Modern artillery made killing morally irrelevant by severing aim from effect

Evidence

One can think of the invention of artillery able to hit a target invisible to those who operate the guns as a symbolic starting point of modern warfare and the concomitant irrelevancy of moral factors: such artillery allows the destruction of the target while aiming the gun in an entirely different direction. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of destroying a target while aiming ‘in an entirely different direction’ is a vivid, quotable fact.
• XREF: connects to: Civilization makes violence aversion irrelevant through bureaucratic complicity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 694; Individual sadism is functionally inferior to disciplined bureaucracy for mass killing — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 91; Combat indifference to killing spread to accept civilian deaths by mistake (+5 more)

Related

• Jus in bello norms applied to drones convert combat ethics into necroethics (similarity 0.82)
• Remote killing of humans drew less moral outrage than remote hunting of animals (similarity 0.82)
• Combat indifference to killing spread to accept civilian deaths by mistake (similarity 0.82)
• Eliminating reciprocal exposure to violence makes drones look like cowardly weapons. (similarity 0.82)
• Drones create a crisis in military ethos by contradicting traditional warrior values. (similarity 0.81)
• Impersonal long-range killing is aseptic homicide rather than rational progress (similarity 0.81)
• Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. (similarity 0.81)
• Distance killing is not morally less terrible than passionate violence (similarity 0.81)
• Drones fuse killing and caring into an integrated humilitarian power (similarity 0.81)
• Faceless blurry drone imagery reduces moral resistance to killing (similarity 0.81)
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good (similarity 0.81)
• Drones’ necroethics embody a nationalism of self-preservation (similarity 0.80)
• Moral limits on weapons apply only where adversaries are equals (similarity 0.79)
• The drone state aims to replace mobilized citizen bodies with mechanical agents. (similarity 0.79)
• Drone killing is reduced to clicking on tiny on-screen figures (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Combat indifference to killing spread to accept civilian deaths by mistake #expands (0.90)
• Faceless blurry drone imagery reduces moral resistance to killing #expands (0.80) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 404
• Jus in bello norms applied to drones convert combat ethics into necroethics #expands (0.78)
• Distance killing is not morally less terrible than passionate violence #contradicts (0.75) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 960
• Drones are morally justified by preventing one’s own casualties #expands (0.72)