Abstract
This chapter articulates and discusses several arguments against the lethal use of unmanned aerial vehicles, often called drones. A distinction is made between targeted killing, killing at a distance, and automated killing, which is used to map the arguments against lethal drones. After considering issues concerning the justification of war, the argument that targeted killing makes it easier to start a war, and the argument that killing at a distance is problematic, this chapter focuses on two arguments against automated killing, which are relevant to all kinds of “machine killing”. The first argument (from moral agency) questions if machines can ever be moral agents and is based on differences in capacities for moral decision-making between humans and machines. The second argument (from moral patiency), which has received far less attention in the literature on machine ethics and ethics of drones, focuses on the question if machines can ever be “moral patients”. It is argued that there is a morally significant qualitative difference in vulnerability and way of being between drones and humans, and that because of this asymmetry fully automated killing without or with little human involvement is not justified.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See for instance the UN report Heyns 2013.
- 3.
- 4.
Note that there is also another argument, which starts from virtue ethics: if this war is risk free, then it requires no courage. Some might say it is cowardly to attack people while being yourself invulnerable. I do not take position in this debate here, but it deserves to be mentioned in this discussion about “easy” war.
- 5.
- 6.
See also Sharkey 2012.
- 7.
Coeckelbergh 2013a.
- 8.
See reports in the press about the stress of drone pilots, e.g. Stewart 2011.
- 9.
Wallach and Allen 2008.
- 10.
Anderson and Anderson 2007.
- 11.
This objection is in tune with Dreyfus’s well-known criticism of AI as articulated in for example in What Computers Still Can’t Do (Dreyfus 1992).
- 12.
Coeckelbergh 2013b.
- 13.
Heyns 2013, p. 17.
- 14.
Heidegger 1927.
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Coeckelbergh, M. (2016). Drones, Morality, and Vulnerability: Two Arguments Against Automated Killing. In: Custers, B. (eds) The Future of Drone Use. Information Technology and Law Series, vol 27. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-132-6_12
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