We Can Recognize Immoral Thinking because It Consistently Refuses to Come to Grips with the Real Issues — an Illustration Using Columnist Michael Gerson’s Recent Drone Column — and a Parallel Example from CIA Director Nominee, John Brennan

08 February 2013

Two points — both to be illustrated with Michael Gerson’s justification for drone murder

These are:

(1) Fear is the number one enemy of the soul — for nations, as well as people.

(2) When under the influence of fear, we tend to disregard key ethical issues and substitute weak justifications for immorality in their place.

I will use columnist Michael Gerson’s essay supporting the Obama Administration’s drone murder program to illustrate both points. My conclusion will refer to a statement from CIA Director nominee, John Brennan, that inadvertently also undercuts Mr. Gerson’s too confident argument.

Point 1 — Fear is the number one enemy of the soul — for nations, as well as people

I have commented before that the discriminatory element underlying American support for drone murder represents, at its core, a disregard for innocent life. This is akin to Germany’s similarly based immorality during the World War II era.

Collective guilt attaches to both.

The fact that between 62 and 83 percent of Americans support the Obama Administration’s secret and (apparently) institutionally lackadaisical execution of thousands of people in foreign lands is — given America’s professed ideas about the Rule of Law and the value of individual lives — disappointing.

Fear lies at the heart of this widely shared moral insanity.

Point 2 — When under the influence of fear, we tend to disregard key ethical issues and substitute weak justifications for our immorality in their place

To wit, Michael Gerson’s illustrating essay. In which his single minded focus on self-defense drowns all other competing ethical issues.

Citation — to Mr. Gerson’s superficially appealing op-ed piece

Michael Gerson, Obama’s drone policy, rooted in self-defense, Washington Post (07 February 2013)

What Michael Gerson said — is pretty much what most drone murder supporters think

For example:

The Obama administration’s defense of drone strikes against al-Qaeda and associated groups — including U.S. citizens who are part of those groups — is based on a certain concept of self-defense in an age of terrorism.

In this view, a threat does not become “imminent” when a terrorist boards a plane or straps on a bomb vest. It emerges when terrorists plot, train for and incite attacks.

“The Constitution,” says Attorney General Eric Holder, “does not require the president to delay action until some theoretical end-stage of planning.”

The recently leaked Justice Department memo argues similarly, “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”

In favor of Mr. Gerson’s perspective is the fact that he is correct — insofar as he goes

No worldly person (a) denies the right to self-defense or (b) makes “imminent imminence” the sole standard for initiating self-defensive action.

I fully support Mr. Gerson’s well stated proposition. Insofar as it goes.

Where Gerson goes off moral logic’s rails

Michael Gerson’s essay goes astray in its exclusive focus on self-defense. Self-defense and non-imminence are not at the core of drone murder critics’ ethical logic.

Critics’ concerns revolve around the mechanics of how we might avoid making mistakes in:

(i) identifying morally and self-defensively appropriate targets

and

(ii) killing them, while minimizing the taking of innocent lives at the same time.

Gerson addresses neither criticism.

In effect, his focus on self-defense has subsumed the moral issues that necessarily enter into the scope of exercise of the right to protect oneself.

His too narrow (and even circular) thinking is evident in the following passage:

If America is in an ongoing war against al-Qaeda and associated groups, then the rules of war apply, Yemen and the Afghanistan/Pakistan border are battlefields, and al-Qaeda operatives are lawful targets.

If this war were a myth or a metaphor, then the pursuit of al-Qaeda would be a criminal matter, requiring extradition, arrests and due process.

Labeling Obama as “judge, jury and executioner” is his critics’ prerogative. But defending the country is not their responsibility.

It is easy for those without executive authority to dismiss risks that are prospective. After a terrorist attack on America, the critics would likely be silent, hoping that no one recalled their complacency.

Gerson’s moral logic here fails on three fronts:

First, the Rules of War do not explicitly address the situation that the world is in today vis a vis terrorism, so relying on them to permit drone murder is evidentiarily mistaken.

Second, Gerson’s thinking is circular when he implies that — because we have not dragged suspected terrorists into civilian court — that necessarily means that the War on Terror is legitimately undertaken, covered by the Rules of War, and therefore subject to drone-launched executions.

Third, Gerson raises a straw man argument when he implies that drone murder critics are mainly relying the “judge, jury and executioner” critique to criticize President Obama’s handling of the terrorist threat.

How morality evaders substitute ethically lesser concerns in place of more primary concerns

Mr. Gerson’s essay uses the right to self-defense to supplant moral and legal concerns about human beings’ right to due process — which, ethically speaking, should be implemented before we kill or maim them.

If Gerson’s implied moral position regarding an essentially unlimited right to self-defense were correct, then police could wander around imprisoning or executing people, whom they believed might be plotting and preparing to carry out personal crimes. Obviously, we do not permit that. My right to self-defense does not overwhelm your right to the same.

War does not change our ethically based bias against indiscriminately getting rid of alleged bad guys. For example, once a combat related fire fight is over, we are not allowed to execute everybody we just captured. This is so, even despite the fact that, if they escape, they would very probably return to attempting to kill us.

Nor does the justification of “modern” (as opposed to “classic”) war allow us to indiscriminately fling mortar, artillery, or missile “rounds” into civilian population centers.

To wit, the frequent criticism of Israel’s overly aggressive self-defense tactics, as exercised across that nation’s borders, in the midst of populations of people who had nothing at all to do with the attacks that the Israeli military is reacting to.

Given these uncomfortable facts, Gerson’s sole emphasis on America’s right to self-defense is morally mistaken.

Just because I have a right to defend myself does not mean that I can exercise it indiscriminately and with unconstrained proactivity. That is partially why humanity invented the idea of due process.

By avoiding dealing with the moral necessity of fairly exercising due process, Mr. Gerson’s essay comes to too simplistic a conclusion

America’s overwhelming support for President Obama’s drone murder program appears to rest on our trust that he will exercise his kingly prerogative wisely. Meaning that (a) he will keep us “safe” and (b) no one here actually cares about dead or maimed foreigners.

The ethical flaw in this position is that non-Americans arguably have the same basic human rights that we do. Primary among these is the right not to be murdered, without reasonably just cause.

Critics of drone murder are not objecting to our right to national defense.

They are objecting to the fact that the Obama Administration is almost certainly killing significant numbers of people who are either (a) not enemies of America or (b) so peripherally involved with enemies of America, that they do not constitute a legitimately cognizable threat.

That is why drone murder critics clamor for explanations of the legal and pragmatic considerations that underlie the Administration’s executions.

Trust in the President or the CIA is not enough to override this procedural concern, especially given those entities' paranoid insistence that virtually everything associated with the drone murder program has to be classified as secret.

My experience in law enforcement and the practice of Law has been that people attracted to national defense and intelligence work tend to be enthusiastic. Their enthusiasm frequently takes them over the paranoia top. When one factors in the natural desire to protect and expand one’s institutional bailiwick, we have a prescription for immoral and unaccountable excesses.

That is why the President’s (i) secret drone policy, (ii) vague legal justifications for it, and (iii) lack of accountability in carrying it out do not pass the ethical smell test.

Instituting mild due process is not a huge hurdle — nor does it have to get bogged down in the excessive back and forths of civilian court

I am not opposed to specialized and efficiently acting drone murder courts, which would operate in secret:

Provided that the legal and moral parameters that they operate under are clearly and fully delineated

and

the mechanisms and considerations by which we appoint the members of those panels are reasonably certain to produce fair-minded “kill” decisions.

Second, government would have to keep the public informed as to the numbers of people that has sent to Life’s terminated side.

Third, thorough attempts would have to be made to track the proportion of innocents blasted by the strikes. If one cannot count collaterally killed innocents:

one’s criteria for execution are either too broad or too poorly supervised

one’s mechanical application of the execution process too imprecise.

The moral? — Defenders of the Obama Administration’s secret and unaccountable drone murder policy typically ignore basic moral concerns

Michael Gersons’ well written, but poorly thought out essay is an example. A parallel example comes from CIA Director nominee, John Brennan.

Mr. Brennan yesterday said something that precisely illustrates the too frequent ethical vacuity of drone murder proponents.

When questioned about the legitimacy of killing American citizens with drone strikes and perhaps offering them an opportunity to surrender beforehand, Brennan replied that anyone associated with Al Qaeda (or an implied affiliate) would already know that they are a target:

“Do you believe that the president should provide an individual American with the opportunity to surrender before killing them?” [Senator] Wyden asked.

Brennan said, in the case of Al Qaeda operatives targeted for killings, that the administration’s policy is clear:

“Any American that joins Al Qaeda will know full well that they have joined an organization that is at war with the United States.”

“Any American who did that should know well that they, in fact, are part of an enemy against us, and that the United States will do everything possible to destroy that enemy to save American lives,” Brennan responded.

Mr. Brennan’s justification misses the obvious point that the Intelligence community makes mistakes. Innocent targets would have no idea that they were considered to be Al Qaeda tag-alongs.

Brennan’s illogic is the kind of ethical irrationality that “these guys” consistently exhibit. It’s called hubris.

Hubris, as a character trait, is exactly why people like Mr. Brennan and President Obama should not be allowed to make drone murder decisions — without first institutionalizing the possibility of receiving overriding input from more humble and less biased participants in the process.

PeteFree.com

We Can Recognize Immoral Thinking because It Consistently Refuses to Come to Grips with the Real Issues — an Illustration Using Columnist Michael Gerson’s Recent Drone Column — and a Parallel Example from CIA Director Nominee, John Brennan