Zero-risk warfare implies radical inequality in the value of lives

Evidence

According to this view of military morality, to kill while exposing one’s own life is bad; to take lives without ever endangering one’s own is good. That first principle of drone necroethics is, paradoxically, vitalist. And it is in accordance with this logic that the drone can be said to be a “humanitarian” weapon: the humanitarian imperative is to save lives. And the drone does indeed save our lives. It is therefore a humanitarian technology. QED. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 453 (#expands, via linked claim)

Using new means, the drone procures for its operators an even greater sense of invulnerability. Today as yesterday, the radical imbalance in exposure to death leads to a redefinition of relations of hostility and of the very sense of what is called “waging war.” Warfare, by distancing itself totally from the model of hand-to-hand combat, becomes something quite different, a “state of violence” of a different kind. It degenerates into slaughter or hunting. One no longer fights the enemy; one eliminates him, as one shoots rabbits. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 332 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Accepted zero-risk killing would collapse just war theory; Claimed precision paradoxically expands global killing rather than limiting it; Remote killing free from retaliation creates a moral hazard problem (+6 more)

Related

• Accepted zero-risk killing would collapse just war theory (similarity 0.92)
• Remote killing free from retaliation creates a moral hazard problem (similarity 0.91)
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good (similarity 0.88)
• Refusing equal value of lives yields state terrorism and philosopher-executioners (similarity 0.86)
• Radical protection from death transforms war into one-sided slaughter or hunting (similarity 0.86)
• Combat indifference to killing spread to accept civilian deaths by mistake (similarity 0.86)
• Drones are morally justified by preventing one’s own casualties (similarity 0.85)
• Drone warfare deactivates the democratic critique rooted in exposable lives (similarity 0.84)
• Drone warfare establishes a norm neither war nor peace via imperial immunity (similarity 0.84)
• Risk-free warfare erodes the legal principles justifying the right to kill in war. (similarity 0.84)
• The drone made warfare absolutely unilateral, killing without risk of being killed (similarity 0.84)
• The drone state aims to replace mobilized citizen bodies with mechanical agents. (similarity 0.84)
• Drones’ necroethics embody a nationalism of self-preservation (similarity 0.84)
• Impersonal long-range killing is aseptic homicide rather than rational progress (similarity 0.83)
• Unilateral drone killing makes the legal right to kill merely formal. (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Refusing equal value of lives yields state terrorism and philosopher-executioners #expands (0.80)
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good #expands (0.75) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 453
• Extreme asymmetry in vulnerability transforms war into hunting or slaughter #expands (0.70) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 332
• Drone warfare creates a new ethical-political norm neither war nor peace #expands (0.65)