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Slaughterhouse-Five Lesson 1 Objectives Cognitive Students will understand that war is a complicated issue that most find falls

s into a moral gray Students will know that drone warfare is highly contested by many because it lacks the human factor Students will know what the human factor is Affective Students will feel comfortable discussing controversial topics in an academic setting Procedural Students will read several articles which discuss varying opinions on warfare and make opinions on war/drone warfare using evidence from the article Students will have a fishbowl discussing the pros, cons, and moral gray of modern warfare Students will make a post-it note story told nonlinearly to prepare them for reading Slaughterhouse-Five Procedure 1. Hook [10-15 mins] Four Corners Survey a. Assign each corner of the room a varying degree of polarity. Read the statement out loud, then have students decide what their position is, then move to that corner of the room. b. Highly Disagree, Somewhat Disagree, Somewhat Agree, Highly Agree i. There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. ii. Drone warfare is more dangerous than traditional, modern warfare. iii. Civilians are acceptable casualties of war. iv. War is an inevitable aspect of humanity. 1. Use these questions to think about the reading. Take notes as you read the articles and formulate opinions, which dont necessarily need to be polarizing. 2. Individual Reading and Writing [20 mins] a. Drones, Ethics and the Armchair Soldier b. The Moral Case for Drones 3. Fishbowl [40 mins] a. Use the four corners survey questions b. Refer to Google Presentation i. Encourage students to guide the discussion on their own and to realize when they should move to a new topic slide 4. Wrap-up

a. Restate some of the ideas that were presented as a way of encouraging critical thinking. Hand out the Slaughterhouse-Five and assign the first 73 pages of reading. Materials

Drones, Ethics and the Armchair Soldier


By JOHN KAAG
Ten years ago, I watched the Iraq invasion unfold on TV. It was for me, like most Americans, a remote-control event, the type that you tuned into occasionally to see how it was going before changing the channel, like the Olympics. And, as often happens in the Olympics, we crushed the opposition. But we Americans at home were not the only ones with remote controls. Many of our soldiers also had them, and used them to direct one of the most devastating military assaults in the history of modern warfare. The technological superiority of the United States its ability to strike with precision from a distance produced something like the shock and awe the media had relentlessly advertised. And it inspired a similar reaction in moral and legal theorists who were concerned about the relationship between advanced military technologies and the legitimation of warfare.

For the first time in history, soldiers have something in common with philosophers: they can do their jobs sitting down.
Ten years later, Im 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 cant 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 Kants 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 Ive 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. Ethics has long been taught at least in passing to officer candidates and battlefield soldiers. But this new breed of remote control soldier will have the time and the space to think through unprecedentedly complex moral quandaries, like the question of using a drone to kill an unarmed human being who may be in the early planning stages of a terrorist attack. A 2011 Pentagon study(which anticipated the results of the psychological examination of pilots earlier this year) showed that nearly 30 percent of drone pilots experience what the military calls burnout, defined by what the military describes, in unusually sophisticated language, as an existential crisis. *** In a recent post in The Stone, Jeff McMahan argued that traditional just war theory should be reworked in several important ways. He suggested that the tenets of a revised theory apply not only to governments, traditionally represented by commanders and heads of state, but also to individual soldiers. This is a significant revision since it broadens the scope of responsibility for warfare beyond political institutions to include the men and women who engage in combat. This has always been the case with the principles of jus in bello (the conventions or rules that govern military conduct) but McMahan intends individuals to be held responsible for the additional standards of jus ad bellum, those guidelines that describe the permissibility of initiating military operations. Specifically, McMahan believes that individuals are to bear at least some responsibility in upholding just cause requirements. McMahan expects more of soldiers and, in this age of drones and leisure, he is right to do so.

I suspect many armchair soldiers would welcome some new intellectual tools to handle this newfound responsibility. As it turns out, some of these new tools have been around since Plato and Augustine (fathers of Western moral theory and the just war tradition, respectively), but some are in fact new, or at least newer, and have yet to be introduced in the training of armchair soldiers. Warfare, until this point, had been too brutal, too immediate, too threatening, for soldiers to spend much time on the theoretical matters of ethics. But as technology makes warfare more leisurely it has, for the first time, the chance to be genuinely and complexly philosophical. My point here is not that these new armchair soldiers are to be criticized for failing in their moral responsibilities. My point is rather that while drones are to be applauded for keeping these soldiers out of harms way physically, we would do well to remember that they do not keep them out of harms way morally or psychologically. The high rates of burnout should drive this home. Supporting our troops requires ensuring that they are provided not just with training and physical armor, but with the intellectual tools to navigate these new difficulties. To be sure, the question of what new responsibilities soldiers have is not the only, nor even the most important, ethical question concerning the use of drones. Hannah Arendt claimed, in her analysis of World War II, that in general, the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands. Just as was the case in the invasion of Iraq 10 years ago, the most important questions we should be asking should not be directed to armchair soldiers but to those of us in armchairs at home: What wars are being fought in our name? On what grounds are they being fought?

NEWS ANALYSIS

The Moral Case for Drones


FOR streamlined, unmanned aircraft, drones carry a lot of baggage these days, along with their Hellfire missiles. Some people find the very notion of killer robots deeply disturbing. Their lethal operations inside sovereign countries that are not at war with the United States raise contentious legal questions. They have become a radicalizing force in some Muslim countries. And proliferation will inevitably put them in the hands of odious regimes. But most critics of the Obama administrations aggressive use of drones for targeted killing have focused on evidence that they are unintentionally killing innocent civilians. From the desolate tribal regions of Pakistan have come heartbreaking tales of families wiped out by

mistake and of children as collateral damage in the campaign against Al Qaeda. And there are serious questions about whether American officials have understated civilian deaths. So it may be a surprise to find that some moral philosophers, political scientists and weapons specialists believe armed, unmanned aircraft offer marked moral advantages over almost any other tool of warfare. I had ethical doubts and concerns when I started looking into this, said Bradley J. Strawser, a former Air Force officer and an assistant professor of philosophy at the Naval Postgraduate School. But after a concentrated study of remotely piloted vehicles, he said, he concluded that using them to go after terrorists not only was ethically permissible but also might be ethically obligatory, because of their advantages in identifying targets and striking with precision. You have to start by asking, as for any military action, is the cause just? Mr. Strawser said. But for extremists who are indeed plotting violence against innocents, he said, all the evidence we have so far suggests that drones do better at both identifying the terrorist and avoiding collateral damage than anything else we have. Since drone operators can view a target for hours or days in advance of a strike, they can identify terrorists more accurately than ground troops or conventional pilots. They are able to time a strike when innocents are not nearby and can even divert a missile after firing if, say, a child wanders into range. Clearly, those advantages have not always been used competently or humanely; like any other weapon, armed drones can be used recklessly or on the basis of flawed intelligence. If an operator targets the wrong house, innocents will die. Moreover, any analysis of actual results from the Central Intelligence Agencys strikes in Pakistan, which has become the worlds unwilling test ground for the new weapon, is hampered by secrecy and wildly varying casualty reports. But one rough comparison has found that even if the highest estimates of collateral deaths are accurate, the drones kill fewer civilians than other modes of warfare. AVERY PLAW, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, put the C.I.A. drone record in Pakistan up against the ratio of combatant deaths to civilian deaths in other settings. Mr. Plaw considered four studies of drone deaths in Pakistan that estimated the proportion of civilian victims at 4 percent, 6 percent, 17 percent and 20 percent respectively.

But even the high-end count of 20 percent was considerably lower than the rate in other settings, he found. When the Pakistani Army went after militants in the tribal area on the ground, civilians were 46 percent of those killed. In Israels targeted killings of militants from Hamas and other groups, using a range of weapons from bombs to missile strikes, the collateral death rate was 41 percent, according to an Israeli human rights group. In conventional military conflicts over the last two decades, he found that estimates of civilian deaths ranged from about 33 percent to more than 80 percent of all deaths. Mr. Plaw acknowledged the limitations of such comparisons, which mix different kinds of warfare. But he concluded, A fair-minded evaluation of the best data we have available suggests that the drone program compares favorably with similar operations and contemporary armed conflict more generally. By the count of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, which has done perhaps the most detailed and skeptical study of the strikes, the C.I.A. operators are improving their performance. The bureau has documented a notable drop in the civilian proportion of drone casualties, to 16 percent of those killed in 2011 from 28 percent in 2008. This year, by the bureaus count, just three of the 152 people killed in drone strikes through July 7 were civilians. The drones promise of precision killing and perfect safety for operators is so seductive, in fact, that some scholars have raised a different moral question: Do drones threaten to lower the threshold for lethal violence? In the just-war tradition, theres the notion that you only wage war as a last resort, saidDaniel R. Brunstetter, a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine who fears that drones are becoming a default strategy to be used almost anywhere. With hundreds of terrorist suspects killed under President Obama and just one taken into custody overseas, some question whether drones have become not a more precise alternative to bombing but a convenient substitute for capture. If so, drones may actually be encouraging unnecessary killing. Few imagined such debates in 2000, when American security officials first began to think about arming the Predator surveillance drone, with which they had spotted Osama bin Laden at his Afghanistan base, said Henry A. Crumpton, then deputy chief of the C.I.A.s counterterrorism center, who tells the story in his recent memoir, The Art of Intelligence.

We never said, Lets build a more humane weapon, Mr. Crumpton said. We said, Lets be as precise as possible, because thats our mission to kill Bin Laden and the people right around him. Since then, Mr. Crumpton said, the drone war has prompted an intense focus on civilian casualties, which in a YouTube world have become harder to hide. He argues that technological change is producing a growing intolerance for the routine slaughter of earlier wars. Look at the firebombing of Dresden, and compare what were doing today, Mr. Crumpton said. The publics expectations have been raised dramatically around the world, and thats good news.

Notes On Students Discussion Student 1: quotes about civilian casualties Student 2: reconnaissance, more efficient technology, decreases likelihood of accidentally killing civilians; we become the terrorists; opposition to wars is loss of life Student 3: unnecessary deaths that we dont think about; moral gray Student 4: risking our own soldiers; safety of drones Student 5: soldiers going crazy killing people; PTSD while in battle, changing psychology Student 6: fewer civilian casualties; human error; Student 7: line from article, moral harm; innocents; Student 8: future of drones, potential of drones to be in the wrong hands; using drones as terrorist weapons Student 9: drop in civilian casualties; repetitive Student 10: guilt; less likely to screw up because of drone warfare; Student 11: our solution to the problem is also terrorism; moral grey of murder Student 12: drones allow us to save American lives

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