Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.
Chapter

Chapter
Drones @ Combat
DOI link for Drones @ Combat
Drones @ Combat book
Drones @ Combat
DOI link for Drones @ Combat
Drones @ Combat book
ABSTRACT
From a philosophical point of view, we are focusing on the moral responsibility related to concrete persons or groups of persons who are interacting with drones or talking about drones. But some issues of this chapter are also related to more general social and global challenges, which are calling for institutional solutions and can´t be addressed so easily to specific agents. We don´t discuss definitions of moral responsibility or ethical debates of the so-called responsibility gap, as this has already been done by Filippo Santoni de Sio and Ezio Di Nucci in the Introduction of this book. What we are going to do is a reflection of anthropological relations between moral responsibility and combat drones: linguistic, technical, and moral practice. Therefore, in a first step, our emphasis will be on the ways in which people talk about drones in terms of autonomy, intelligence, or responsibility. We differentiate three forms of language games and three forms of autonomy, and we discuss the so-called mirror-effect. Our conclusion is that, in order to think about moral responsibility, drones are most adequately described as “embedded technical autonomy”, not in the meaning of human autonomy. In the second step, we discuss technological developmental paths, technical conditions for the usage of drones, and some characteristics of drones in relation to traditional combat technologies. We discuss aspects of the criteria of military success and introduce the term “enhanced information warfare” to describe both the dependence and advancement 1 of combat drones in relation to information technologies, microelectronics, and worldwide communication networks. Our conclusion at this point is that, in order to realize moral responsibility, drones must be treated as a global, transnational, and transcultural phenomenon, which calls for regulation by the UN or some other new institution. Thirdly, we are going to discuss fundamental aspects of moral responsibility, in search for an adequate ethos or moral codex of using, developing, or trading combat drones. We are arguing for a basic moral attitude in which idealistic aims must be combined with pragmatic skills. As a conclusion, we are going to summarize at least three fundamental moral claims (which could be complemented by others). Thereby, we are not going to argue for a ban of combat drones as such. But driven by the idea of human autonomy and enlightenment, we are searching for moral conditions for using drones responsibly.