The Myth of Ethical Warfare

Can war be ethical? I can understand this question from an academic perspective, but not as a human being. Here's why.

War is the ultimate crime. Committed not just by and against individuals, but entire peoples. Destruction at it's grandest scale. Not just a show, but an application of our collective destructive ability. The immense power of our creativity harnessed for the opposite - the best of what we are to achieve the worst of what we are capable of.

People murdered, homes destroyed, nature violated. Cities levelled. Fear, pain, suffering. Human bonds severed for generations. Children traumatized for life. Hunger and famine. Any kind of cruelty our worst instincts can conjure. Rape. Torture. A license to maim, kill, take, brake or burn anything or anyone. This is war. The pinnacle of brutality. An orgy of violence. An assault on Life and Truth. War is the worst of not just us, but of all of us - of us together. Not just of ourselves but of our collective being.

And then we erect monuments and memorials and construct myths and legends and entire national identities from these terrible events. I understand the need to glorify those on the defending side, but in so doing do we not risk missing the true lesson - that war is a crime? All of war is a war crime and all of war is a crime against humanity.

For something to be considered ethical, we as a society must collectively agree that we accept these things in some form or case.

I for one don't, won't and never will. And I suspect most people would agree.

And yet here we are. Not just with actual wars still happening, but nations actively investing a significant part of our wealth into preparing for war. We buy guns and bombs and missiles and drones and tanks and planes. We train people every day and conduct big war games. We use our dwindling natural resources on weapon systems instead of investing into not having wars in the first place.

Si vis pacem, para bellum

How about?

bellum est crimen summum

ergo

si vis pacem, fac pacem!

This is not a novel idea. In fact most of us agreed to this in 1919:

In order to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war, by the prescription of open, just and honourable relations between nations, by the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among Governments, and by the maintenance of justice and a scrupulous respect for all treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another

It's all right there. We got it over a hundred years ago having just gone through the most devastating four years of human existence. Millions of lives ended and ruined, societies set back 200 years. All those beautiful cities bustling with culture and new ideas about society, science, life and art turned to fire and rubble. Culture and history lost forever. Millions displaced, family trees violently uprooted, cut down, hacked to shreds and burned to ash.

"No more!" said we. No mas! Ever!

But like the tragic tale of an alcoholic going on a suicidal bender after 20 years of relative sobriety, we were back with a vengeance. And like so many blockbuster sequels, this one turned everything up to eleven. Courtesy of one of the nations missing from the signatories to the treaty.

Just imagine what could have happened if had actually kept that promise made that Thursday in August in 1919. The United States alone would by now be a sci-fi utopia had they used their military budget on civilian projects instead. For all it's citizens and not just the ultra-wealthy. If all major powers reallocated their military budgets to fostering global cooperation. Investments in culture and education. In sustainable science, energy, agriculture. In people. We would not only solve wars forever, but also ensure the sustainable existence of all life on this planet - including ours. We are not escaping to Mars. This place is all we have. It's all we've ever had. We've destroyed most of it faster than anything that came before us. Now it's time we make due with what's left.

We are arguing if Autonomous Weapon Systems should be banned or regulated when we should be arguing about how to get to a situation where no nation would ever go to war with any other nation. I know it sounds idealistic and naive, but that doesn't change the fact that it's true. It's like our "solution" to poverty which we deem such a complex problem that we never actually get to fixing it. We circle around it and wax philosophical about systemic bias, lack of access to education and job opportunities when we should simply be giving people enough money to live a dignified life.

Yes, we talk about peace, but the resources we actually allocate to creating it are a drop in the ocean compared to how much we invest in war.

The Skewed Technological Angle

War and tech look like they're productive partners. The last major one alone gave us atomic energy, spaceflight and computers. Technological progress is often cited as one of the very few, if not the only positive outcome of war. But that's backwards. War needs technology, but technology does not need war. It would be much more accurate to say that the immense technological progress happened despite of the war, not thanks to it. The progress in atomic energy was preceded by hundreds of years of theoretical science most recently just before world war one, same with rocketry and computing.

We don't know what would have happened to those fields had it not been for WWII, but it's probably safe to assume that certain things would have developed slower. But speed is just one measure of technological progress and I would argue the least important one and from a sustainability standpoint - possibly the most harmful. One could also argue that war is always detrimental to true progress.

Atomic weapons are often named as the reason we've had relative peace all these decades. But that too is backwards. Peace between superpowers emerged from and is maintained mainly through trade and mutually beneficial economic ties. Mutually assured prosperity, not mutually assured destruction.

The real catalyst of progress during war is political will. Wars coalesce societies and leadership like no other human endeavour and nothing motivates people quite like a common enemy or the fear of death. But the takeaway from that should not be "wars also have positive sides", but rather how can we harness that immense creative capacity without war? Or are we really so unimaginative, so lazy, so poorly evolved as a species that we can only act when staring down the barrel of a gun?

The discourse around the ethics of autonomous weapon systems is yet another example of how technology changes the topic from the essential to the superficial. Here we are "debating" whether robots should be programmed to kill instead of debating if and when killing should be allowed in the first place. Technology distracts us from the tough, important questions because it decouples our understanding of reality from the limitations and complexities of reality. It tricks us into thinking that any societal ill can be solved by technology. It convinces us that any area of society - from education and healthcare to economics and safety - is simply another challenge for some innovative tech entrepreneur to solve. Technology can work like magic and with that has the tendency to turn us towards magical thinking. "What if we could have war without any suffering?", "Learning without effort?", "Life without aging?". Tech allows us the kick any proverbial can down the road indefinitely.

The OED defines magic as

the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces

"Mysterious" is just something we can't understand or explain. "Supernatural" is something "attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature". Which is exactly where we are in terms of the general population's understanding of software and digital networks. And how many people have any actual "scientific understanding" of anything these days? The Internet allowed us to outsource our understanding to the point that we no longer understand anything ourselves. Part of this could be solved with better education, but a part of this I fear never will be. Because too many people would rather take the entertainment value of the magic trick over the enlightenment of understanding of how it's done.

This distracting effect comes with a high price tag for society. Whenever policymakers deem a technology impossible to regulate because it simply changes too quickly - this is precisely why - they are focusing on the distraction and not the actual question. Most likely because they don't even know what the actual question is.

The rapid change of tech relative to other natural and societal processes muddles our perception of history and thus our ability to learn from it. And so it becomes our go-to excuse for repeating the mistakes of history. "This time it will be different" we say "look at all this new technology!". But it never is. War is still war.

Technology will never end all wars because "to end all wars" is a why question. "Why" is a moral question, not a technical one. Technology cannot answer it because it is amoral - it cannot tell "right" from "wrong". Tech is purely about the "how" - a means to an end. What end? That's up to us to decide.