Drone strikes are a relatively new, high-tech weapon that have rapidly expanded the way countries fight terrorists and other enemies. They allow military forces to engage enemies in places where the risks of ground-based attacks would be too great, and they can provide the illusion of a “clean war” without requiring large numbers of military personnel to risk their lives. Yet they also raise difficult questions about the morality of drone warfare and the role it should play in modern societies.
To better understand the morality of drone strikes, I conducted an original survey experiment with 555 respondents online using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Respondents were asked to complete an open-ended question about what they believed to be the morally justified use of a drone strike, and then were assigned to one of five groups. In groups one through four, I randomly told respondents that the country they were talking about was either tactically or strategically using a drone strike and, in some cases, that this particular strike was being conducted under multilateral constraint (groups two and three). In group five, I simply informed them that the country was conducting a drone strike.
Results showed that the public recalled unique combinations of moral norms when considering the legitimacy of drone strikes, and that they did not prioritize battlefield courage or civilian protection as much as scholars have argued. The results also showed that when a country is perceived to be submitting to multilateral constraint — as was the case in group five — it is more likely that respondents will absolve that country of any moral culpability for civilian casualties.
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