Description
This paper assesses the violence perpetrated by drone operators by reference to the ethics of care (a mode of morality associated with feminist theory and virtue ethics). Historically, military professionals who kill on their society’s behalf have sometimes struggled to make moral sense of that killing. For some, it is not enough to receive assurances that they acted for a just cause and/or in accordance with prescribed ethical standards of warfighting. Rather, such moral reasoning (based on Just War principles) still leaves these killers with a sense of guilt and self-betrayal about taking a human life. This perpetration-induced ‘moral injury’, which can be deeply debilitating mentally, is increasingly recognised as one of the many unjust harms potentially resulting from war. Among the operators of armed drones, who typically experience no physical risk when they kill, moral injury is in theory a salient issue of victimhood even though the actual extent of its occurrence remains largely unknown. Presumably, at least some drone operators avoid this non-physical risk because their Just War thinking is sufficient to rationalise the remote-control killing of a person in a faraway place. For other drone operators, however, avoiding moral injury might require an additional mode of moral reasoning; one which accounts for the way a drone’s powerful video-camera enables close and prolonged observation of a prospective target’s prosaic humanity and personal relationships. Accordingly, this paper explores the idea that a drone operator’s decisions (on whether or when to kill) should be guided also by a feminist ethics of care. In contrast to Just War’s rights-and-rules approach, care ethics focuses on people not as abstract others but as real individuals with unique needs, and its emphasis is on persons in relation to each other. So, for the drone operator who richly perceives the humanity she has in common with a targeted individual, and whose actions are guided by care ethics, the question is: what is the virtuous way of conducting drone violence?
