Philosophy Of Drones
An inquiry beyond ethics: Who will kill whom?
Recent ‘philosophical’ debates on drones usually focus on ethical questions, namely if the disassociation of killing and killed changes the way we wage war, if drones make it ‘easier’ for us to kill — even though there seems to be ample evidence for drone operators suffering from PTSD, no matter how far away we wage war. This question especially arises when we hear of the many ‘civilian causalities’ which die in drone-strikes: Would/could they have been killed in ‘traditional’ combat?
In the following we do not want to immerse ourselves in this debate, but rather ask a much broader question with the help of Günther Anders.
How is the technology of drones affecting the relationship between ‘man’ and machine?
A common answer we here is that machines are substituting us in the act of killing. Yet we shall see that our relationship with machines (of war) isn’t such a simple one, but rather more dialectic — who and how things are allowed to kill influences our own autonomy in a technological society more deeply. In order to make this phenomenon more apparent we shall look back at the Vietnam War — a war which, at least by our contemporary standards of ‘remote killing’, was still a pre-modern one.
There are two main reasons for looking back: the first and foremost reason for this article is that Günther Anders used the Vietnam War as an example in his 1980 book The Obsolescence of Humankind II — a criticism of technology. The reason he chose this war specifically most likely has to do with the fact that it was the war ‘closest’ to him, one he tried to actively stop as a member of the peace movement. The second and less opportune reason for looking back is that the Vietnam War, at least from a European standpoint, isn’t as deeply embedded in our daily discourse: It is easier to critically look back at the past than critically examine the present, especially when the consequences can’t yet be anticipated.
Transcending Morality: The My Lai Massacre
Günther Anders considers the My Lai Massacre to be a clear example of what he calls retranslation: when what we have told machines to do changes how we do things (without machines). We do not want to get into a political or ethical debate about what happened in My Lai, or who may be at fault and why, but rather want to highlight Anders’ thoughts on what happened, and by doing so cast a new light on our relationship to machines of war, namely drones.
For Anders there is no doubt that the Vietnam War was an ‘extermination machinery’ to which many civilians and soldiers fell victim. In said machine the G.I.’s were just — quite literally — a part. What the massacre — during which somewhere between 300 and 500 civilians were killed by American soldiers — brings to light is the double moral-standard soldiers were held to regarding what they should do with machines indirectly, and what they could do directly in combat on the ground:
“The G.I.’s were not allowed to do what, for example, helicopter pilots were allowed to do with bombs and napalm, no what they were ordered to do: namely to wipe out whole villages, something they were never allowed to do directly and with their bare hands.” — The Obsolescence of Humankind II*, p. 290
For Anders a divide becomes apparent here between what one may call the moral-code of humans and machines, which is transgressed by what happened in My Lai. Anders points out what a commentator on PBS only implicitly hints at:
“If you take the total number of people who died at My Lai, which was five-hundred and seven, and put that along side the two-million civilians who died, it doesn’t seem very much. But it in terms of impact on America and on the rest of the world, about how they conducted that war, clearly it changed people’s opinions towards the war. It was too big a price to pay, that if you were going to have to win this war by this kind of conduct, then it wasn’t a price worth paying.” — Michael Bilton on PBS American Experience
What Bilton calls the “kind of conduct” that made people question the war wasn’t the two million civilians killed mostly ‘by machines’, but the 500 killed ‘directly’. What had seemingly caused less public outrage, the millions of indirect killings, now becomes the reason for the massacre itself: the G.I.’s wanted to be even with machines. The imperative the G.I.’s obeyed was not:
“Stop machines from following imperatives you could never follow yourself ”
, but rather
“Feel free to do everything which doesn’t contradict the imperatives built into machines, of which you are a part, and demand to be allowed to follow the same rules.” — The Obsolescence of Humankind, p. 291
A fact seemingly supported by soldiers defending what they had done when questioned centuries later:
“I am a soldier and I received and obeyed the orders that were issued to me by my superiors. The order was to kill or destroy everything in the village, the children happened to be there. The people of that village were Vietcong or Vietcong sympathizers. Maybe some see it differently. That’s the way I see it.” — Kenneth Hodges on PBS American Experience
This is obviously a sentiment often heard when people justify what happened during a war, but in this case we may be inclined to say that the orders the soldiers were following weren’t ‘our’ orders, but the orders of machines, which they began to obey after what machines did was legitimized by orders given to the machine operators. The mass killings had become ‘common sense’ before the massacre itself happened, and it could only have reached that point because the ‘machine killings’ had seemingly caused less general outrage. For Anders this must have seemed doubly shocking, since he witnessed the horrors of the Second World War as a German jew.
It is here that Anders believes his sentiment of the obsolescence of humankind becomes most pertinent: as the “negative attitude of humans regarding their own humanity.” (The Obsolescence of Humankind, p. 393)
What Anders believes to have found in his interpretation of what happened in My Lai is a motive, something that had been sorely missing during the trial in which everyone was seemingly only ‘following orders’. The motive that comes to light is the aforementioned and discussed retranslation which now assumes historical meaning. For Anders this fits into a broader trend he sees in our time, in which the line between doing and acting (being accountable for what you do) blurs more and more. Whilst analyzing the act of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima he poses the question if it is still appropriate to ask if he (the pilot) did it, or if we shouldn’t rather ask if he did it, in what way he was actually acting. The darker question which lingers here is how one can judge morality if no one is really acting. In a time where everybody does his or her part — someone discovering how to split atoms, someone inventing the atom bomb, someone attaching it to the plane and someone dropping it — who or what is responsible for the outcome? One might quickly say: The one how gave the order! Anders poses the even darker question if, given the invention of the atom bomb, the realization of its possibilities and believing in technological advancement, dropping the bomb wasn’t the logical conclusion, given that no one can be directly responsible. Was the person who gave the order — if it was really a person and not again many parts of a machinery — really acting, or did he or she just do what needed to be done?
The Drone In Us
How can we connect Anders’ thoughts on My Lai back to our inquiry about drones? One premise of many critiques on using drones in warfare is that by alienating the act of killing from the killed we make killing — in a sense — ‘easier’. Compared to the dropping of bombs during the Vietnam War, ordering drone-strikes from close to home seems to imply a far greater degree of alienation, which in turn leads to even less public outrage. But what most of these interpretations seem to leave out is Anders’ critical third step: After translating the act of killing to machines, what happens when it starts to retranslate to us? Must we expect a My Lai of drone-strikes, or has it already occurred somewhere among the ruins of the War on Terror? Will the retranslation rather be a far more subtle one? In what sense are we actually deciding to use drones instead of troops, and not the invention of drones predetermining the ‘un-reasonableness’ of actually sending in troops?
What if drone-strikes are never ‘too big a price to pay’?
* Quotes translated from German by me.
Image #1 (cover drone) from: Wikipedia
Image #2 (explosion) from: PBS
Image #3 (aerial) from: Understanding Empire
