William Ferree Mrs. Daye Phillippo ENGL 106 8:30 a.m. 16 November 2017 Ethics and Drone Warfare Targeted killing is not a new subject. It has been around since the beginning of time. How can an issue so old be so controversial? Technology. The modern use of drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, make targeted killing easy. A man sitting in a room staring at a screen can kill a target across the world with the push of a button, but is it ethical? Can the act be justified or is drone technology too advanced to be used for targeted killing? I argue that targeted killing by drones is ethically justified when restricted. Not only can drones execute with precision, reduce the number of soldiers put in danger by the enemy, and decrease the civilian fatality count, but they also make the U.S. safer. The target of the drone strikes is what determines how ethical the killing is. Some believe that killing is never justified due to the sanctity of life. In “Just & Unjust …show more content…
Drones are precise and minimize the number of civilian casualties. Drones become more practical when they decrease innocent victims. Critics of drones may say that the effectiveness of drones can not be determined because there are not solid statistics on the casualties of drone strikes. I agree with Assistant Professor of Political Science at La Salle University Michael J. Boyle in “The Costs and Consequences of Drone Warfare” when he says, “Taken at face value, these data suggest that Brennan was correct when he argued that civilian casualties from drone strikes in Pakistan are ‘exceedingly rare’,” however I do believe that civilian deaths do occur (5). Even though drone strikes do have civilian casualties, they are significantly less than that of air strikes or tactical team confrontations (Boyle 6). Drones minimize the number of parties involved in a targeted