Feigned empathy with victims legitimizes drone homicide publicly

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated purpose: the twisted logic of impunity and the instrumentalization of ethics for military ends. — connects to: Empathy discourse is repurposed to legitimize mechanized killing; Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 453; Drone warfare fuses killing and caring into a single integrated gesture — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 461 (+3 more)
• SEED: The proverb-reversal — empathy as enabler rather than inhibitor of killing — is a strong essay angle on the moral economy of remote warfare.

Related

• Empathy discourse is repurposed to legitimize mechanized killing (similarity 0.94)
• Drones fuse killing and caring into an integrated humilitarian power (similarity 0.87)
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good (similarity 0.86)
• Jus in bello norms applied to drones convert combat ethics into necroethics (similarity 0.84)
• Drone warfare fuses killing and caring into a single integrated gesture (similarity 0.83)
• Combat indifference to killing spread to accept civilian deaths by mistake (similarity 0.83)
• Drones’ necroethics embody a nationalism of self-preservation (similarity 0.82)
• Drones are morally justified by preventing one’s own casualties (similarity 0.82)
• Eliminating reciprocal exposure to violence makes drones look like cowardly weapons. (similarity 0.81)
• Remote killing of humans drew less moral outrage than remote hunting of animals (similarity 0.81)
• Faceless blurry drone imagery reduces moral resistance to killing (similarity 0.81)
• Drones create a crisis in military ethos by contradicting traditional warrior values. (similarity 0.80)
• Impersonal long-range killing is aseptic homicide rather than rational progress (similarity 0.80)
• The drone state aims to replace mobilized citizen bodies with mechanical agents. (similarity 0.80)
• Drone warfare deactivates the democratic critique rooted in exposable lives (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Drone warfare fuses killing and caring into a single integrated gesture #expands (0.80) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 461
• Drones fuse killing and caring into an integrated humilitarian power #expands (0.75)
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good #corroborates (0.70) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 453
• Humanitarian drone justification rests on a logic of the lesser evil #corroborates (0.60) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 463
• Media emphasis on drone pilot trauma legitimizes them as classic soldiers #corroborates (0.55) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 372