Zayd Riaz
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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 framework that structures the ontological imagery of the reality they believe to be enveloped within. I argue that this metaphysical structure grossly misleads the academic debate in its aim to understand the ethical and legal implications of drone warfare. This leads to inaccurate analyses, as they take the drone, the pilot and the moral Law governing them as ontologically separate, pre-existing entities within a hierarchical structure. However, they fail to consider or fathom that the pilot, the drone, and the law governing them all interact within an assemblage and produce the actions labelled as ethical violations. Ethical conduct is not the result of one component, it is the product of relations between the components. This paper argues that since the introduction of the drone into the war assemblage, new relationships have formed, creating new ethical norms instilled with new meaning. Hence new actions are produced. This paper investigates the unique relationship between machine and man, matter, and discourse. Only from there can we abstract a more encompassing and better ethical frameworks to govern this new War Assemblage and the new practices that have emerged.
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