Targeted Killing is a Morally Permissible Foreign Policy Tool

First: Raz defines moral permissibility: Joseph Raz. Permissions and Supererogation. American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Apr., 1975) pp. 161-168 “a person is permitted to perform an action ... if it is not the case that he ought, ... to refrain from it.” This means I just have to show there is no injunction against targeted killing. Second: The negative must defend a prohibition otherwise targeted killing is permissible and you affirm apriori. If there are no normative qualities then something is permissible. Conee writes: Earl Conee. Against Moral Dilemmas. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 87-97 “features of acts, ... render an act impermissible when an alternative without such a feature exists. Other qualities of acts, ... render an act obligatory ... if the act does not have a forbidding feature and nothing else of the same merit can be done instead. When an equally worthy alternative is available, each of them is permitted. When no choice has a morally significant quality, any choice is permitted. ... “ Prefer this interp for 3 reasons: A) my definition since it comes from a review of moral literature, making it more predictable and more indicative of moral truth. B) common usage since everyday actions like sitting down are permissible not because there is some reason for them to be morally neutral, but since they’re not wrong. C) Presuming actions to be permissible is the only way to justify the contemplation of permissibility, making presumption a starting point for all moral discourse. Thus my burden is to either show targeted killing is normatively good or that there are no normative qualities. Either is sufficient to affirm. The world doesn’t pre-exist the subject rather objects are tied to the subject however, the task of ethics is to allow for the creation of those concepts. I advocate an ethic of transcendental empiricism. Transcendental empiricism says we must not ground our ethic in abstract nor purely physical qualities. Rather we must deal in the moment of experience and always creating. First: Traditional metaphysics views the subject as one that is put into the world, this assumption must be rethought in favor of an ethic that allows the subject to create different experiences and concepts. Bryant writes: Levi R. Bryant. DIFFERENCE AND GIVENNESS Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence. Northwestern University Press 2008 “Where intuitions lack spontaneity in that one must await them so that they might become present, ... By contrast, ... the perspective of an infinite intuition, ... would not require the intellect to supplement itself with the use of concepts to represent the many under one, but would entertain a direct relationship with things such that the very thinking of the thing would produce the thing. ... Empiricism ... becomes transcendental, ... only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. ... to criticize aesthetics for founding itself on what can be represented … is to criticize aesthetics for having reduced the given to passive receptivity rather than seeking, ... Deleuze seeks to determine the conditions under which receptivity is itself possible. “ Moreover, abstract ethical theories disregard the interaction between concepts and precepts. The moment of experience is one to be explored and relegislated. Bryant 2 writes: Levi R. Bryant. DIFFERENCE AND GIVENNESS Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence. Northwestern University Press 2008 “we trace, ... the point at which difference in kind or nature converges with difference in degree in the actualization of experience. ... it is a case of real experience in all its peculiarities. And if we must broaden it, or even go beyond it, this is only in order to find the articulations on which these peculiarities depend. So that the conditions of experience are less determined in concepts than in pure percepts. ... while these percepts themselves are united in a concept, it is a concept modeled on the thing itself, which ... we have followed each of the "lines" beyond the turn in experience, we must also rediscover the point at which they intersect again, where the directions cross and where the tendencies that differ in kind link together again to give rise to the thing as we know it. ... the expression "beyond the decisive turn ... denotes another moment when these lines converge again to give us this time the virtual image or the distinct reason of the common point. …” Second: ethical theories that are detached from either the subject nor the creation of concepts is epistemically bankrupt and negates the very possibility of an authentic ethical encounter. The AC question of how we form ethical concepts is priori. Bryant 3 writes: “so long as philosophy assumes that thought has a natural affinity with ... a specific form of objectivity ... thought cannot help but become unconsciously trapped in its own implicit presuppositions which are ... contingent. As a result, thought is led to denounce difference and divergence as aberrant or perverted departures from what is recognizable, normal, and therefore true . . . Beginning with the Image of thought ... leads to ... philosophizing in which ... individuations are understood relative to our own individuation, so that it becomes impossible to affirm the other individuations in their difference as anything but aberrations. ... Before determining … individuations, it will first be necessary to subject the Image of thought to a radical critique.” Third: metaphysics the point of departure for ethics. The way ontology interacts with perception is ethically apriori. Bai writes: HEESOON BAI [Simon Fraser University]. On the Edge of Chaos: Complexity and Ethics. Proceedings of the 2003 Complexity Science and Educational Research Conference October 16–18 Edmonton, Canada pp. 19–30 “it makes no sense to speak of the world independent of the knower/perceiver. We can never catch the world outside our cognition, ... We cannot step outside our cognition to witness the world independent of ourselves. ... Ethics is not just about how we act. For, how we act follows from how we think and perceive. ... ethics is intimately tied to epistemology. The representationalist conception of cognition leads to what we may call the ethics of power where the subject wields control and manipulation over the object, naturally leading to exploitation and violence, …” The framework establishes that 1) we must look to the question of how we create abstractions given the physical world we are thrust into and 2) we must reject ideologies of representation in favor of one of creating new concepts and new ways to approach ethics and call something ethical. My contention is that under transcendental empiricism everything is permissible thus targeted killing is permissible. First: prohibitions are rejected in favoring of calling everything permissible. We must always be questioning, relegislating, and reinventing our ethic which means we can never preclude the ability call something permissible, otherwise it forecloses the possibility of us taking that action or calling it moral or immoral. Massumi writes: Brian Massumi. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. MIT Press. “Nomad thought” does not lodge itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. ... it rides difference. ... The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislating subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which their subject, ... is only secondary. Rather than reflecting the world, they are immersed in a changing state of things. ... Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is ... the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. ... It is an act. Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation, x=x= not y with an open equation: …+y+z+a …. ... It synthesizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging. ... The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from [representational] space. ... Nomad space is “smooth,” or open-ended. …” Thus under the framework everything is permissible because we can’t restrict action for the subject. Second: Ethics becomes not something overreaching and transcendent but rather something the agent decides and is created in relation to the agent. This means we affirm everything is permissible under a theory of immanence. Smith writes: Daniel W. Smith. DELEUZE AND THE QUESTION OF DESIRE: TOWARD AN IMMANENT THEORY OF ETHICS. PARRHESIA NUMBER 2 • 2007 • 66–78 “actions and propositions are interpreted as so many sets of symptoms that express or “dramatize” the mode of existence of the speaker. “What is the mode of existence of the person who utters a given proposition?” ... Rather than “judging” actions and thoughts by appealing to transcendent or universal values, one “evaluates” them by determining the mode of existence that serves as their principle. ... the transcendent moral opposition ... is replaced an immanent ethical difference ... base modes of existence, ... a mode of existence will be considered to be “good” ... that exercises its capacity for being affected in such a way that its power of acting increases, to the point where it produces active affections and adequate ideas. ... Modes are ... “evaluated” in terms of the manner by which they “occupy” their existence: the intensity of their power, ... knowing whether a mode of existence … is capable of ... increasing its power “