The Moral Case for Drones?

The New York times ran a piece the other day on the moral case for drone attacks. The piece is not all that sophisticated or interesting. It is mostly boring because they are defending (or at least quoting people who are defending) drone warfare.

However, on closer inspection, what they are actually defending is the moral preference of a drone attack on a target to an attack on the same target by an assassination team. So the article is not saying anything about the ethics of assassination, but rather it is saying that if you will assassinate someone, it is morally preferable that you do it by remote control because you minimize certain kinds of risks.

Yawn.

The article barely mentions the morally important points relating to the fact that with drones it is now far easier to actually carry out these assassinations, making them more common, and now a policy tool of the Obama administration. All that is not to say that there is anything wrong with such attacks, but rather to say that The Times discusses the banal questions and glosses over the important ones. Any increase in precision is good, both militarily and I would say morally. But that is not where the drone controversy is in play. No one ever seriously suggested that drones are evil because they are more precise. People who dislike drones on moral grounds dislike them because they now make it possible to assassinate targets with relative ease and fewer repercussions.

Training ethics

The New York times raises an interesting ethics question. Are there real moral problems "practicing" on unwitting civilians if it has no real impact on their lives? (This question has real repercussions for my line of work too.)

In the story, drones are "tracking" civilian cars, presumably in the US, simply to give the drone pilots practice in tracking things. If my car was being tracked just so someone can practice looking at me from 20,000 feet, I'd certainly feel uncomfortable. And what if the US Air Force discovered something they didn't like, would they act on it? Does that violate federal surveillance laws? What if the drone happened upon a drug deal or something worse? Does practicing on unwitting american violate the Posse Comitatus Act?

Secondly (and not mentioned by the story), what if the Air Force practiced on foreigners? Would that make a difference? Would if violate the sovereignty of that country? If some other country was doing it to the US, I am sure we'd freak out. Is it any different than observing random strangers in some foreign country with a satellite? Is that legal?

Cyberattacks and JWT

How does Just War Theory apply to cyberattacks? A forthcoming paper by Leonard Kahn has a discussion. 

Bioterror?

It has been suggested that an invasive insect has been introduced into California to kill the eucalyptus trees as a biological weapon. I am personally skeptical, but if true, this is an interesting sort of terrorism. It seeks to attack a species of tree that is mostly used for shade. If it is terror, its will succeed by annoying many Californians. It is hard to even take credit for such a thing and to what end? I suppose destroying a bit of ecosystem could be a terrorist's goal. 

With new weapons come new questions. Anything worth thinking about here?

(I wonder if this is some kind of revenge for this Eucalyptus tale.)

(H/T /.)

Cyberwar

Another piece on Cyberwarfare.

Just cyberwar

As if in response to our last post. . . see prophilosophy's post here. 

Ethics and Cyberspace

With the success of Stuxnet and now newer computer malware that are specifically designed with military targets in mind, it is time to start thinking seriously about ethical questions involving weapons that work in cyberspace. The US Air force has Cybercommand, Germany is now starting an offensive cyberwarefare unit, Russia has been alleged to employ cyberwarefare, and other nations like Israel, North Korea, the UK, and China have also been exploiting cyberspace for military purposes.

But what are the ethical issues involved? (Here are some practical issues.) I can think of a few off the top of my head. First are the traditional questions: How are civilians in enemy countries impacted by cyberwarefare and what responsibilities do countries have to only target military cyber infrastructure? Is this perhaps a kind of "warfare" where the discrimination standard breaks down? After all, chances are that few people will die as a direct consequence of a cyberattack on a country. So how to we weigh the double effect consequences?

Another question I was thinking about is how to deal with proliferation. There is little doubt that weapons proliferation has ethical repercussions. Cyber weapons can potentially be copied quickly and effectively and presumably with disastrous consequences. What ethical responsibilities to governments have to prevent this?

Also, is it really war, is it really a weapon, if individuals are not getting physically harmed? Is this the new kind of war people are talking about when they envision the future of war? Imagine immobilizing the enemy without harming anyone? Is it possible to win wars that way and if so, can this mean the end of war as we know it?

Finally, this all seems like an important step in moving war away from the nation state and putting non-state actors on the same level.

(H/T /.)

Ethics and veterans

I am generally a fan of Andrew J. Bacevich's writing. Here he reviews James Wright's Those Who Have Borne the Battle. The book talks about the relationship the United States has to those who have served and also who served in the first place.

I think that veterans pose a few important ethics questions worth exploring for military ethics. For one, we should think about the virtue of gratitude. Gratitude is often taken as a virtue. I would argue that in democratic countries that do not have drafts, veterans deserve their country's gratitude for being the people who were willing to put themselves at the disposal of the democracy. Regardless of whether or not you like how the democracy acted, they acted at the behest of the country, often without prior knowledge of what they would be asked to do, and often put themselves in more danger than most people would feel comfortable doing. (Pace an argument once made by Stephen Kershnar that said, among other things, that members of the military are adequately compensated, and thus do not deserve special gratitude.)

Of course, gratitude is not much. It is an emotion some people feel for some things, and only sometimes actually benefits the veteran. What does a country owe its vets? What attitude ought citizens have toward veterans? What obligations do veterans have?

Any thoughts?

Military research and ethics

/. has a post about the bioethicist Jonathan Moreno who co-wrote an essay about the intersection of military ethics and neuroscience. Moreno is also interviewed here. Though the interview is pretty interesting, I find the essay itself rather thin on content. It is largely a list of research DARPA has tried out like brain-computer interfaces, performance enhancing drugs, and lie detection technologies.

One point that the article makes that is ethically interesting is one I am somewhat skeptical of:

The military establishment's interest in understanding, developing, and exploiting neuroscience generates a tension in its relationship with science: the goals of national security and the goals of science may conflict. The latter employs rigorous standards of validation in the expansion of knowledge, while the former depends on the most promising deployable solutions for the defense of the nation. As a result, the exciting potential of high-tech developments on the horizon may be overhyped, misunderstood, or worse: they could be deployed before sufficiently validated." 

I am a bit puzzled why this should be so. If a solution is deployable, i.e. works, how does that conflict with our getting knowledge? (There may be ethical issues in deploying a technology as part of the testing process, but that issue is not raised.) The economics of the military might get them to try some science before it is mature, but academia seems beset with the same problems, with researchers publishing findings before they are mature (see here, for example, for a list of science papers that were retracted for lots of reasons). There may be a conflict between the goals of science and the goals of quick science, but that is not particular to the military. It seems to me to be creating an ethics problem where there is none. 

There is certainly a lot of military research that should be generating ethical questions, and the essay even mentioned some of them. But if there is a more fundamental tension between the goals of science and the goals of military research, the essay did not demonstrate it. 

Ethics at Lockheed Martin

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a review of Daniel Terris's Ethics at Work: Creating virtue at an American corporation.The review ends with the following quote that I thought was interesting: Lockheed Martin "helps to make some of the deadliest man-made objects on the face of the earth. To claim that this fact has no ethical implications for the manufacturer is, on the face of it, absurd."  It suggests that ethics is an inherent part, not only of the user of some technology and for the entity who commissioned it, but also for the manufacturer.

I am not completely convinced of this connection, but I am open to being so. After all, once you get past the idea that you are just manufacturing something that was legally and legitimately commissioned  who has all the obligations to properly use whatever it is that you make, what ethical dilemmas can you have relating to this product? Could Lockheed Martin really be culpable for additional deaths on a battlefield, or credited for fewer ones (on either side) because of something it did or failed to do that was part of its contract?

Needs some thought.