Indian Strategic Studies: Cognitive and Ethical Implications of the Drone as an Agential Actor in War
AI Analysis
This academic paper argues that current ethical and legal frameworks (specifically Just War Theory) are inadequate for understanding the implications of drone warfare due to an anthropocentric bias. It posits that drones possess a degree of 'agency' and reciprocally influence the ethical decision-making of their operators. The analysis suggests a need to re-evaluate how we assign moral responsibility in the context of increasingly autonomous weapon systems.
Key Takeaways
- Traditional Just War Theory is criticized for its human-centric approach, failing to account for the agency of technological weapons like drones.
- The paper proposes a 'post-humanist' metaphysical framework to understand the co-constitutive relationship between humans and drones in warfare.
- Drones are not simply tools, but 'agentic' entities that shape the moral and cognitive frameworks of those who operate them.
- The influence of drones extends to the broader context of 5th-generation warfare, yet receives insufficient academic attention.
- Current legal and ethical debates surrounding drone warfare are hampered by a lack of understanding of the drone's impact on human judgment.
Why It Matters
This analysis highlights the growing need to address the ethical and legal challenges posed by increasingly sophisticated autonomous weapons systems. Recognizing the 'agency' of drones, even in a philosophical sense, is crucial for developing appropriate regulations and operational doctrines. Failure to adapt existing frameworks could lead to unintended consequences and erode accountability in future conflicts.
Indian Strategic Studies: Cognitive and Ethical Implications of the Drone as an Agential Actor in War
Zayd Riaz
This content was originally written for an undergraduate or Master's program. It is published as part of our mission to showcase peer-leading papers written by students during their studies. This work can be used for background reading and research, but should not be cited as an expert source or used in place of scholarly articles/books.
This paper aims to provide an alternative metaphysical paradigm that emerges from the post-humanist literature. The analysis aims to re-formulate the ontology of the drone and give it its proper due within the constellation of warfare. I argue that traditional metaphysics, which structures our representations of the world including existing international relations scholarship, is insufficient for understanding the drone’s formative effects on shaping our ethical reasoning, legal frameworks, and military practices. Using this new metaphysical structure, I aim to showcase the inadequacies of traditional Just War Theory as an ethical concept and the subsequent academic debate that uses it as a framework to investigate the legality and morality of drone warfare. The current interpretation of Just War principles is deeply anthropocentric, hindering our understanding of agency possessed by technological artefacts. The current interpretation fails to understand the role of matter/technology in the co-constitution of the subjectivity of man. Weapons are “agentic” entities with an essence of their own, capable of forming significant relationships with humans. Both the weapon and the individual exist in a mutually effective, mutually constitutive condition where neither component is wholly dominating. [1] Both shape the other, most significantly in the domain of moral and ethical action.
I argue that Just War Theory governs a particular conception of what man is and their relationship to the world and abstracts from there a moral framework that seeks to govern their military conduct. Thus, how moral responsibility, ethical violations, moral judgment, and the relationship between the man and his weapon are determined all stem from this particular anthropocentric metaphysical structure. This paper will show how the drone reshapes the moral, legal, and cognitive frameworks that structure a drone pilots actions, impacting what is deemed ethical. This analysis greatly challenges axiomatic jus in bello principles that judge a soldier’s capacity for autonomous rational judgment and their ability to follow such maxims. The current academic literature has paid scant attention to the capacity of the drone to shape moral and ethical frameworks, including its formative roles within the broader assemblage of 5th-generation warfare. [2] However, this is due to their current ontological conceptions of what a drone is and how it relates to other components within the War Assemblage. This results from the metaphysical framewo