The Crime of Disembodiment: Ethics and Remote-Controlled Warfare

• In Event: The Colors of Embodiment and Crime: Toward a Criminal Justice Ethic

Abstract

The use of unmanned combat aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones has grown exponentially in recent years. This remote-controlled warfare poses new challenges to our common assumptions on warfare, peace and post-war governance. The ethical problem the use of drones poses goes beyond the traditional questions of just war. The thousands of miles separating the unseen victims from the far remote killers bring the ethical question of disembodiment of the victims, the undistinguished victims. Drone warfare seems to accomplish a total objectification of the enemies. The latters lose their subjectivity to become an ob-jectum (out of subject) a reified commodity or toy for that matter. Without even bringing Kantian categorical imperative asking us to treat any human being as an end by itself and never as a means for an end, by reifying our enemies the unmanned combat aerial vehicles take the warfare from human domain to the ludic one making the killing of a human being resemble those of aliens on a television screen of video games. This is indeed a crime against an unwritten law about human dignity we inherited from classical Greeks. Sophocles’ Antigone decided to bury her brother in the name of unwritten laws and against the will of his uncle, the King Crayon. The crime of disembodiment calls for an unwritten justice to restore the inalienable human dignity

Authors

• Patience Kabamba, Utah Valley University

• Samuel Nelson, Utah Valley University

• J. Stuart McGraw, Utah Valley University