Nolen Gertz

Autonomy online: Jacques Ellul and the Facebook emotional manipulation study

Though we would expect the revelation of the Facebook emotional manipulation study to have had a negative impact on Facebook, its number of active users only continues to grow. As this is precisely the result that Jacques Ellul would have predicted, this paper examines his philosophy of technology in order to investigate the relationship between Facebook and its users and what this relationship means in terms of autonomy. That Facebook can manipulate its users without losing users reveals that Facebook’s autonomy is growing while the autonomy of users is diminishing. The paper concludes by showing that the answer to this increasingly asymmetrical relationship cannot be the creation of review boards and oversight committees as the underlying issues concerning autonomy are existential more than they are ethical.

Hegel, the Struggle for Recognition, and Robots

While the mediational theories of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek have helped to uncover the role that technologies play in ethical life, the role that technologies play in political life has received far less attention. In order to fill in this gap, I turn to the mediational theory of Hegel, as Hegel shows how the mediated nature of experience is vital to understanding the development of both ethical and political life. Through examples found in the military, in particular concerning the relationship between explosive ordnance detonation (EOD) soldiers and robots, I illustrate how Hegel’s analysis of the “struggle for recognition” can be used to understand human-technology relations from a political perspective. This political perspective can consequently help us to appreciate how technologies come to have a role in political life through our ability to experience solidarity with technology, a solidarity that is experienced by users due to the recognition of technologies as serving roles in society that I describe as functionally equivalent to the social roles of the user. The realization of this functional equivalence allows users to learn how they are perceived and respected by society through the experience of how functionally equivalent technologies are perceived and respected. Consequently, I conclude by focusing on the Dallas Police Department having turned an EOD robot from a life-saving to a life-taking device in order to show why Hegel is necessary for helping us to understand the political significance of recognizing and of misrecognizing technologies.

Military Professionalism and PTSD: On the Need for “Soldier-Artists”

In part one of this paper I discuss how issues of combatant misconduct and illegality have led military academies to become more focused on professionalism rather than on the tensions between military ethics and military training. In order to interrogate the relationships between training and ethics, between becoming a military professional and being a military professional, between military professionals and society, I turn to the work of Martin Cook, Anthony Hartle, and J. Glenn Gray. In part two I focus on Cook’s analysis of the conflict between the self-understanding and the expected behavior of military professionals. In part three I focus on Hartle’s analysis of how the experience of alienation by military professionals can help to create the culture of military professionals. In part four I introduce a new theory of professionalism based on the existential and phenomenological philosophy of J. Glenn Gray, which can help us to better understand the philosophical and psychological stakes of what it means to become a military professional. I conclude in part five by suggesting that the most pressing issue in the military is not a lack of professionalism, but a lack of trust.

The Master/iSlave Dialectic: Post (Hegelian) Phenomenology and the Ethics of Technology

In part one of this paper I turn to Don Ihde to show how a technological object can occupy the role that “the other” plays for Hegel in his phenomenology as the structural features of Hegels analyses of self-other relations can be found in Ihdes analyses of human-technology relations. I then turn to Singers Wired for War and Gertzs Philosophy of War and Exile. Using these texts I show how the way soldiers treat robots by naming them, protecting them, and by even risking their lives to save them, illustrates Hegels central claim: ethical life develops based on the process of discovering that to recognize others (whether human or technological) is to recognize ourselves and that to misrecognize others is to misrecognize ourselves. I conclude by offering suggestions as to how this understanding of ethical life as based on recognition and misrecognition can be applied to design ethics.

Of the Many Who Returned and Yet Were Dead

To talk today of combatant suffering is to talk of PTSD. Since its inclu sion in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM-III) in 1980 — an acceptance based on the recognition that the suffering of veterans returning from the Vietnam War was more than just a political tool for pacifistic psychoanalysts protesting the war1 — PTSD has afforded prac titioners, patients, and the public a way of universalizing, and a way of understanding, the effects of going to war. To return from war changed, to be unable to take back up once familiar routines and once close rela tionships was now to be seen as symptomatic of combat rather than as a personal failing or a sign of individual weakness. The ability to identify and classify symptoms then both opened the way for combatants and veterans to avoid the stigma of suffering in war, and further allowed for the diagnosis, treatment, and curing of this suffering.

Conclusion: Our Veterans, Ourselves

The object of this book was neither to bring war to an end, nor to show us how to cure the suffering of veterans, but rather to show that our current attempts to end war and our attempts to cure veteran suffering have in common a particular understanding of what it means to be human, an understanding that helps to perpetuate both war and the suffering of veterans. This view of humanity, this view that is never stated, but is instead the presupposed and necessary ground of these attempts, can be seen when we try to understand not only the apparent contradiction of how war can be waged as aggression to end aggression, but of how our ethico-legal institutions can say that war is sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and of how our medico-psychiatric institu tions can say that the suffering of war is sometimes normal and some times abnormal. These contradictions are only contradictions, however, so long as we narrow-mindedly think that all aggression is the same, for common sense tells us that defensive aggression is not the same as offensive aggression, and that the physical consequences of aggression need not be the same as the mental consequences of aggression. Just as we can know whether our aggression is just or unjust because of the norms of war, we can likewise know whether our response to aggression is normal or abnormal because of the norms of peace, and in both cases others can use these norms to make such judgments for us.

A World Without Responsibility

Since Dan Baum published his interview with Carl Cranston in 2004, I have been reading the following passage to students in my various philosophy classes and asking them to try to interpret it: “We killed a lot of people,” he said as we ate. Later, Carl and his men had to establish roadblocks, which was notoriously dangerous duty. “We started out being nice,” Carl said. “We had little talking cards to help us communicate. We’d put up signs in Arabic saying ‘Stop.’ We’d say, ‘Ishta, ishta,’ which means ‘Go away.’” But people would approach with white flags in their hands and then whip out AK-47s or rocket-propelled grenades. So Carl’s group adopted a play-it-safe policy: if a driver ignored the signs and the warnings and came within thirty metres of a roadblock, the Americans opened fire. “That’s why nobody in our whole company got killed,” he said. … “You’re not supposed to fire warning shots, but we did,” Carl said. “And still some people wouldn’t stop.” He went on, “A couple of times — more than a couple — it was women and children in the car. I don’t know why they didn’t stop.” Carl’s squad didn’t tow away the cars containing dead people. “You can’t go near it,” he said. “It might be full of explosives. You just leave it.” He and his men would remain at their posts along side the carnage. “Nothing else you can do,” he said.1

What’s Wrong with (How We Think About) Torture?

In the immediate wake of 9/11 there was a rash of debates — both public and private — about the justification of using torture to prevent further terrorist attacks. The form of these debates was always consequentialist, balancing the possible benefits of what could be discovered through torturing a captured terrorist against the possible harms inflicted upon the terrorist being tortured. In other words, the question of justifica tion almost always came down to whether a torture victim’s suffering — even if the victim was a terrorist — could be outweighed by the number of lives saved by the information this suffering produced. One of the most discussed arguments in favor of justifying torture in this manner is the “ticking bomb case,” which, as discussed in the previous chapter, Alan Dershowitz helped to make famous and Jeff McMahan found to be just as useful for discussion as actual cases of torture. If, as the case goes, thousands of innocent lives can be saved only through torturing a captured terrorist who otherwise refuses to disclose the location of a hidden bomb set to go off imminently, then we must be justified in the use of torture. Almost as if in response to any possible doubt about the relevance to reality of this hypothetical scenario, the television show 24 turned this scenario into a perpetual plot point over the course of seven seasons as protagonist Jack Bauer “encounter[ed] a ticking time bomb an average of 12 times every season,” which — because each season was meant to represent 24 hours in real-time — means that “Bauer encounter[ed] someone who need[ed] torturing 12 times per day.”1

The Lust for War vs. The Lust for Judgment

How does one judge war? Though we often make judgments about partic ular wars — referring to them at times as “foolhardy,” “tragic,” “savage,” or “noble,” “justified,” “humanitarian” — we just as often claim that we cannot judge war generally, referencing such cliches as “all’s fair in love and war,” “war is hell,” “the fog of war,” or “war is a world of its own.” For some, this schism might merely indicate that we feel that it is possible to judge the decision to fight particular wars, while we feel that it is impossible to judge decisions made in the course of fighting wars. We might say that we can judge wars politically, but we cannot judge wars militarily, or to put it another way, that we can judge only what we know. For others, such as Michael Walzer and contemporary just war theorists, this schism might instead indicate the success of those involved with military decision-making in getting the rest of us to agree to the myth that one cannot judge war unless one has experience of it. Hence, for just war theory, one should not judge wars only politically or militarily, but also morally, and to claim otherwise is to let both them off the hook for taking responsibility for the crimes that take place in war, and to let us off the hook for holding them responsible for these crimes. In other words, judge lest ye be judged.

Drone Operators, Cyber Warriors, and Prosthetic Gods

As has been remarked upon since its inception, to wage war on terror is to wage war not on an enemy, but on a concept. It should thus come as no surprise that this war has been waged conceptually. The Bush admin istration, operating under the concept of war-as-revenge, focused on man-hunting and network-dismantling, a focus that led to the extreme of warfare, the extreme of torture. The Obama administration, operating under the concept of war-as-risk-aversion, focused on troop-reduction and prison-dismantling, a focus that led to what is now seen as the opposite extreme of warfare, the extreme of “unmanned warfare.” Whereas war for President Bush was, paradoxically, capable of being fought with ever- expanding means for ever-narrowing ends — with torture being used in order to ultimately capture and kill one man — war for President Obama is instead, paradoxically, capable of being fought from ever-increasing distances with ever-decreasing personnel — with bots in the sky being used to replace boots on the ground.1 Even with the Obama administra tion having embraced the idea that “there’s an app for that” can be a rallying cry for replacing wartime as well as peacetime practices, freeing us up in both domains to pursue more meaningful activities while our software does the “dirty work,” there nevertheless remains the ever present feeling that war has not necessarily changed for the better.