By John Kaag
The New York Times - Opinionator
Originally published on March 17, 2013
Here are some excerpts:
Ten years later, I’m a philosopher writing a book about the ethics of drone warfare. Some days I fear that I will have either to give up the book or to give up philosophy. I worry that I can’t have both. Some of my colleagues would like me to provide decision procedures for military planners and soldiers, the type that could guide them, automatically, unthinkingly, mechanically, to the right decision about drone use. I try to tell them that this is not how ethics, or philosophy, or humans, work.
I try to tell them that the difference between humans and robots is precisely the ability to think and reflect, in Immanuel Kant’s words, to set and pursue ends for themselves. And these ends cannot be set beforehand in some hard and fast way — even if Kant sometimes thought they could.
What disturbs me is the idea that a book about the moral hazard of military technologies should be written as if it was going to be read by robots: input decision procedure, output decision and correlated action. I know that effective military operations have traditionally been based on the chain of command and that this looks a little like the command and control structure of robots. When someone is shooting at you, I can only imagine that you need to follow orders mechanically. The heat of battle is neither the time nor the place for cool ethical reflection.
Warfare, unlike philosophy, could never be conducted from an armchair. Until now. For the first time in history, some soldiers have this in common with philosophers: they can do their jobs sitting down. They now have what I’ve always enjoyed, namely “leisure,” in the Hobbesian sense of the word, meaning they are not constantly afraid of being killed. Hobbes thought that there are certain not-so-obvious perks to leisure (not being killed is the obvious one). For one, you get to think. This is what he means when he says that “leisure is the mother of philosophy.” I tend to agree with Hobbes: only those who enjoy a certain amount of leisure can be philosophers.
The entire article is here.
