ABSTRACT Drone Warfare: Ethical Controversies and Voices Of
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ABSTRACT Drone Warfare: Ethical Controversies and Voices of Experience Samuel Gostomski Director: Dr. John Haldane, Ph.D. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or ‘drones’ has drastically increased in the last two decades. That increase has been accompanied by a rise in anxiety – both among the general public and military ethicists – about the ethical challenges that arise with the use of these weapons. In this thesis, I explore these ethical controversies both by reviewing existing literature and offering my own analysis of the issues. Following my initial survey, I conclude by putting the ethical issues I identify in conversation with my proprietary interviews with members of the U.S. Army and Air Force. Accordingly, this thesis is a combination of exclusive interviews I obtained as part of my research, which are included as transcripts, and a survey and detailed exploration of the ethical issues that arise with the use of ‘drones’ in warfare. APPROVED BY DIRECTOR OF HONORS THESIS: _________________________________________________ Dr. John Haldane, Department of Philosophy APPROVED BY THE HONORS PROGRAM: _________________________________________________ Dr. Elizabeth Corey, Director DATE: _________________________________ 2 DRONE WARFARE: ETHICAL CONTROVERSIES AND VOICES OF EXPERIENCE A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Baylor University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Honors Program By Samuel Gostomski Waco, Texas December 2018 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………........iii Chapter One: Old Answers to New Questions – Just War and the Challenges We Face…1 Chapter Two: The Drone………………………………………………………………...11 Chapter Three: The Problem of Transferred Agency……………………………………21 Chapter Four: Voices of Experience……………………………………………………..33 Appendices……………………………………………………………………………….43 Appendix A………………………………………………………………………44 Appendix B……………………………………………………………………..126 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………151 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I could not have completed this thesis without the help, guidance, and support of a number of very dear people in my life. My thesis director, Dr. John Haldane, guided me through the writing and editing process with great care. My sincere thanks to Dr. Mark Long, who has acted as my mentor throughout my time at Baylor and who served on my committee. To Dr. Gawrych, who also served on my committee, thank you for your words of advice and for the many excellent recommendations. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mr. Randy Martin, spokesperson for the U.S. Air Force, Major Jordan, officer in the U.S. Air Force, and Lieutenant General Rick Lynch (Ret.) of the U.S. Army for their willingness to be interviewed. Finally, I could never have completed this project without the support of my family and friends, who offered me encouragement in countless ways during this process. Thanks to Peter Mungiguerra for his help with formatting, without him there to work and miss deadlines with… I likely would have been just fine, but it would have been less fun. Thank you to you all. iii CHAPTER ONE Old Answers to New Questions – Just War and the Challenges We Face "We are rarely called upon to invent new ethical principles; if we did that, our criticism would not be comprehensible to the people whose behavior we wanted to condemn. Rather, we hold such people to their own principles, though we may draw these out and arrange them in ways they had not thought of before." – Michael Walzer1 There are two basic camps a person can fall into when thinking about war: people who think there is a morally right way to wage war, and people who think there is not. This is written for the former group of people. The latter, comprised of the pacifists and political ‘realists’, either think that war is too horrible to be waged at all or that the conditions of war are such that moral rules do not apply to it. For the realists, the only sense of rightness in the conduct of war is military and political efficacy, i.e. success. For the pacifist, there is no right way to conduct a war. While both of these positions have distinguished defenders, I am interested in what has historically been the much more popular approach to war – war with moral rules. Rules of war date back almost as long as humans have been recording history, with some of the earliest examples in the Sanskrit Epic, the Mahābhārata, and the Old Testament or Torah. Even the Iliad, written between the 8th and 9th centuries B.C.E., espoused certain standards of engagement, like the concept of xenia (friendship or hospitality) that survived even the worst enmity. Diomedes, whose grandfather Oeneus had hosted a feast for Glaucon’s grandfather, Bellerophon, said to Glaucon in Book VI: 1 Michael Walzer. Just and Unjust Wars. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1984.), XV. 1 “Thus I am your beloved guest in the breast of Argos… Let us turn our lances away from each other, even in battle.”2 The Iliad can hardly be credited with depicting a war anybody would now consider to have been conducted “justly.” At least, it would not be just according to the rules of war as those were developed in the West in the late Middle Ages and early modern periods and further developed in the past century. Rape and enslavement are staples of the epic, the pleas of the innocent were often ignored, and Hector’s corpse was dragged outside the gates of Troy with shocking indifference to Article 34 of the Geneva Convention. Even in this context, there were still rules governing engagement that one simply did not ignore, and Homer was singing for an audience that was expected to know this. This at least suggests that there is an inclination amongst human beings to curb our most violent behavior. Another early example, this time from the Mahābhārata states3: “One should not attack chariots with cavalry; chariot warriors should attack chariots. One should not assail someone in distress, neither to scare him nor to defeat him. There should be no arrows smeared with poison, nor any barbed arrows – these are weapons of evil people. War should be waged for the sake of conquest; one should not be enraged toward an enemy who is not trying to kill him.”4 2 Weil, Simon. “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” (Chicago Review, 1965.), 23. 3 This statement from Krishna is interesting in the context of the full Mahābhārata and it is worth noting that it would later be Krishna who would order the prince, Arjun, to break this rule when he kills Karna after dismounting from his chariot. The breaking of rules under certain circumstances is often justified by the Gods in the Mahābhārata as being necessary for the preservation of ultimate good. For those interested, the Mahābhārata also contains rules of war that limit the use of weapons technology that mirror thermonuclear weapons. For instance, Krishna steps in to prevent the use of the bhrahmastra, which would have destroyed the universe. 4 Fitzgerald, James L. The Mahābhārata. (Chicago, United States: University of Chicago Press, 2004.) 411. 2 It is worth noting how closely this resembles the Geneva Convention’s Protocol I, Section 41, which prohibits engaging soldiers who are recognized as “hors de combat,” and the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of chemical weapons.5 That a poetic epic written nearly three millennia ago would contain nascent versions of rules that would be formalized during the age of artillery and machine guns is, at the very least, thought provoking. Clearly, the rules of war have deep roots, be they historical, psychological, sociological, or (insert your field of study here). The question in which I take an interest is: are these roots natural? Do human beings have a natural inclination to impose rules in the conduct of war? This question is more complicated than it might at first seem, so I need to define my terms. Natural, in this context, refers to something that is not created by artifice or design. It is not a convention that could be abandoned if its participants so chose. Instead, it is rooted in something fundamental to what makes a human being a human being – something like our “essence” in the Aristotelian sense. Certainly, one might consider a person who lacked any sense of constraint in violence – initiating conflict at the slightest provocation, or dragging their enemy’s corpse outside the city gates – to have lost something crucial to their humanity. Such people form tragic figures precisely because they no longer seem to be fully human. Moreover, my account needs to say something about why it matters whether or not rules in war are natural to humans. That is to say, it should be a normative, and not merely a descriptive, account of human nature. Perhaps humans do naturally restrain 5 “1925 Geneva Protocol – UNODA.” United Nations, United Nations, www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/bio/1925geneva-protocol/. 3 themselves in wartime, so what? At first glance, the fact that something is natural does not seem to tell us anything about what constitutes right or wrong, just or unjust, behavior. Thankfully, one of Just War Theory’s most influential thinkers has already explored this question on our behalf. In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas discusses the idea of “natural law,” a system of ethical precepts that should govern human conduct. Aquinas recognizes the objection that not all “acts of virtue” necessarily belong to natural law. One might object that they could be directed towards a private good, or in our context, something created by artifice or design, a mere instance of periodically conventional behavior. Aquinas addresses this objection by stating that virtuous acts are given their status as a product of mankind’s natural inclination towards virtuous behavior as a result of reason, writing, “each thing is inclined naturally to an operation that is suitable to it according to its form: thus fire is inclined to give heat.” 6 In Aquinas’ understanding, what is natural to mankind is twofold.