the enemy is sometimes said to morally distinguish the foot soldier from the bombardier, although, as modern technology has developed, ground-to-air missiles may place the bombardier at considerable risk as well.
- 56.
We would also draw attention to an irony involved in the charge of cowardice. The use of a technology developed largely to pursue the so-called war on terror is now complained (by some) to display the same vice as was popularly and insistently imputed to terrorists. Those who commandeered the planes that were used as weapons in the 9/11 attacks were early and frequently referred to as “cowards,” and those questioning that attribution were often the objects of characterizations meant to shame or censor them (for references, see Weber (2005)). “Cowardice” became not only a widely affirmed characterization of terrorists but also a politically correct one.
The charge of cowardice, though insistently propagated by political authorities, may have been inapt as applied to the 9/11 terrorists, for they did not secure themselves behind a protective wall that shielded them from risk to their own lives but sacrificed their lives in order to destroy the lives of others. Their suicides might be said to have made manifest the courage of their convictions.
Perhaps the charge that drone operators act with cowardice is fuelled by something to which we alluded earlier: their ability to depersonalize. In depersonalizing, drone operators shield themselves from the moral enormity of what they are doing, namely, killing vulnerable human beings, often in horrible ways and in ways that keep those who do the killing not only safe but also hidden, not only separated from the moral seriousness of what they are doing (avoiding “the look”) but also avoiding the sight of the bloody aftermath to which they have given rise. That this may be what feeds the complaint is suggested by the fact that it is also a common complaint about snipers (Blahnik 2003).
- 57.
Depending on the circumstances, some form of moral and psychological courage may be called for if drone operators are required to make their own judgments about whether a situation calls for the use of a missile.
- 58.
Nor does courage take only one form. We recognize the possibility of “moral and psychological courage,” getting ourselves to do something that we believe is right or even morally called for when we have not the stomach for it. From interviews with drone operators, it is clear that they are sometimes called upon to exhibit these forms of courage.
- 59.
See also Wood and Harbaugh (2014: A29), who argue that “the moment we conflate proficiency and valor, we cheapen the meaning of bravery itself.”
- 60.
“Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God” (Lieber Code, 1863, art 15).
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Kasachkoff, T., Kleinig, J. (2018). Drones, Distance, and Death. In: Andreopoulos, G., Barberet, R., Nalla, M. (eds) The Rule of Law in an Era of Change. Springer Series on International Justice and Human Rights. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89908-4_2
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