Why targeted killing is immoral

However, it is then puzzling how he can accept large-scale killing in a war of human beings, i. Evildoers deserve to suffer in response and in a way suited to their crimes. Palestinian terrorists with blood on their hands therefore deserve death, the ultimate punishment for their crimes. Hence, the targeted killing of these terrorists is justified. One could object to this argument by claiming that acts of retribution can be imposed only by a court of justice, within whose authority it is to punish and only after establishing the relevant facts of the case and the blameworthiness of the defendant.

Retribution cannot be imposed by private individuals, nor by governments, but only by legal institutions. But this objection must be wrong. First, for those who accept the idea of retribution, [13] the legal institution of punishment is the best means of achieving it, but not a necessary condition for its possibility.

For retribution to apply, evildoers need to suffer, and this can be imposed by God, by Nature—or by some human being. No doubt there are powerful social and moral reasons for making the courts the only body that administers retribution in society, but these reasons bear no relevance on the justification of retribution per se, which, in principle, can be achieved outside the courtroom too. In the case of terrorists, the problem that arises is that retribution through the legal system is not an option with regard to most of them, because the countries that harbor them hardly ever bring them to trial within their territories, nor do they extradite them to be tried in a foreign domestic or international court.

Since in such cases, retribution through the legal system is unfeasible, and if we take seriously the idea that evildoers deserve punishment, the inevitable conclusion is that retribution can, or must, [14] be imposed by some other entity, such as the army of the injured country.

Second, the role of courts in establishing the facts of the matter and the blameworthiness of the alleged criminal seems less significant in the context of terrorists because many of them are only too happy to admit their participation in the relevant crimes or their active membership and roles in the relevant organizations.

In conventional wars, when the enemy upholds the conventions of war, retribution is irrelevant with regard to individual soldiers, and hence self-defense provides the only framework for justifying killing them. In wars against terror, retribution offers a justificatory framework that complements and bolsters the self-defense justification. Thus, killing enemy combatants in wars on terror—namely, activists in the terror organizations—is, if anything, more, and not less, justified than killing enemy combatants in conventional wars.

In the next section, I discuss a philosophical argument against targeted killing developed by Michael Gross. The only way to justify this albeit vaguely is by considering soldiers on both sides not as individuals, but as agents of their respective polities.

Judged as individuals, most soldiers would be morally exempt from being killed by the enemy, but judged as agents of a collective, they would lose this immunity and become morally legitimate targets. For this reason, anonymity is so imperative to justifying killing enemy soldiers in war: the license to kill soldiers from the other side rests precisely on the fact that their personal merits or demerits are ignored, that they are seen merely as the enemy.

The problem with targeted killing is that it does not meet this condition, thereby undermining the very justification for killing in war. This move seems odd, if not paradoxical. The source of the problem lies in the collectivist solution to the problem of killing in war.

If the ordinary notion of self-defense fails to provide justification for most killings in war, then the conclusion must be that these killings are morally unjustified and, hence, war in general is morally unjustified. It is of no help to choose to relate to the people killed in war as agents of a collective rather than as individuals, as their moral dignity is not contingent on how anybody arbitrarily chooses to relate to them.

Yet, targeting perpetrators of terror is not killing them by name, but by role. To kill by name is to kill somebody simply because he is who he is, regardless of any contingent features he possesses or actions he has committed. This type of killing is, indeed, deeply problematic from a moral point of view.

But targeting soldiers in war is not of this kind. It is connected to the special role the targets play in the war or, more precisely, to the special threat they pose to the other side.

In other words, even if soldiers are only agents of some collective, some agents might be more important than others in carrying out the policy or ideology of that collective. What emerges from these two points of criticism is a view that is opposite to that propounded by Gross, one that must be credited to Richard Norman.

This is particularly true in wars against terrorism, where those targeted are usually personally responsible for atrocities committed against the lives of innocent civilians. Killing in self-defense is justified only if—among other conditions—it achieves its primary objective, which is defense.

If the killing increases the threat and danger to the side carrying it out, it is unjustified from both a moral and pragmatic perspective. Many argue that this is precisely the problem with targeted killing. Its cost is too high, it is argued, as it is usually followed by waves of terrorist attacks and it tends to escalate the conflict; moreover, in general, targeted killing does not succeed in deterring potential terrorists who, in any event, are willing to sacrifice their lives for what they regard as a sacred cause.

Note that this argument is not necessarily founded on strictly utilitarian premises. The justification for killing in self-defense rests on notions such as responsibility, blame, desert, and rights, not on the notion of utility.

But nonetheless, the justification for acts carried out in self-defense is contingent, inter alia, on the effectiveness of those acts. If A wants to prevent B from doing X to her but shooting B will not accomplish that goal, then shooting B cannot be justified on grounds of self-defense. In other words, effectiveness is a constraint on the right to self-defense in general and on the right to use targeted killing for self-defense in particular.

Does targeted killing meet this condition? Let me make the following comments in response. First, in the war against terror, just as in the war against the mafia, what counts are the long-term results, not the immediate ones. In the short run, acts of revenge might follow the killing of terrorists, but in the long run, there is good reason to believe that such killings will weaken the terror organizations, generate demoralization among their members, force them to restrict their movements, and so on.

The personal charisma and professional skills of the leaders and key figures of certain organizations are crucial to the success of their organizations, something that is especially true with regard to terror organizations that operate underground with no clear institutional structure.

It is reasonable to assume that killing such individuals will gradually make it more difficult for the terror machinery to function. I refer to the general claim made repeatedly that terror cannot be fought by military means and, more particularly, to the widespread view that a massive military operation in the West Bank would fail to reduce terror directed against Israeli civilians.

Yet, the fact is that Operation Defensive Shield significantly weakened the ability of the Palestinian terror organizations to carry out murderous attacks. Though the war against Palestinian terror is far from over and though dozens of Israelis have been murdered since the invasion of the Palestinian cities in the Operation, the situation is much better at the time this article goes to press than it was in March , when Israel was facing two to three terrorist attacks a day, resulting in the deaths of more than a hundred Israelis in one month.

In retrospect, it seems that many of the predictions about the ineffectiveness of the measures taken against terror during that time were premature. Third, while I do not deny the importance of effectiveness as a justificatory condition for self-defense, I think that wars against terror should not be subject to a much stricter application of this condition than conventional wars.

In retrospect, it is sometimes possible to determine that some actions were of little or no effect, while others were essential for victory, yet rarely will we hear condemnation of these ineffective actions on moral grounds. If, as claimed above, wars against terror follow the same moral logic as that of conventional wars, one cannot require that the effectiveness of every action carried out in the former be established beyond any reasonable doubt for it to be granted moral license.

And that would involve giving the public much more information than aggregate data about collateral damage. Some of these situations are familiar: There are good reasons to use undercover cops, for instance, and sealed indictments. But these are exceptions to the rule in a system that is otherwise largely open to public scrutiny.

This is in part because the U. From the public picture journalists have provided of the drone program, the administration is careful and deliberative in choosing its targets. To see the alternative, look no further than the other supposed counterterror campaign in Yemen, where the Saudi-led coalition has bombed at least four hospitals through malice or inattention in the past year.

Obama has clearly grappled with the challenge of justifying preemptive strikes on terrorists. Were the government enforcing the law, it would need to press public cases against individuals deemed threats. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. Can 3. Yasmeen Serhan. It's impossible to know because the list is secret. In response to a question about the procedures used to order lethal strikes against U.

Why should being a U. Once you decide to fight against America, don't you give up that protection? There are very narrow circumstances under which the government is authorized to use lethal force against a person without due process. But the government appears to be claiming the authority to use lethal force against U. Aren't you challenging a military strategy?

Shouldn't the military be able to do what's necessary to keep us safe? War time authority must be limited to active conflict zones, but the U. The entire world is not a battlefield, and we don't want to replace the laws of peace with the laws of war everywhere and anywhere the government believes a suspect may be located.

If we give the executive branch the authority to define a global battlefield and to describe any terrorism suspect as a combatant, then we are effectively allowing government officials to make life-or-death decisions without the time-tested procedural protections of the Constitution.

How the U. Why should someone be protected just because he isn't in an armed-conflict zone? Would this be ok if he was hiding out in Iraq or Afghanistan? Under very narrow circumstances, the government can use lethal force without due process, including against people engaged in armed conflict on the battlefield and people who pose an imminent threat off the battlefield. But unless those criteria are met, the government cannot lawfully execute someone without charge or trial.

Insurgents who are not terrorists, who fight like soldiers, should be treated like soldiers. But the targeted killing of insurgents in wartime is no different from the targeted killing of terrorists: all killing is subject to the same moral constraints. It will have to meet strict standards of proportionality and, given that the target is usually a single person, it will be difficult to justify injury to innocent bystanders. Remember the standard rule: collateral damage — that is, the death or injury of noncombatants — must not be disproportionate to the value of the military target.

Even a high-ranking insurgent or terrorist leader is not so important — especially since these leaders are quickly replaced — as to justify many civilian deaths.

After the attack on the USS Cole in October , the Clinton administration undertook a search for Osama Bin Laden, intending to kill him and any members of his organization who were with him.

The camp was not attacked. If force is used on the ground rather than from the air, the commandos must get close enough to make sure they are killing the right people. These are standard requirements for the zone of war. In the intermediate zone, the proportionality standards might well be tougher, the required care would be more extensive, and greater risks would have to be accepted in the collection of information or in the actual attack.

I will just say, without argument, that if someone is involved in terrorist attacks on innocent men and women or in military attacks on American soldiers, it is hard to see why his nationality should protect him from counter-attack. Now, does it make any difference, morally, if the actual killing is the work of a drone, operated by a technician sitting in a room five thousand miles away? Surely the same criteria apply to the drone as to any more closely manned machine.

They are more vulnerable to drones than to any more conventional weapon — so why should we worry about using drones? But there are reasons to worry: killing-by-drone poses no immediate risk to the persons running the drone and so it is technically easier than other forms of targeted killing; there is no need to maneuver armed men into difficult terrain or contested airspace.

The easiness of fighting with drones should make us uneasy. This is a dangerously tempting technology. Drones combine the capacity for surveillance with the capacity for precise attack. The technology is so good that the temptation is very strong to relax the criteria in accordance with which it is used so that drones can be used more and more often. This is what seems to have happened with the U. We need to be careful here, for the exact character of our policy and its consequences on the ground are still disputed; much is not known or not known with any degree of certainty.

The differences are extreme: by some accounts, civilian casualties make up only 7 percent of the total; by others, 40 percent. In July , the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued the first official figures, covering all airstrikes outside conventional war zones that is, in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen in the Obama years.

In strikes, the report says, between 2, and 2, combatants and between 64 and civilians were killed. It also indicates that if no strike produced more than one civilian death, then strikes produced none at all: a remarkable result, which has already drawn highly skeptical responses.

The nonlethal costs imposed on the civilian population are also disputed. The authors describe what life is like in a Pakistani village with a drone hovering overhead, sometimes for days at a time.

The hovering allows for accurate targeting of a particular individual; it is possible to wait and watch for the best opportunity for an attack.

At the same time, the report says, the buzz of the hovering drone terrifies the villagers, who live in constant fear of an explosion from the sky. The fear may indeed be constant; there is much evidence for that and for the buzzing drone. But the very effectiveness of drone attacks raises questions about these accounts of the fear they provoke. If they didn't do that, the intended targets, who presumably know they are targets, would simply stay out of sight.

Or, maybe, drones sometimes hover visibly and audibly precisely in order to terrify the villagers, so that they expel Taliban militants hiding among them. Like much else in the early history of drone warfare, reports from the field are not necessarily accurate, but they may be accurate in part. And it is undoubtedly true that the experience of drone attacks leaves fear behind; villagers who have watched one explosion from the sky may plausibly fear another. Drones don't win hearts and minds.

There are political arguments, in addition to moral arguments, against their overuse. But I want to focus here on one striking example of how the moral criteria were relaxed, or seem to have been relaxed, in order to justify the costs that drone warfare imposes on innocent people.

The men who happened to be in the vicinity of the actual target were never themselves targeted; they were not the specific object of the attack; we had no knowledge of what they had done, or were doing, or were planning to do. There are ancient precedents for this sort of thing. We are not aiming to kill all the men of military age, but we have made them all liable to be killed.

We have turned them into combatants, without knowing anything more about them than their gender and approximate age. This new doctrine of liability may well have been reconsidered and rescinded after the New York Times report. That means taking strikes only when we face a continuing, imminent threat, and only where … there is near certainty of no civilian casualties. But they probably have not been stopped entirely. All this suggests how important it is to open up the process by which lists of targets are put together and decisions about drone attacks are made.

The general criteria for selecting targets in the zone of war and in the intermediate zone should also be considered and debated not only inside but also outside the government, by the body of citizens, by all of us. But I do want their deaths to be the subject of ongoing political and moral arguments, and there should be known government officials accountable to the rest of us for attacks that go badly wrong.

There is another issue raised by drone technology, which, even if not now real, certainly warrants discussion. One example of this is the attempt by American officials to expand the target list in Afghanistan to include drug dealers, on the grounds that the Taliban benefited from the drug trade.