Humanitarian drone justification rests on a logic of the lesser evil

Evidence

As Eyal Weizman has shown, this type of justification is essentially based on a logic of the lesser evil: “the essence of our humanitarian present, obsessed with the calculations and calibrations that seek to moderate, ever so slightly, the evils that it has largely caused itself.” He notes that Hannah Arendt too warned against this type of argument: “Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.” — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 463

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s lesser-evil warning connects to the reader’s interest in the ethics of impunity. — connects to: Jus in bello norms applied to drones convert combat ethics into necroethics; Drone warfare establishes a norm neither war nor peace via imperial immunity; Drones are morally justified by preventing one’s own casualties (+8 more)

Related

• Drones fuse killing and caring into an integrated humilitarian power (similarity 0.92)
• The lesser-evil logic measures morality against one’s own violence (similarity 0.91)
• Drones are morally justified by preventing one’s own casualties (similarity 0.88)
• Drone advocates came to believe their own claims of negligible collateral damage. (similarity 0.87)
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good (similarity 0.87)
• Drone warfare establishes a norm neither war nor peace via imperial immunity (similarity 0.84)
• Risk-free drone operators morally resemble assassins, not soldiers (similarity 0.84)
• Jus in bello norms applied to drones convert combat ethics into necroethics (similarity 0.83)
• The drone exemplifies the moral hazard of acting without bearing costs (similarity 0.83)
• Drones create a moral hazard that shifts risk onto others. (similarity 0.83)
• Drone warfare creates a new ethical-political norm neither war nor peace (similarity 0.82)
• Drones lower political, economic, and ethical costs of war (similarity 0.82)
• Drones’ necroethics embody a nationalism of self-preservation (similarity 0.81)
• The drone state aims to replace mobilized citizen bodies with mechanical agents. (similarity 0.81)
• Drone warfare adopts assassination ethics while refusing assassination’s self-sacrifice (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Risk-free drone operators morally resemble assassins, not soldiers #complicates (0.65) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 509
• Drones create a moral hazard that shifts risk onto others. #expands (0.55) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 588