The Ethics of Killing from a Distance: A Levinasian approach to Drone Warfare & Public Responses to them
Drones, or an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are powered aerial vehicles that do not carry human operators, can fly autonomously or be piloted remotely, are expendable or recoverable, and can carry a lethal or non-lethal payload.[1] ‘Predator’ drones possess state-of-the-art surveillance imagery and can carry two ‘Hellfire’ laser-guided anti-tank weapons that cause extensive damage. Predator drones have been supplanted by the ‘Reaper’ drone, carrying up to four Hellfire missiles and two 500-pound bombs with a radius of blast destruction of 100 or 200 feet.[2] The first military case of a targeted killing via drone strike was carried out by the Bush administration in Yemen in 2002. In 2004 the administration introduced a covert CIA drone programme that carried out ‘personality attacks’ against an approved list of senior al-Qaeda members.[3] Within the C.I.A programme, pilots operate the UAV from miles away using joysticks resembling video-game controls, watching a live video feed from the drone’s camera.[4] Thus, if a drone is destroyed, there is no loss of life. The absence of physical contact with the attack means that the operators never see the people that they have killed. It is this detachment from killing that I wish to explore as a category of ethical analysis within this essay. I suggest that the lack of contact with a victim as the result of drone automation acts to produce a moral distance between the drone operator and their target, a distance that circumvents the possibility of ethical judgments in combat.
By approaching this topic through an examination of Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of the ethical demands made by face-to-face contact with the other, this essay also seeks to explore conditions of ‘grievability’ in wider western society, in response to the unintentional innocent civilian casualties of drone warfare. Judith Butler illustrates how the lack of exposure to the names and faces of those killed in contemporary battlefields has allowed the public to become ‘senseless before those lives we have eradicated, and whose grievability is indefinitely postponed’.[5] To further evaluate the extent to which there is a differential allocation of grievability, we must first understand what is meant by the ethical demands of the face-to-face encounter, and why this relationship with the other leads to the impossibility of murder.
The face-to-face encounter, for Levinas, serves as the basis for his phenomenological conception of ethics, arguing that the encounter with the other (that is, another person) through exposure to their face reveals a vulnerability and destitution, a sense of dependence, that appeals to the self. At the same time, this encounter addresses me and makes a demand upon me, instilling within me a responsibility for the other.[6] The relationship with the other person, as Levinas sees it, disrupts our relationship to the world. In everyday life, the first-person point of view orients our perception of the world and other people. I desire them, name them, classify them, take hold of them, and therefore dominate others through my interpretation of them.[7] Things and people are there for me (the ‘I’) to use, consume, enjoy: ‘as consumable, [the world] is nourishment, and in enjoyment, it offers itself, gives itself, belongs to me’.[8] Here, Levinas is suggesting that our typical perception of the world is based on egoism, in which we figure our relation to the world as something we can dominate. Thus, we think of other people conceptually in a manner that denies them independence. Like objects, we value them on the basis of what they can do for us. However, Levinas claims that despite our supposed power over people and things ‘[t]he encounter with the other (autrui) consists in the fact that despite the extent of my domination and his slavery, I do not possess him’.[9] For Levinas then, the encounter with the other undermines our preconceived notion of control. At a fundamental level, the other person is more than a thing, an encounter with them prompts an understanding of this, and what follows are ethical considerations.
Through real-life encounters, our egoism is broken, and we can begin to treat the other ethically. The face, for Levinas, is the means through which the other can challenge the I to act ethically. The concept of the face does not just refer to the other’s features, rather it is ‘the way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me’.[10] Thus, experiencing the face of the other is not an observation of their appearance: ‘you turn yourself toward the Other as toward an object when you see a nose, eyes, a forehead, a chin, and you can describe them’.[11] The face escapes the I’s domination through an expression of itself, not through its aesthetic qualities: the face of the other expresses their being. It is this expression of being that challenges us to not only recognise the other’s autonomy, but to recognise them as in need of ethical treatment; ‘the absolute nakedness of a face, the absolutely defenceless face, without covering, clothing or mask, is what opposes my power over it, my violence, and opposes it in an absolute way…the being that expresses itself, that faces me, says no to me by his very expression’.[12]
To sense the vulnerability of the other is to experience the impossibility of murder, as within the face is an ethical commandment- ‘this face of the other, without recourse, without security, exposed to my gaze in its weakness and its morality, is also the one that orders ‘Thou Shalt not Kill’. There is, in the face, the supreme authority which commands me’.[13] Upon the recognition of the other’s autonomy, the I will empathise and treat them differently. I see that they are a subject just like me, though I cannot see the world as they do.[14] Exposure to the face creates a relationship between the I and the other, demanding that I be ethical. The weakness, not the strength, of the other that the face betrays demands my justice, so to sense the vulnerability of the other is to experience the impossibility of murder. Seeing the face therefore derails our supposed domination over the world, in that we recognise that the other is not an object but another subject, who in ‘his nudity- his destitution, his morality- straightaway imposes himself upon my responsibility: goodness, mercy or charity’.[15] Here Levinas details that the face establishes an obligation that manifests in an inescapable ethical duty of care; ‘to be human is to have responsibility for the other… I am the hostage of the other… The human is first of all obligation’.[16] This relationship of responsibility is a non-symmetrical one, in that ‘I am responsible for the other without waiting for reciprocity’.[17] It is clear that reciprocity cannot be the basis of ethical relationships, as ethics is not a bargain. It cannot be the case that my ethical relation to another is dependent on their ethical treatment of me, as that would make that ethical status of the relationship less than absolute, and would establish my self-preservation as more important than any relation I have to another.[18]
From a Levinasian approach it becomes evident that ethics stem from our experience of the other, not from prior qualities of the self, as with other ethical systems. To be ethical is not a conscious choice. Rather, acting ethically towards another person is against my own wishes- it is demanded of us by the face of the other who impels me to account for my actions. Levinas claims that our obligation towards the other makes it impossible to murder someone once you have experienced their being. Nevertheless, violence does happen, especially in war.
War is violence aimed towards the other by approaching the other, as Levinas claims, from an ‘indirect angle’.[19] On the surface, the violence between one person and another seemingly dismisses Levinas’ claim of the impossibility of murder. Levinas acknowledges this however, positing that the violence against the other in war is accomplished through disregarding the opposition of the face, denying the face’s plea to live and to be acknowledged. Violence that does occur in war then does not occur in a relationship with the other, but occurs when we treat the other as an object, avoiding their appeal for protection. To experience the other as a face is to experience the impossibility of killing, so there must be either an evasion of the face-to-face encounter, whether intentional or unintentional, for there to be the possibility for murder in war. Even in war then, it is still impossible to murder another person, as long as you first see them as another person. As Levinas states: ‘at the very moment when my power to kill realises itself, the other has escaped me’.[20]
Drone warfare should thus be considered the definitive example of the avoidance of the face in warfare. The mechanisms of separation that characterise targeted killings via drones mark an intended return to ignorance and egoism which precedes an ethical relation with the other, in which we perceive the world and the people in it as objects. This relationship with the world consists in ‘never approaching [the other] in their individuality’.[21] The distance of the drone operators from their victim acts to remove any opportunity to engage with the face of the other before killing them. Describing what was visible to them during a drone operation, a former C.I.A. officer states: ‘You could see these little figures scurrying… when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff’.[22] From this, it is evident that the experience of the other empties the relationship of any ethical possibility. This is further evidenced in the accounts of drone operators’ use of derogatory terms for their targets- ‘bug splats’ and ‘squirters’.[23] This demonstrates the dynamic of animosity that Levinas details can only occur through an evasion of the face-to-face encounter. Where in previous iterations of warfare, there was always the possibility, however minute, for the I to engage with the other and make ethical decisions on their behalf, drone warfare evades that possibility from ever happening. To this end, we must understand drone warfare as a completely unethical endeavour, not exclusively on the basis of the lives lost, but on the basis of its denial of personhood as a means to perpetuate violence.
Drone strikes, in their avoidance of the contact with the other, destroy the fact the people who are targeted are human, or could ever have been experienced as human. Thus, the possibility of murder is always justified through objectification and alienation.[24] Alienation is clearly demonstrated in the case of drone warfare, in which a distance is created through a mobilisation of the sterile video game-like unreality of killing through a television screen. O’Connell notes that ‘distance from the victim’, including physical, emotional, social, and cultural distance, increases the willingness of someone to kill, permitting the killer to ‘dehumanise’ the victim.[25] This dehumanisation is not only a means of post-attack justification, but directly influences who is targeted by these attacks. This is most evident in the civilian casualties of drone strikes. Press reports suggest that between 2006-2009 drone strikes killed 14 terrorist leaders in Pakistan. Nonetheless, according to Pakistani sources, these strike also killed some 700 civilians.[26] It is likely that more militants and fewer civilians have been killed than is reported by the press in Pakistan, there is no disputing that drone strikes for targeted killing in locations such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia have caused civilian deaths and injuries.[27]
A dehumanisation of this kind, accomplished through a denial of the face-to-face encounter, can, according to Judith Butler, also be illustrated in the public response to civilian casualties of conflicts. Discussing media reports of the civilian casualties of American oversees conflicts, Butler asks: ‘do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly or collectively? Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media?’.[28] Because we have no frame of reference for the innocent lives that are taken, no image of their face, Butler suggests we are apathetic to their deaths, despite the innocence of those killed. Continuing, she states that obituaries act to visibly give a name and a face to the dead, and ‘is the means by which a life becomes a publicly grievable life’.[29] Following Levinasian approaches, she suggests that the public abstractly recognise that civilian deaths happen as the result of military action, yet in the absence of media in which we can see the faces of those killed, those deaths cease to have happened. We can understand that Levinas’ conception of the face once more comes to impact our understanding of the other as a person rather than an object. In this instance, the lack of an encounter with the face determines that some lives are grievable, and others are not. The allocation of grievability that decides what kind of person is grieved ‘operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human’.[30]
The same patterns of objectification and alienation that make killing via drone easier for the pilots can be found in the public apathy towards drones being used. Once again, it is the relationship with the face that comes to determine the ethical relationship between the I and the other, in this example it is magnified to a societal scale. As a society we are unsolicited by images of suffering. This dislocation from the suffering of others has led to apathy, an apathy that can only arise when we do not see the other as human. Butler states : ‘if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note’.[31] Thus, dehumanisation is not exclusive to acts of violence. The Levinasian concept of the face-to-face encounter, when applied to drone strikes, highlights how we respond to suffering only when we are confronted with it. Butler notes that there are times when, ‘in spite of ourselves and quite apart from any intentional act, we are nevertheless solicited by images of distant suffering in ways that compel our concern and move us to act’.[32] A recent example of this is the death of Alan Kurdi. The publicised image of the refugee boy’s lifeless body washed up on a beach was a wake-up call to the West in particular. Many refugee charities saw a surge in donations. The week after the photo was taken, the amount given to the Swedish Red Cross was fifty-five times greater than it had been the week previously.[33] Without a confrontation we opt to ignore these deaths, to the extent that it is easier to nullify the other’s existence than to act ethically towards them.
Approaching this topic through an examination of Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of the ethical demands made by face-to-face, it is clear that the lack of contact with a victim acts to produce a moral distance between the drone operator and their target, a distance that circumvents the possibility of ethical judgments in combat. Not only is the structure of the face-to-face encounter denied in a combative environment, but, as Butler illustrates, it is saturated within society. Ethical intentionality for Levinas does not occur unless you are first acted upon by the face of the other, so to pre-emptively destroy the possibility to make judgements that could spare the life of a victim should be considered an avoidance of responsibility. A relationship with the other through the face is the basis of Levinas’ ethics, so to actively deny what makes us moral is through definition, unethical. Levinasian moral theory serves to illustrate that drone strikes are unethical not solely on the basis of lives lost, innocent or other, but on the basis of a conceptual denial of life. Alienation and objectification are the means through which western society maintains it self-perceived status as moral. Our perception of morality is however limited to those we know, those who can do things for us. It is this misunderstanding of ethics that allows suffering to continue, both in the continued pursuit of drone warfare, and in the inaction of the public who don’t concern themselves with the faces they cannot see.
[1] Mary Ellen O’Connell, ‘Unlawful Killing with Combat Drones A Case Study of Pakistan, 2004-2009’, Notre Dame Law School Legal Studies Research Paper, 2010, p.2 <http://ssrn.com/abstract=1501144http://ssrn.com/abstract=1501144http://www.ssrn.com/link/notre-dame-legal-studies.html> [accessed 24 May 2019]
[2] Neta C. Crawford, ‘Accountability for Targeted Drone Strikes Against Terrorists?’, Ethics & International Affairs, Vol.29.Issue 1 (2015), p.43
[3] Nico Vorster, ‘Killing from a Distance: A Christian Ethical Evaluation of CIA Targeted Drone Killings’, The Heythrop Journal, Vol.56.Issue 5 (2015) p.837
[4] Jane Mayer, ‘The Predator Drone War’, The New Yorker, 2009 <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/26/the-predator-war> [accessed 26 May 2019]
[5] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, (London: Verso, 2004) p. xviii
[6] Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) p.65
[7] Ibid., p.63
[8] Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’, in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Indiana University Press, 1996), p.9 <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dmHH1Xie8Q0C&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 2 June 2019]
[9] Ibid.
[10] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979) p.50
[11] Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, Trans. by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985) p.85
[12] Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Freedom and Command’, in Collected Philosophical Papers, ed. by Alphonso Lingis (Lancaster: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987) p. 21
[13] Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. by Jill Robbins (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001) p.215
[14] William Large, Levinas’ Totality and Infinity: A Reader’s Guide, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) p.6
[15] Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?, p.115
[16] Ibid., pp.132-133
[17] Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, p.98
[18] Judith Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol.26.Issue 2 (2012) p.140 <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/486301> [accessed 24 May 2019]
[19] Levinas, ‘Freedom and Command’, p.19
[20] Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p.9
[21] Levinas, ‘Freedom and Command’, p.19
[22] Mayer
[23] Michael J. Boyle, ‘The Legal and Ethical Implications of Drone Warfare’, The International Journal of Human Rights, Vol.19.Issue 2 (2015), p.106
[24] Large, p.94
[25] O’Connell
[26] David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum, ‘Death From Above, Outrage Down Below’, The New York Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17exum.html> [accessed 27 May 2019]
[27] Crawford, p.44
[28] Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, p.34
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid., pp.xiv-xv
[31] Ibid., p.34
[32] Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation’, p.135
[33] Katy Fallon, ‘Three Years on from Alan Kurdi’s Death and Life Is No Better for Child Refugees in Europe’, Independent, 2018 <https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/aylan-kurdi-death-three-year-anniversary-child-refugee-home-office-a8518276.html> [accessed 7 June 2019]
By approaching this topic through an examination of Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of the ethical demands made by face-to-face contact with the other, this essay also seeks to explore conditions of ‘grievability’ in wider western society, in response to the unintentional innocent civilian casualties of drone warfare. Judith Butler illustrates how the lack of exposure to the names and faces of those killed in contemporary battlefields has allowed the public to become ‘senseless before those lives we have eradicated, and whose grievability is indefinitely postponed’.[5] To further evaluate the extent to which there is a differential allocation of grievability, we must first understand what is meant by the ethical demands of the face-to-face encounter, and why this relationship with the other leads to the impossibility of murder.
The face-to-face encounter, for Levinas, serves as the basis for his phenomenological conception of ethics, arguing that the encounter with the other (that is, another person) through exposure to their face reveals a vulnerability and destitution, a sense of dependence, that appeals to the self. At the same time, this encounter addresses me and makes a demand upon me, instilling within me a responsibility for the other.[6] The relationship with the other person, as Levinas sees it, disrupts our relationship to the world. In everyday life, the first-person point of view orients our perception of the world and other people. I desire them, name them, classify them, take hold of them, and therefore dominate others through my interpretation of them.[7] Things and people are there for me (the ‘I’) to use, consume, enjoy: ‘as consumable, [the world] is nourishment, and in enjoyment, it offers itself, gives itself, belongs to me’.[8] Here, Levinas is suggesting that our typical perception of the world is based on egoism, in which we figure our relation to the world as something we can dominate. Thus, we think of other people conceptually in a manner that denies them independence. Like objects, we value them on the basis of what they can do for us. However, Levinas claims that despite our supposed power over people and things ‘[t]he encounter with the other (autrui) consists in the fact that despite the extent of my domination and his slavery, I do not possess him’.[9] For Levinas then, the encounter with the other undermines our preconceived notion of control. At a fundamental level, the other person is more than a thing, an encounter with them prompts an understanding of this, and what follows are ethical considerations.
Through real-life encounters, our egoism is broken, and we can begin to treat the other ethically. The face, for Levinas, is the means through which the other can challenge the I to act ethically. The concept of the face does not just refer to the other’s features, rather it is ‘the way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me’.[10] Thus, experiencing the face of the other is not an observation of their appearance: ‘you turn yourself toward the Other as toward an object when you see a nose, eyes, a forehead, a chin, and you can describe them’.[11] The face escapes the I’s domination through an expression of itself, not through its aesthetic qualities: the face of the other expresses their being. It is this expression of being that challenges us to not only recognise the other’s autonomy, but to recognise them as in need of ethical treatment; ‘the absolute nakedness of a face, the absolutely defenceless face, without covering, clothing or mask, is what opposes my power over it, my violence, and opposes it in an absolute way…the being that expresses itself, that faces me, says no to me by his very expression’.[12]
To sense the vulnerability of the other is to experience the impossibility of murder, as within the face is an ethical commandment- ‘this face of the other, without recourse, without security, exposed to my gaze in its weakness and its morality, is also the one that orders ‘Thou Shalt not Kill’. There is, in the face, the supreme authority which commands me’.[13] Upon the recognition of the other’s autonomy, the I will empathise and treat them differently. I see that they are a subject just like me, though I cannot see the world as they do.[14] Exposure to the face creates a relationship between the I and the other, demanding that I be ethical. The weakness, not the strength, of the other that the face betrays demands my justice, so to sense the vulnerability of the other is to experience the impossibility of murder. Seeing the face therefore derails our supposed domination over the world, in that we recognise that the other is not an object but another subject, who in ‘his nudity- his destitution, his morality- straightaway imposes himself upon my responsibility: goodness, mercy or charity’.[15] Here Levinas details that the face establishes an obligation that manifests in an inescapable ethical duty of care; ‘to be human is to have responsibility for the other… I am the hostage of the other… The human is first of all obligation’.[16] This relationship of responsibility is a non-symmetrical one, in that ‘I am responsible for the other without waiting for reciprocity’.[17] It is clear that reciprocity cannot be the basis of ethical relationships, as ethics is not a bargain. It cannot be the case that my ethical relation to another is dependent on their ethical treatment of me, as that would make that ethical status of the relationship less than absolute, and would establish my self-preservation as more important than any relation I have to another.[18]
From a Levinasian approach it becomes evident that ethics stem from our experience of the other, not from prior qualities of the self, as with other ethical systems. To be ethical is not a conscious choice. Rather, acting ethically towards another person is against my own wishes- it is demanded of us by the face of the other who impels me to account for my actions. Levinas claims that our obligation towards the other makes it impossible to murder someone once you have experienced their being. Nevertheless, violence does happen, especially in war.
War is violence aimed towards the other by approaching the other, as Levinas claims, from an ‘indirect angle’.[19] On the surface, the violence between one person and another seemingly dismisses Levinas’ claim of the impossibility of murder. Levinas acknowledges this however, positing that the violence against the other in war is accomplished through disregarding the opposition of the face, denying the face’s plea to live and to be acknowledged. Violence that does occur in war then does not occur in a relationship with the other, but occurs when we treat the other as an object, avoiding their appeal for protection. To experience the other as a face is to experience the impossibility of killing, so there must be either an evasion of the face-to-face encounter, whether intentional or unintentional, for there to be the possibility for murder in war. Even in war then, it is still impossible to murder another person, as long as you first see them as another person. As Levinas states: ‘at the very moment when my power to kill realises itself, the other has escaped me’.[20]
Drone warfare should thus be considered the definitive example of the avoidance of the face in warfare. The mechanisms of separation that characterise targeted killings via drones mark an intended return to ignorance and egoism which precedes an ethical relation with the other, in which we perceive the world and the people in it as objects. This relationship with the world consists in ‘never approaching [the other] in their individuality’.[21] The distance of the drone operators from their victim acts to remove any opportunity to engage with the face of the other before killing them. Describing what was visible to them during a drone operation, a former C.I.A. officer states: ‘You could see these little figures scurrying… when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff’.[22] From this, it is evident that the experience of the other empties the relationship of any ethical possibility. This is further evidenced in the accounts of drone operators’ use of derogatory terms for their targets- ‘bug splats’ and ‘squirters’.[23] This demonstrates the dynamic of animosity that Levinas details can only occur through an evasion of the face-to-face encounter. Where in previous iterations of warfare, there was always the possibility, however minute, for the I to engage with the other and make ethical decisions on their behalf, drone warfare evades that possibility from ever happening. To this end, we must understand drone warfare as a completely unethical endeavour, not exclusively on the basis of the lives lost, but on the basis of its denial of personhood as a means to perpetuate violence.
Drone strikes, in their avoidance of the contact with the other, destroy the fact the people who are targeted are human, or could ever have been experienced as human. Thus, the possibility of murder is always justified through objectification and alienation.[24] Alienation is clearly demonstrated in the case of drone warfare, in which a distance is created through a mobilisation of the sterile video game-like unreality of killing through a television screen. O’Connell notes that ‘distance from the victim’, including physical, emotional, social, and cultural distance, increases the willingness of someone to kill, permitting the killer to ‘dehumanise’ the victim.[25] This dehumanisation is not only a means of post-attack justification, but directly influences who is targeted by these attacks. This is most evident in the civilian casualties of drone strikes. Press reports suggest that between 2006-2009 drone strikes killed 14 terrorist leaders in Pakistan. Nonetheless, according to Pakistani sources, these strike also killed some 700 civilians.[26] It is likely that more militants and fewer civilians have been killed than is reported by the press in Pakistan, there is no disputing that drone strikes for targeted killing in locations such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia have caused civilian deaths and injuries.[27]
A dehumanisation of this kind, accomplished through a denial of the face-to-face encounter, can, according to Judith Butler, also be illustrated in the public response to civilian casualties of conflicts. Discussing media reports of the civilian casualties of American oversees conflicts, Butler asks: ‘do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly or collectively? Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media?’.[28] Because we have no frame of reference for the innocent lives that are taken, no image of their face, Butler suggests we are apathetic to their deaths, despite the innocence of those killed. Continuing, she states that obituaries act to visibly give a name and a face to the dead, and ‘is the means by which a life becomes a publicly grievable life’.[29] Following Levinasian approaches, she suggests that the public abstractly recognise that civilian deaths happen as the result of military action, yet in the absence of media in which we can see the faces of those killed, those deaths cease to have happened. We can understand that Levinas’ conception of the face once more comes to impact our understanding of the other as a person rather than an object. In this instance, the lack of an encounter with the face determines that some lives are grievable, and others are not. The allocation of grievability that decides what kind of person is grieved ‘operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human’.[30]
The same patterns of objectification and alienation that make killing via drone easier for the pilots can be found in the public apathy towards drones being used. Once again, it is the relationship with the face that comes to determine the ethical relationship between the I and the other, in this example it is magnified to a societal scale. As a society we are unsolicited by images of suffering. This dislocation from the suffering of others has led to apathy, an apathy that can only arise when we do not see the other as human. Butler states : ‘if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note’.[31] Thus, dehumanisation is not exclusive to acts of violence. The Levinasian concept of the face-to-face encounter, when applied to drone strikes, highlights how we respond to suffering only when we are confronted with it. Butler notes that there are times when, ‘in spite of ourselves and quite apart from any intentional act, we are nevertheless solicited by images of distant suffering in ways that compel our concern and move us to act’.[32] A recent example of this is the death of Alan Kurdi. The publicised image of the refugee boy’s lifeless body washed up on a beach was a wake-up call to the West in particular. Many refugee charities saw a surge in donations. The week after the photo was taken, the amount given to the Swedish Red Cross was fifty-five times greater than it had been the week previously.[33] Without a confrontation we opt to ignore these deaths, to the extent that it is easier to nullify the other’s existence than to act ethically towards them.
Approaching this topic through an examination of Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of the ethical demands made by face-to-face, it is clear that the lack of contact with a victim acts to produce a moral distance between the drone operator and their target, a distance that circumvents the possibility of ethical judgments in combat. Not only is the structure of the face-to-face encounter denied in a combative environment, but, as Butler illustrates, it is saturated within society. Ethical intentionality for Levinas does not occur unless you are first acted upon by the face of the other, so to pre-emptively destroy the possibility to make judgements that could spare the life of a victim should be considered an avoidance of responsibility. A relationship with the other through the face is the basis of Levinas’ ethics, so to actively deny what makes us moral is through definition, unethical. Levinasian moral theory serves to illustrate that drone strikes are unethical not solely on the basis of lives lost, innocent or other, but on the basis of a conceptual denial of life. Alienation and objectification are the means through which western society maintains it self-perceived status as moral. Our perception of morality is however limited to those we know, those who can do things for us. It is this misunderstanding of ethics that allows suffering to continue, both in the continued pursuit of drone warfare, and in the inaction of the public who don’t concern themselves with the faces they cannot see.
[1] Mary Ellen O’Connell, ‘Unlawful Killing with Combat Drones A Case Study of Pakistan, 2004-2009’, Notre Dame Law School Legal Studies Research Paper, 2010, p.2 <http://ssrn.com/abstract=1501144http://ssrn.com/abstract=1501144http://www.ssrn.com/link/notre-dame-legal-studies.html> [accessed 24 May 2019]
[2] Neta C. Crawford, ‘Accountability for Targeted Drone Strikes Against Terrorists?’, Ethics & International Affairs, Vol.29.Issue 1 (2015), p.43
[3] Nico Vorster, ‘Killing from a Distance: A Christian Ethical Evaluation of CIA Targeted Drone Killings’, The Heythrop Journal, Vol.56.Issue 5 (2015) p.837
[4] Jane Mayer, ‘The Predator Drone War’, The New Yorker, 2009 <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/26/the-predator-war> [accessed 26 May 2019]
[5] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, (London: Verso, 2004) p. xviii
[6] Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) p.65
[7] Ibid., p.63
[8] Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’, in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Indiana University Press, 1996), p.9 <https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dmHH1Xie8Q0C&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false> [accessed 2 June 2019]
[9] Ibid.
[10] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979) p.50
[11] Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, Trans. by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985) p.85
[12] Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Freedom and Command’, in Collected Philosophical Papers, ed. by Alphonso Lingis (Lancaster: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987) p. 21
[13] Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. by Jill Robbins (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001) p.215
[14] William Large, Levinas’ Totality and Infinity: A Reader’s Guide, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) p.6
[15] Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?, p.115
[16] Ibid., pp.132-133
[17] Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, p.98
[18] Judith Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol.26.Issue 2 (2012) p.140 <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/486301> [accessed 24 May 2019]
[19] Levinas, ‘Freedom and Command’, p.19
[20] Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p.9
[21] Levinas, ‘Freedom and Command’, p.19
[22] Mayer
[23] Michael J. Boyle, ‘The Legal and Ethical Implications of Drone Warfare’, The International Journal of Human Rights, Vol.19.Issue 2 (2015), p.106
[24] Large, p.94
[25] O’Connell
[26] David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum, ‘Death From Above, Outrage Down Below’, The New York Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17exum.html> [accessed 27 May 2019]
[27] Crawford, p.44
[28] Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, p.34
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid., pp.xiv-xv
[31] Ibid., p.34
[32] Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation’, p.135
[33] Katy Fallon, ‘Three Years on from Alan Kurdi’s Death and Life Is No Better for Child Refugees in Europe’, Independent, 2018 <https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/aylan-kurdi-death-three-year-anniversary-child-refugee-home-office-a8518276.html> [accessed 7 June 2019]