| dc.description.abstract | The purpose of this thesis is to argue for the adoption of Mission Command because it stands to promote the kind of functioning proper to the aims and conditions of the increasingly tech-enabled military. It does this because there are no mission, battle, or war conditions where good judgment and responsible action are not critical to the success of the military’s endeavors. In this, there is a moral basis to the proper functioning of a good military – trust and responsibility taking. While some argue that implementing Mission Command is infeasible, I argue that Kant, in fact, provides a model of moral education that suits Mission Command’s integration quite well. I turn to Kant because he is the thinker for whom responsibility is the key concept, so his thoughts on how to cultivate it are relevant to the successful integration of Mission Command.
In order to support my argument for Mission Command, I first focus the thesis on the ethical debates of autonomous weapons systems (AWS), specifically, drones. In finding the literature too narrow, I argue the ethical discussion must be recast in terms of judgment, autonomy, and responsibility in order to locate a balanced path forward for the ethical research and development of technology that privileges the centrality of the human agent.
Next, I turn from the machine to the human operators responsible for employing them. I argue that in the military’s quest to maintain an asymmetric advantage by potentially pursuing AWS which would offload many decisions from the operator, we have simultaneously placed too much trust in a machine that lacks any true ability to self-govern and exercise judgment, while removing conditions that support the operators being able to take responsibility for their own actions.
In doing so, I utilize drones as a limit case to demonstrate that when we undermine operator’s autonomy and capacity to be responsible at some minimal level, we essentially treat them as mere means to an end and risk enacting even further harms on the individual. All of this, I argue, recommends a robust adoption of Mission Command. | en |
