The Categorical Imperatives: The Drone Strikes

The Drone Strikes Take a moment and imagine this, for every terrorist killed by a U.S. drone strike, 50 Pakistani civilians fall victims to these ruthless attacks. According to an article written by David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald from the NY Times, “press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. However, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent hardly “precision”. Regardless if the number of casualties of innocent people caused by drone strikes has increased or decreased, the policy itself should be eliminated if

All people have autonomy, and it is up to the individual to use their reason to act based on good will; “Kant believed that there was a supreme principle of morality, and he referred to it as The Categorical Imperative. The Categorical Imperatives determines what our moral duties are”. Humans have the moral duty to act simply for the right reasons. However, in the case of the U.S. Military killing terrorist without their knowledge, someone “up the ladder” decided that the act alone is acceptable because it would result in “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”. Kant was not a consequentialist theorist as his fellow philosopher, Bentham, was. As stated before, Kant believed that our actions should be based on the rightness of themselves, regardless of the result. Therefore, if the military did, in fact, decide to eliminate a group of leading terrorist, they have duties as humans to do it the right way. What is the right way, though? It would be permissible to say that the best way of going about the task of eliminating terrorist would certainly not be to use drone tactics; instead, both militant parties would have to come up with an agreement of how to end the

military and agree that there is, in fact, a tolerable punishment; death is not being one of them. The reason death could not be an option is because ultimately the U.S. military would be taking away the autonomy of that individual, they are not choosing to die out of free will, but instead are acting based on heteronomy, which is the opposite of Autonomy. To act heteronomous “is to act according to laws (or rules) that we do not give ourselves. It is an action that is influenced by a force outside the individual.” The Living Under Drones project interviewed Khalid Raheem, an elder in his community in Pakistan. Raheem is bewildered by the current state of affairs in his country. He states that they knew nothing about where the US was or what type of people lived there. They did know that the US supported the Taliban in their fight against the Soviets until the Soviets left Afghanistan in defeat. Now they are victims of the Americans. “Now we are always awaiting a drone attack and we know it’s certain and we’re just waiting to hear whose house it will strike, our relatives’, our neighbors’, or us. We do not know. We’re just always in