A good guy with a drone: On the ethics of drone warfare
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A good guy with a drone: On the ethics of drone warfare Emil Archambault University of Durham, Durham DH1 3TU, UK. [email protected]
Legal and Ethical Implications of Drone Warfare Michael J. Boyle (ed.) Routledge, London and New York, 2017, x+130pp., ISBN: 978-0-367-13910-0 The Morality of Drone Warfare and the Politics of Regulation Marcus Schulzke Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2017, ix+236pp., ISBN: 978-1-137-53379-1 Contemporary Political Theory (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00328-w
To say that the past five years have seen a flurry of interest in the emergence of drones and autonomous weapons would be quite an understatement. The works under consideration here – Michael J. Boyle’s edited volume Legal and Ethical Implications of Drone Warfare and Marcus Schulzke’s The Morality of Drone Warfare and the Politics of Regulation, both published in 2017 – represent exemplars of what could be termed a second generation in drone studies, moving away from the categoric adoptions (Strawser, 2010) or rejections (Chamayou, 2013) of armed drones. Boyle and his contributors as well as Schulzke believe that the significant ethical and legal questions lie in the use of drones, and not in the weapons systems themselves. Boyle and Schulzke agree that drones do not pose radically novel ethical challenges but exacerbate concerns present in warfare more broadly: the crucial questions, therefore, concern either how they are used ethically or unethically (Schulzke, p. 43) or how they transform practices of war and understandings of ethics and law (Boyle, p. 8). The question of the novelty of drone warfare and the relationship of drones to other weapons systems looms large in both books. While Schulzke seeks to downplay the significance of the emergence of remote-piloted weapons platforms, Boyle’s volume seeks to parse out what is transformed by drones and what is not. Ó 2019 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Review Essay
In so doing, Boyle’s collection draws a much closer link between technological innovation and changes in practices of warfare, providing multiple compelling avenues for the continuation of the drone debate. Schulzke, meanwhile, emphasizing continuity with existing practices of warfare, seeks to reorient the debates surrounding the use of drones, highlighting how drones can improve on existing practices of warfare and provide a qualitative improvement in the reduction of the harms of war. This essay proceeds in four stages. After providing brief separate summaries of the arguments of Boyle and Schulzke’s books, I situate them in the debate between the ethics of weapons and the ethics of practices of war. Schulzke is firm in his conviction that the debate over the morality of drones themselves is moot, as weapons can be employed in a variety of ethical and unethical ways, while Boyle adopts a more nuanced position, tracing how drones can exacerbate tendencies towards more or less ethical use. I then conclude by probing the relation of
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