Empathy discourse is repurposed to legitimize mechanized killing

Evidence

What is emerging here, more fundamentally, is a regime of military violence that claims to be humanitarian but might equally be called humilitarian. It is a power that both kills and saves, wounds and heals, and it performs those double tasks in a single gesture, in an integrated manner: an immediate synthesis of a power of destruction and a power of caring, murder at the same time as care. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 461 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Clearly, if they felt nothing at all, this would raise a moral problem. But given that they kill with sensitivity and even with “care,” they can continue to do so with our blessing. This sensitivity and care, this supposed empathy with the victims, is, paradoxically, what now makes a public rehabilitation of homicide by drones possible. The theme of empathy here undergoes a reversal similar to that of the psychic vulnerability mentioned above. Whereas empathy for the enemy was classically understood as a ferment of possible resistance to murder, as a possible premise for a refusal to kill, in the discourse that we are now considering it serves to apply a layer of humanity to an instrument of mechanized homicide. In the face of this vast operation involving the instrumentalization of ethico-affective categories for military ends, however, there is another image that comes to mind: that of the crocodile shedding tears, the better to devour its prey. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 378 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Feigned empathy with victims legitimizes drone homicide publicly — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 378; Ethical-robot rhetoric is a Trojan horse that lowers moral barriers to killer robots — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 669; Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 453 (+17 more)

Related

• Feigned empathy with victims legitimizes drone homicide publicly (similarity 0.94)
• Ethical-robot advocacy lowers moral barriers to deploying lethal robots. (similarity 0.87)
• Human emotions protect civilians by restraining lethal military force (similarity 0.87)
• Drones fuse killing and caring into an integrated humilitarian power (similarity 0.85)
• Drone warfare fuses killing and caring into a single integrated gesture (similarity 0.84)
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good (similarity 0.83)
• The drone state aims to replace mobilized citizen bodies with mechanical agents. (similarity 0.82)
• Jus in bello norms applied to drones convert combat ethics into necroethics (similarity 0.82)
• Combat indifference to killing spread to accept civilian deaths by mistake (similarity 0.81)
• Drones’ necroethics embody a nationalism of self-preservation (similarity 0.81)
• Remote killing of humans drew less moral outrage than remote hunting of animals (similarity 0.81)
• The discourse of ethical drones strategically lowers the cost of using them. (similarity 0.81)
• An enemy’s incidental human detail can stop a soldier from firing (similarity 0.80)
• Impersonal long-range killing is aseptic homicide rather than rational progress (similarity 0.80)
• Ethical-robot rhetoric is a Trojan horse that lowers moral barriers to killer robots (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Feigned empathy with victims legitimizes drone homicide publicly #exemplifies (0.85) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 378
• Drones fuse killing and caring into an integrated humilitarian power #exemplifies (0.85)
• Drone warfare fuses killing and caring into a single integrated gesture #exemplifies (0.85) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 461
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good #corroborates (0.80) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 453
• The Pentagon weaponized anthropological empathy to control colonized populations #exemplifies (0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 424
• Ethical-robot rhetoric is a Trojan horse that lowers moral barriers to killer robots #complicates (0.70) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 669
• Ethical-robot advocacy lowers moral barriers to deploying lethal robots. #complicates (0.70)
• Human emotions protect civilians by restraining lethal military force #contradicts (0.55) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 1135