Steven Lee

The subject of this paper is the ethics of the use of attack drones by a state. My concern is not the moral acceptability of drones as such, but rather that of current drone policy insofar as it involves the targeted killing of individuals in the “war on terror.” I seek to clarify and extend some of the arguments offered regarding the policy. Though this will involve some appeal to just war theory, my moral argument is broader than this. I conclude that there is a reasonably strong case that current drone policy is morally unacceptable.

Much has been written about the ethics of humanitarian intervention in the past fifteen years. In this paper I discuss a variety of justifications that have been proposed (in fact, seven theories of justification), finding difficulties with each of them, and then I offer a theory of justification of my own. My approach to justification will differ from most of the earlier accounts in two ways. First, I begin the discussion of justification at a different point. Second, I seek to expand the traditional discussion of humanitarian intervention to cover an area not usually addressed, namely, the question of the scope of justified humanitarian intervention. If humanitarian intervention is sometimes justified, precisely when is it justified? This is no merely academic question, given the belated appeal to humanitarian intervention on the part of those scrambling to provide a public justification of the war in Iraq.

Do philosophers have an obligation to public philosophy, that is, do they owe the pubic an effort to explain their work in a form that the public can understand and make use of? A prior question is whether public philosophy is possible, and this question is open because the role of the public philosopher may not be a possible role in our society. In Plato’s view, public philosophy was not possible in a democracy, as the only role for public philosophy was in a society in which philosophers were rulers. But the differences between our conception of democracy and Plato’s may show that his view of the social fate of the potential philosopher in a democracy does not hold for us.