We say: my great-grandfather died for this dirt, my grandfather died for this dirt, my father died for this dirt, I would die for this dirt, but I hope my son never has to die for this dirt. Instead of questioning why your family died for that dirt and trying to make the world a place where your son doesn’t have to die for the same patch of dirt that claimed your clan, you stick to your foot in that dirt and hope that your stand will be that last stand. However, with history as a prologue, your son and maybe even his son will sadly die for that same patch of dirt. Watching the new horrors of drone warfare beamed directly to my phone from the battlefields of Ukraine in 1080p; it’s evident that as I watch a soldier beg for his life while being chased down by the high-pitched hum of a $10 drone, there’s a real chance you and your son die for that dirt without ever seeing who valued you, and your divine spark, so little.

It will always be this way. Maybe it doesn’t have to be, but maybe the reality is that though we think concepts like feudalism died, we find ourselves in a new version of it. Our banner lord Amazon calls us up from the fields to push back the invaders – the enemy, Nvidia, is raising the price on processors for the new data center – sally forth, seize the day, and thank the lord for another beautiful day tending the land and two-day delivery. Looking back, maybe developing nuclear weapons was the best thing we could’ve done for humanity – mutually assured destruction made it so our appetites for ending others had to be tempered by the fear that they could end us – after all, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Human ingenuity knows no bounds. We have to bloodlet a little – those people who have the same attributes as us, but in a different shade, need to be stopped before they do x or y or z to you and me – think of the children, but not their children.

Humans are wonderful beings. Though we can empathize nine times out of ten, that tenth time, we are far better at another ability, rationalization. The rationalization that though that person may appear like us, may have a beautiful family, may have similar hopes and dreams to me, they come from a different patch of dirt, making them less than me. We must be able to rationalize that; we must have strength in numbers, we need the echo chamber, and we need to know that we alone don’t have these dark thoughts. We can overlook that the person fighting beside us may look like the enemy – they are draped in the same cloth as me, and that makes them friends, not enemies.

But as we pivot into remote-controlled warfare, the ethical landscape shifts beneath our feet. Consider the drone operator: sitting in a climate-controlled room, far removed from the chaos of the battlefield, watching the world through a screen. Their job is to decide who lives and dies, with the press of a button unleashing death from above. The emotional and psychological detachment is staggering. This operator doesn’t see the fear in the eyes of their target, doesn’t hear the cries of pain and loss – or they do, but a lifetime of Call of Duty had deadened the concept of real life – the act of killing can become as sterile as deleting an email.

Here, the teachings of Jean-Paul Sartre come to mind – Sartre posited that individuals are condemned to be free and burdened with the responsibility of their choices and actions. For the drone operator, this freedom is both a shield and a sword. They are shielded from the immediate horror of their actions, yet the weight of their decisions may haunt them in ways unseen. The screen (or even their youth) that separates them from their targets does not absolve them of their humanity, but it may be the thing that provides that pivotal extra layer of psychic disconnect from their actions.

This detachment creates a dangerous potential for moral disengagement. When killing becomes a task performed from the comfort of an office chair, the moral gravity of taking a life can be easily forgotten. The philosopher, Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil”, comes into sharp focus here. Arendt argued that ordinary people can commit atrocious acts simply by following orders, detached from the human consequences of their actions – we also see that as part of the Milgram Experiment, where people delivered levels of electric shock to another person when ordered to. There was a definite willingness to, under orders, provide fatal levels of shock to people – drone warfare risks normalizing this detachment, making the extraordinary act of killing alarmingly mundane.

Moreover, the implications for international law and the rules of engagement are profound—for example, can a combatant surrender to a drone? Drones operate in a grey zone, often outside the traditional boundaries of war. Their anonymity and ease of deployment can lead to an escalation in conflicts, as nations may resort to drone strikes without fully considering the repercussions. This new era of warfare challenges us to rethink the frameworks that have guided us through centuries of conflict.

Yet, in this bleak analysis, there is a glimmer of hope. Awareness and discourse can spark change. By confronting these ethical dilemmas head-on, we can strive to create a framework that upholds the sanctity of human life, even in the most technologically advanced theaters of war. Granted, that seems like an oxymoron, but the call for empathy, ethical reasoning, and moral accountability is louder than ever.

Ultimately, our technological advancements must be matched by our moral and ethical progress. As we navigate the complexities of drone warfare, we must remember that each action taken from a distance still reverberates in the heart of humanity. The challenge is not just to wield our power responsibly but to ensure that in doing so, we do not lose sight of our shared human essence.

These are the concepts we have wrestled with since Cain killed Abel. We are beautiful because we are flawed. We can descend to darkness, but we can also elevate to greatness—that is the blessing and the curse of humanity. We are depraved, but in that depravity, there is a cyclical nature to the beast. It was the Alan Moore character, Dr. Manhattan, who said it best: “Without condoning or condemning, I understand.”

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The political reason for the public sphere is explained here as the medium of the political. Habermas’s political constitution of philosophy opens and substantiates the next thesis: “Political philosophy is a dispute about the good.” This can become a standard of action. In his later work, Habermas attempts to define the notion of communicative reason as a reflection of philosophy.

Communication and rationality gradually become the basis of social relationships and displace the position of transcendental consciousness. Once we abandon the idea that the actor is the source of meaning in the world, we can see that the actor is just one Understanding comes from rational communication and norms of understanding in the space of reasons.”

The basic principles of rationalized communication are to move away from the subject as a constituent of society and to preserve the possibility of criticism. The subject has been replaced by an understanding of the living world as an integral part of society. Despite this, the requirements of the validity of communication retain the possibility of criticism. They are based on two broad aspects. One can criticize strategic action based on the action of understanding the lifeworld. Second, the traditions of everyday communication are not exempt from their criticism. Because they could conflict with the claims of the validity of communication that they condition as contingent traditions. The grounding and critique of society thus become equally possible. In this article, we primarily focus on the second aspect, the possibility of social critique, which is examined here from the perspective of J. Habermas as well as that of Hannah Arndt.

When it is rooted in the source of legitimacy of human unity, an act has the communicative structure of the lifeworld. When rooted in the source of political legitimacy, which is the formation of human unity, it is legitimate. Recent contemporary thought has repeatedly emphasized that sovereignty is the legal title of political legitimacy. According to Arendt, a functional and federal separation of powers should not limit democracy, but rather facilitate it and strengthen and increase the power of the people to create their law. The system of checks and balances is supposed to ensure that state authorities don’t abuse their power.” Abstraction action always emanates from the experience of the lifeworld. “The appropriation of traditions, the renewal of solidarity, the socialization of the individual require a natural hermeneutic of everyday communication”.

THE ACTIVITY-THEORETIC CONCEPTION OF POWER

However, according to Hannah Arendt, communicative power is impermanent. It exists only in the “fleeting moment of joint action (5)” and “disappears” as soon as those gathered “disperse again. However, Arendt does not only have this singular, negative, and activity-theoretic conception of power, which she first develops in Vita Activa. In “On Revolution” she supplements it with a second, constructive, and structural conception of power. In doing so, she not only takes up the constitutional-theoretical legacy of the Declaration of Independence but also, in a radical counter-movement, taps into the third concept of power she had used earlier in her study of totalitarianism, to develop an alternative to both bureaucratic, imperial and totalitarian power and the negative evanescence of performative communicative power on the example of the revolutionary constitution. However, the question remains open as to whether communicative power can be reasonable.

How can communicative power be maintained, stabilized, and increased in the long term? How can the reflexive mechanism that generates street power be institutionalized? The answer, which Arendt finally found after a careful study of the American Revolution in the chapter “Constitutio Libertatis” of her book On Revolution, is this: through a constitution that establishes rule. This constitution must be constructed in such a way that it can make permanent the communicative power of the constitutional law unleashed by the revolution. This idea leads Arendt to a fundamental critique of the “constitutionalism” of the English rule of law and the German constitutional state, which only limits power. She calls it, which she opened in the final section of The Origins of Totalitarianism as the last lifeline of Western civilization, now a “counterrevolutionary” project, created only to “break the revolutionary power of the people” and sow “deep distrust of the people” to provide “a relatively small group of technical specialists” with the means “in the class struggle (6).”

Habermas, on the other hand, talks more about procedural popular sovereignty. The difference with Arendt lies in his understanding of autonomy. Whereas Arendt, like Carl Schmitt, identifies political autonomy with a specific public space in which citizens confront each other face to face, for Habermas, Kelsen, and Luhmann autonomy is a characteristic of a specific form of communication that can take place anywhere and anytime and is separated from law only by claims of validity (Habermas), specialization (Luhmann) and method (Kelsen)(7). However, the main difference between Habermas and Arendt is not in the concept of power, but in the concept of rationality, which for Habermas is closely linked to power in all its manifestations. The broad communicative conception of rationality allows Habermas to hold to the claim of the truth of political legitimacy and democratic self-legitimacy. 30

Thus, he acts in line with Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, whereas Arendt sharply and historically ontologically demarcates politics and truth from each other and thus inevitably moves in line with Hobbes, Austen, and Schmitt, whom she abhors. Unlike Habermas (and Hobbes), Arendt does not understand the formation of political power as a purely social phenomenon, but clearly distinguishes it (like Hegel and Schmitt) from social “violence,” which for her includes administrative power. She thus moves the political, separated from truth, society, and violence, into the neighborhood of the poetic, which in turn links her to Heidegger, Nietzsche, and some poststructuralists(8). A critique needs the argumentation, which normally grows up on the moral life experience of a community. The life-world itself accommodates the discourse principle to connect it with the knowledge of the existential claims of moral norms – and at the same time, in turn, to recognize in it the ground of the procedure of gaining moral knowledge(9). Both concepts, Arendt’s notion of communicative power and Habermas’s notion of communicative reason mark a clear distance from liberalism. Power cannot be limited by law from the outside, but it can be constituted, enabled, and established by law.

THE LITHOGRAPHY:

1. Hindrichs, G. (2009): Kommunikative Macht; Philosophische Rundschau, 2009, Vol.56, No.4 (2009), p. 277

2. Hindrichs, G. (2009): Kommunikative Macht; Philosophische Rundschau, 2009, Vol.56, No.4 (2009), p. 273-295 Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handels , IV

3. Arendt, H. (1960): Vita activa, S. 194. Arendt, H. (1963): Über die Revolution, München 1974, S.96, S 198, S.222, S.218,S.228

4. Arendt, H. (1963): Über die Revolution; S. 196; S.200

5. Arendt, H. (1960): Vita activa, S. 195.

6. Arendt, H. (1963): Über die Revolution, S. 187, S. 379.

7. Brunkhorst, H. (2011): Affinität wieder Willen? Hannah Arendt, Theodor W.Adorno und die Frankfurter Schule; Fritz Bauer Institut, Liliane Weissberg (HG.), Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/New York, 2011

8. Vgl. Brunkhorst, H. (1999): Hannah Arendt, München, 1999, S. 107 ff.

9. Vgl. Hindrichs, G. (2009): Kommunikative Macht; Philosophische Rundschau, 2009, Vol.56, No.4 (2009), p. 27

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