Last month we learned that a US drone strike on suspected
Al-Qaida terrorists killed at least 13 people in Yemen who were on
their way to a wedding. Many, perhaps all, were innocent.
Let’s talk morality. Too many of our public debates over
violence and war are only legal debates, not moral ones. Discussing the second
amendment in the gun debate is useful when debating law, but it is beside the
moral point. After all, the first amendment legally protects your right to
gossip, but doesn’t make it moral. Even though we will disagree on the
particulars, let’s acknowledge that many more things are legal than are moral.
Yes, on occasion innocent people are being killed by mistake
and intelligence is faulty. But it’s more than this. Parts of the Just War
tradition reveal specific moral problems with drones as such.
For starters, the means of fighting must discriminate
between combatants and noncombatants. Drone advocates laud the precision of
drones. We’re a long way from carpet bombing Dresden and nuking Hiroshima, both
examples of extraordinary indiscriminateness. This is a moral problem and not
just a technical one (of sloppy weapons). Some weapons and some war tactics are
designed for the express purpose of including innocent people among their
victims. The Catholic Church, for example, categorically condemns nuclear weapons on these grounds.
John Kerry recently condemned chemical weapons for their
indiscriminateness. (America still has a lot of its own as-yet not-destroyed chemical weapons,
not to mention the world’s largest supply of nuclear weapons.)
Nevertheless, the precision of drones is overstated if we
only compare them to wildly indiscriminate weapons. We constantly need to ask
whether there are more discriminating methods. Why not daggers? Of course you
put your own life at much greater risk if you set out to stab your enemy rather
than fly an unmanned aircraft from half a world away. But protecting yourself
from harm at the cost of increasing the risk of attacking the wrong person
carries no moral weight in the Just War tradition. It can even work against
you. After the Battle of Hastings (1066), the Norman bishops imposed heavier
penance on archers (who kill at a distance) than soldiers who killed at close
range.
While clearly preferable to indiscriminate alternatives,
focusing only on this aspect of drones can distract us from other moral
requirements. One of these is that war must be a last resort. Not only does the
Just War tradition insist that a whole war must only be waged as a last resort,
but this requirement also carries over into the fighting itself—killing must be
the last resort.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) argued this in a discussion of self-defense. He said that if you are being
attacked, you must use no more force than is necessary to stop the attack. If
you successfully disarm a violent intruder but then go on to stab him to death,
you have acted, as Aquinas says, “out of proportion to the end.” Killing the
attacker is disproportionate.
This raises two problems with drone strikes on suspected
terrorists:
1.
No attack is currently underway. President Bush’s
doctrine of preventive war (“preemption”) was widely criticized by ethicists
for this reason. Obama’s drone policy and his approach to Iran are not much different.
2.
Based on last resort: Non-lethal responses have not
been exhausted. They have possibly not even been attempted. If the suspected
terrorists were in the act of attacking (which, in the drone cases being
debated, they aren’t) and it were possible to restrain the attacker short of
killing him, the moral response is to do that.
In short, drones are the latest in a long line of
technologies that cause our society to relax the moral imperatives of its strongest
war-limiting moral tradition. When our souls, and not just our lives, are at
stake, daggers don’t sound quite so stupid.
Craig Hovey is
Associate Professor of Religion at Ashland University and serves on the Ashland
Center for Nonviolence steering committee.
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