Bradley Jay Strawser

Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles

Abstract A variety of ethical objections have been raised against the military employment of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs, drones). Some of these objections are technological concerns over UAVs abilities’ to function on par with their inhabited counterparts. This paper sets such concerns aside and instead focuses on supposed objections to the use of UAVs in principle. I examine several such objections currently on offer and show them all to be wanting. Indeed, I argue that we have a duty to protect an agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agents ability to act justly. UAVs afford precisely such protection. Therefore, we are obligated to employ UAV weapon systems if it can be shown that their use does not significantly reduce a warfighters operational capability. Of course, if a given military action is unjustified to begin with, then carrying out that act via UAVs is wrong, just as it would be with any weapon. But the point of this paper is to show that there is nothing wrong in principle with using a UAV and that, other things being equal, using such technology is, in fact, obligatory.

Responsibilities to Protect

Following the humanitarian horrors of the 1990s, the international community began to seek consensus on a new norm to help address the tension between upholding the sovereign right of states to administer their own internal affairs, and the pressing need for civilian populations to be protected from their own government in certain situations. The result was the responsibility to protect initiative from the UN, accepted as an emerging norm and based on existing legal structures although not itself necessarily accepted as law. This volume looks not only at the humanitarian-inspired interventions of the past 15 years, such as those that took place under the Force for Good banner of the UK Government under New Labour, but also looks at what this has meant for the people actually involved in doing them. What responsibilities do states have towards their own soldiers when sending them to protect ‘other’ people? Should that responsibility extend to moral and psychological protection as well as physical protection, and if so, how? How far does the duty go when considering the protection of one’s own citizens who have deliberately placed themselves in harm’s way, such as journalists who have chosen to leave the safety of a protected area? What happens when institutions are faced with the choice of protecting their people or their reputation? What does it feel like for the inhabitants of a state who become ‘protected’ by the international community?

Liability to Defensive Harm

What do we mean when we claim that someone is morally liable to defensive harm? The concept of liability as I use it in this book is introduced in this chapter, as well as the related constraints of proportionality and necessity. This rights-based account of permissible harm is the predominate theory held by most philosophers working on the topic. I discuss the ways in which people can undertake certain actions such that they can be held morally responsible for unjust threats, and thereby make themselves liable to harm. After providing two cases to explicate the theory, I discuss the two primary conditions that must be met in the case of Osama bin Laden for him to be properly liable to be killed: his own moral responsibility for unjust lethal threats; and, the necessity and proportionality conditions of permissible harm being met for his killing.

Celebrating the Killing of a Liable Person

To conclude the book, this chapter examines the controversy over the celebrations that broke out in the United States in the wake of the announcement of bin Laden’s death. I make a distinction between celebrating a person’s death itself as opposed to celebrating one’s relief that an unjust threat has been thwarted. I offer a case to show that the two types of celebrating may often intermingle and that one’s motivation behind any given celebration is what is morally relevant. I conclude with a brief discussion of the actors themselves who carried out the killing.

Moral Cyber Weapons

This paper examines the morality of cyber weapons, offering conditions under which they are not only ethical under just war theory, but morally preferred over their kinetic counterparts. When these conditions are satisfied, states not only have the option of using cyber weapons, but could even acquire a moral duty to do so over other forms of warfare. In particular, we show that states are morally obliged to use cyber weapons instead of kinetic weapons when they can be deployed for a purpose already deemed just under the law of armed conflict and without any significant loss of capability. The reason behind this moral obligation is that cyber weapons can reduce both the risk to one’s own (putatively just) military and the harm to one’s adversary and non-combatants. The paper discusses this obligation, using examples to illustrate cases where it does or does not apply. It also addresses several objections that have been raised about the use of cyber weapons, showing that they fail to fully counter the obligation to use cyber weapons derived from their reduction of risk and harm properties.

Sovereignty Issues and Precedent Setting Problems

This chapter continues to deal with objections to the claim that the killing of Osama bin Laden was justifiable. Here I address the related worries that the raid itself violated Pakistan’s sovereignty and that the killing creates a bad precedent making the killing wrong, all things considered. In response, I concede much of the objection regarding the ways in which the United States engaged their ally on the raid, but discuss the countervailing reasons the United States had to worry about the risk of the mission being compromised were they to partner with Pakistan on the raid. I also discuss the “all things considered” objection and argue that, indeed, the raid was likely more than merely a pro tanto good, given the epistemic constraints in play.

Possible Moral Justifications

There are many ways one could try to justify the killing of Osama bin Laden. Indeed, in the public square we heard a wide variety of claims regarding the killing: that it was good because a “bad man” was now dead, or that it was a permissible act of enforcing capital punishment, or that it was simply killing a combatant in war, which is permissible under traditional just war theory. In this chapter I show some of the ways these and other justifications for killing Osama bin Laden fall short. The goal is not to give a complete rebuttal of such approaches, but, rather, to simply show that the rights-based liability account for permissible harm described in Chapter 1 is far more restrictive than these other competing accounts.

The Case of Osama bin Laden

The book now turns to the details of the Osama bin Laden case itself. His life and relevant background details are reviewed, particularly his role in the formation in, and, at the time of his death, his on-going leadership of al-Qaeda. After establishing his background culpability for unjust threats, the raid undertaken by the United States to kill bin Laden is carefully reviewed in detail. The various discrepancies about the raid from among the competing accounts are canvassed and discussed. The resulting picture of the event that we can have the most confidence in is presented, with the aim of including all morally relevant details that could pertain to the possibility of bin Laden’s liability.

Objection: Defensive Killing or Execution?

Now that the argument has been made that bin Laden was liable to be killed, this chapter addresses a particularly powerful objection against this view. The objection has been strongly given by Noam Chomsky, so it is his articulation of it that is engaged. Namely, the objection claims that the killing was in fact merely an act of revenge, aiming to kill bin Laden as a kind of extra-judicial execution. Moreover, this objection argues that, in the least, bin Laden should have been captured rather than killed. I respond to this objection by arguing that, in fact, the best moral accounting of the killing is on the liability, rights-based approach, not a desert-based model. Therein I contend that bin Laden was properly liable to be killed, not merely captured, because of the unique and extraordinary way in which his capture would have actually exacerbated, rather than thwarted, his unjust threat.

UBL’s Liability to Be Killed

In this chapter the book returns to the specifics of the Osama bin Laden raid and investigates whether his case meets the conditions laid out earlier for the liability account of permissible harm. The case, as it turns out, is highly irregular because bin Laden’s threat was (primarily) indirectly imposed by the collective agency of al-Qaeda. Moreover, killing bin Laden on the liability account would be a kind of pre-emptive killing. These nonstandard features of the case make meeting the conditions for liability more difficult. However, this chapter argues that, first, these nonstandard aspects do not block liability in principle and that, second, the conditions for liability were in fact met in this case. This is demonstrated through the use of several thought experiments, designed to isolate the various moral aspects involved in the killing of Osama bin Laden.