Suleimani's choice: the narrow permissions and wider considerations of remote warfare

Abstract

This chapter argues that the notion of liability to defensive harm, now dominant in the ethics of killing in war, grants a narrow set of permissions to use drones to kill persons intentionally within a rights-respecting regime of targeted killing. This chapter also argues for wide moral concerns arising from necessity. Both the narrow permission and the wide concerns offer moral reasons that justify and guide remote warfare and with two opportunities: the opportunity to protect and respect human rights to achieve a substantively just outcome, and the opportunity to reinforce a procedurally just pluralistic order that respects human rights across time. Remote warfare allows a balance between substantively just outcomes that protect rights and a procedurally just, rights-respecting order in world affairs. Both order and justice can give us moral reasons that tell in favor of this or that remote killing.