Why Isn't Robotic Killing Taboo?

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When we think about practices that our society surrounds with taboos -- cannibalism, incest -- we tend to assume that those practices are extreme, and difficult to engage in.

But that is the point of taboos: that is what taboos are intended to make us think.

Because the reality is that the practices that taboos protect us against are the easiest things in the world.

In a society that eats meat, there is nothing easier than grabbing the neighbor's children and cooking them. To sexually active people, the most convenient sex partners are those who live in close proximity.

We have taboos against these practices despite the fact that they are convenient. The taboos reflect a recognition of social disruptiveness that outweighs the benefits of some limited subset of circumstances in which the practices happen -- and, more importantly, even the possible desires of the most powerful people in the society.


For instance, we seem to encounter cannibalism mainly in hypothetical lifeboats where someone has already hypothetically died, and others can hypothetically survive by sustaining themselves on the flesh of the deceased. But the cannibalism taboo was established to prevent not this far-fetched situation, but the kind of flesh-eating that could be expected to take place every day without it.

Today, drones are set loose by the United States government day after day to kill people in country after country, and in the limited number of cases in which justifications are even proffered, they are extremely tenuous: "Well, we had reason to believe . . . on good authority . . . that the victim was engaged in preparing to plot . . . or was otherwise associate with . . . . " Drone victims in remote regions 6,000 miles away have about as much chance of defending themselves as hypothetical lifeboat passengers.

The problem with drones is that their computerized, high-tech, robotic, automated killing long ago came to outrun -- by a long shot -- any semblance of human agency in controlling them. And it's only getting worse every hour.

An exaggeration? Hardly. This is exactly the kind of activity that our society governs with taboo. We are indulging a fantasy that "reasonable" use of drones can be determined by logic and policy and jurisprudence, and all the while more and more people are being killed, and the technology is reaching the point of being uncontrollable.

The day will come when we would no more elect to office a person who believes in setting robotic drones loose to kill other people than we would someone who eats the flesh of their next door neighbor or has sex with their sister. Instead, we will cast such people outside of social bounds.