Drone Logic
Abstract
This dissertation presents three scholarly papers dealing with the philosophical dilemmas of drone warfare that challenge the pervasive reliance of current literature on a paradigm of colonialist ideology and offer alternative analyses of drone technology that are not beholden to the corrupt values and procedures of contemporary western thought. In the first paper, I argue that the classic utilitarian approach is routinely co-opted by colonialist politics as evidenced in the historical debate over western military technologies and the contemporary debate over drones. Because utilitarianism is particularly susceptible to political manipulation due to its amenableness to false dilemmas and dubious counterfactuals, I advocate an alternative approach based on the technology-as-social-experiment framework, which I conclude is not only inoculated from the ideological trappings of utilitarianism but also produces an analysis that is more philosophically consistent with the existing regime of international humanitarian law. In the second paper, I use Thomas Kuhn’s well-known account of science to argue that the drone debate operates within a colonialist paradigm that supplies the problem-field, methods, and standards of solution for contemporary discourse, which in turn consists mainly in solving colonialist puzzles and is therefore incapable of producing non-colonialist results. Within the colonialist paradigm, moral and legal debates over drones inevitably end in paradoxes by which mutually exclusive conclusions are drawn from the same conceptual repertoire. Because there is no higher standard than the assent of the relevant community, I implore scholars to abandon the colonialist paradigm and to restore the traditional role of philosophy as a critical enterprise. In the third paper, I synthesize existing anticolonial legal scholarship with the debate over drones and outline a philosophy of anticolonial legal realism, which accounts for the actual history and values of colonial imperialism and serves to reorient the drone debate from an amorphous complex of philosophical and legal puzzles to a more unified program of anticolonial critique. Anticolonial legal realism avoids the contradictions of paradigmatic colonialist thought while at the same time revealing a clearer path of resistance against the frightening future world that drone technology portends. I conclude by offering programmatic suggestions for worldwide anticolonial resistance to drone warfare.
Subject
dronesdrone warfare
utilitarianism
social experiment
Thomas Kuhn
colonialism
anticolonialism
legal realism
Citation
Oday, John Curran (2020). Drone Logic. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /192546.