Preemptive drone strikes rest on fragile and therefore dangerous prediction claims.

Evidence

Furthermore, in determining that status, one slips from an epistemology of manifest observation and statements of fact into an epistemology of suspicion in which a targeting decision is based on the identification of behavior or a pattern of life that suggests membership in a hostile organization. For example, your pattern of life might suggest a 70 percent chance that you are a militant, in other words a combatant, and we accordingly have the right to kill you. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 482 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Drone precision claims will fail in actual battle conditions — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 726; Preemptive drone targeting rests on epistemologically fragile predictions; Drone targeting decisions rest on probabilistic inference from behavior rather than observed facts. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 482 (+2 more)

Related

• Preemptive drone targeting rests on epistemologically fragile predictions (similarity 0.95)
• Drone targeting decisions rest on probabilistic inference from behavior rather than observed facts. (similarity 0.90)
• Predictive threat-detection rests on epistemologically fragile assumptions (similarity 0.84)
• Drone precision claims will fail in actual battle conditions (similarity 0.84)
• Drone targeting hinged on remote visual guesses about sex and combatant status (similarity 0.83)
• Drone surveillance cannot reliably distinguish combatants from civilians (similarity 0.83)
• Pattern-of-life strikes kill civilians through unconfirmed behavioral inference (similarity 0.82)
• Drone advocates came to believe their own claims of negligible collateral damage. (similarity 0.82)
• Drone targeting presumes guilt until innocence is proven posthumously. (similarity 0.81)
• Humanitarian drone justification rests on a logic of the lesser evil (similarity 0.80)
• Signature strikes kill based on behavior patterns, not confirmed identity (similarity 0.80)
• Drones fuse killing and caring into an integrated humilitarian power (similarity 0.79)
• Most drone strikes target suspects whose identity is unknown at the moment of killing. (similarity 0.79)
• The lesser-evil logic measures morality against one’s own violence (similarity 0.79)
• The fewer-collateral-victims argument is false because the alternative was no strike at all. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Drone targeting decisions rest on probabilistic inference from behavior rather than observed facts. #expands (0.75) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 482
• Pattern-of-life strikes kill civilians through unconfirmed behavioral inference #exemplifies (0.70)
• Humanitarian drone justification rests on a logic of the lesser evil #contradicts (0.55) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 463