A few hundred drone operators’ moral feelings can be dismissed as irrelevant

Evidence

A first response might be to declare that the acts committed involve only their immediate agents and that so long as these are few in number or so long as we ourselves are not among them, it matters little; it is not our business. That is precisely what Amitai Etzioni is cynically saying about drone operators. Of the possibility that what they are made to do leads to a disturbing desensitization, even a loss of the meaning of killing, he says: “It might have the feared effects. However, we are talking about a few hundred drone drivers; what they feel or don’t feel has no discernible effects on the nation or the leaders who declare war or make it drag on.” — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 627

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does the ‘few hundred’ claim hold up as drones proliferate and operator staffing grows?
• XREF: connects to: Drone technology produces a combined morale-buffering effect on operators; The psychological effect of drone killing on operators remains empirically unresolved. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 391; Bureaucratic distance makes actors’ moral standards irrelevant to operation success — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 295

Related

• The psychological effect of drone killing on operators remains empirically unresolved. (similarity 0.88)
• Drone technology produces a combined morale-buffering effect on operators (similarity 0.85)
• Drone design produces a strong moral buffering effect on operators (similarity 0.84)
• Drone psychopathology lies in produced compartmentalization, not operator trauma (similarity 0.82)
• Risk-free drone operators morally resemble assassins, not soldiers (similarity 0.81)
• Drone technology produces a strong moral buffering effect that offsets visual proximity to victims. (similarity 0.81)
• A drone operator killed more people than he thought himself capable of (similarity 0.81)
• Drone technology severs visual discrimination from physical proximity to targets. (similarity 0.81)
• Drones lower political, economic, and ethical costs of war (similarity 0.80)
• Drones fuse killing and caring into an integrated humilitarian power (similarity 0.80)
• Drones create a moral hazard that shifts risk onto others. (similarity 0.80)
• Drone operations constitute a pure case of perpetration-induced traumatic stress. (similarity 0.80)
• Faceless blurry drone imagery reduces moral resistance to killing (similarity 0.80)
• The drone exemplifies the moral hazard of acting without bearing costs (similarity 0.80)
• Drones centralize kill authority upward into hierarchy rather than handing control to machines (similarity 0.80)