Maybe the terrorists were dumbing things down for a newspaper audience, but I was a little surprised by the simplicity of this argument.

That's a bit harsh, destor.

I liked how they started out, but about halfway through, I thought they started picking out nits in a field of absurdity. Hellloo, I come at this from this view: all war is obscene and absurd, no ifs ands or buts. For instance, calling something like WWII "the good war" is absurd, if you just venture a bit away from the comic book version.

If there is anyplace for relativism, this area is it! You cannot make reason about war. "Just war" theory is absurd to anyone with common sense. All war rules ultimately hit absurdity head on, always have, always will. You can try to do it more morally, bending to your own culture's morals, but that too is always going to be relativist, because enemies and their tactics will always change, and not always going to follow the other side's rules. Actually, they may have become the enemy because they won't follow your moral rules to start with! Hey, If everyone didn't disagree about morals, maybe there wouldn't have been so many massive wars, ya think?

I think anti-drone activists need to stick to arguing about us following our own Constitution, there's some meat there on this topic (which is where I sense you are at, destor, but I don't sense the same thing from these two writers.) But getting into universal morality as regards anything to do with "warrioring," that leads you nowhere.

Here you go, you want it, it's easy, the universal moral is: thou shalt not kill

(no mulligans that I can see for war in that rule.) Less killing, less sin?

Unless you're writing a play about Robin Hood or a white hats vs black hats in the old west or some fictional characters like that....

Just rewriting my silly comment from yesterday...

Philosophers are often eager to apply classical theories to contemporary dilemmas. A classical allusion is much like an appeal to divine authority. By referencing Plato, the authors make it seem as if one of the greatest moral thinkers in history would want to denounce drone attacks. (As a bonus, such allusions also help justify spending one's life interpreting ancient texts.)

But it's all too easy to pervert the old texts in one's zeal to recruit long-dead luminaries to the cause. Prof. John Kaag should certainly know better.

He and his co-writer propose: "This story, which is as old as Western ethics itself, is meant to elicit a particular moral response from us: disgust."

Odd. I have never before heard this particular interpretation of the allegory, and it makes little sense in context.

In the Republic, a character named Glaucon presents the Gyges story to Socrates. As with most of the speeches by secondary characters, Plato's uses Glaucon to offer a counter-argument, which he then refutes in the voice of Socrates. In this case, Glaucon is arguing that people are naturally unjust (what we might call "immoral" but slightly different). That is, given the opportunity to commit injustice without risk of penalty, we won't hesitate. In that case, the only difference between a just man and an unjust man is that the unjust man thinks he can get away with it.

Plato then spends the majority of the Republic refuting this position. He argues that there is a genuine psychological difference between the just man and the unjust man. The truly just man, he proposes, would never commit injustice even if he owned the Ring of Gyges.

So how does this apply to the ethics of drones? It doesn't. Plato did not introduce the tale in order to explore the nature of injustice. Gyges' crime--the killing of a king for selfish reasons--is obviously unjust and requires no explanation. It is deliberately black-and-white. Had Plato made the king into an enemy of Gyges whose death might have had some justification, it would have muddled the point. Indeed, both Plato and Socrates were warriors from violent times, and it's unlikely that they would have had any objection to using the magic ring to defeat military enemies.

It's a shame that the authors pursued the red herring of Gyges' ring because drone strikes pose a much more applicable philosophical dilemma: Do the ends justify the means?

Any rational defense of drones must invoke utilitarian principles: the killing of innocents is justified by the number of lives saved by defeating terrorists.

One could also argue against this position on utilitarian grounds--that drones actually cause more death and destruction than they prevent.

Or one could argue against it on Kantian grounds--that killing innocents is inherently immoral, no matter how many lives you save.

Or one could just muddle the picture with a sophomoric reading of Plato designed to fit one's own rhetorical ends.

Kaag's and Krep's referral to Gyges getting away with actions without consequence possibly has bearing on the Platonic narrative but they omit the central claim Plato is making about the impossibility of invisible action.

It is not as if the the people who survive  on the perimeter of a drone attack wonder about what just happened to them and who did it.