Death machines The ethics of violent technologies [Hardcover]

As innovations in military technologies race toward ever-greater levels of automation and autonomy, debates over the ethics of violent technologies tread water. Death Machines reframes these debates, arguing that the way we conceive of the ethics of contemporary warfare is itself imbued with a set of bio-technological rationalities that work as limits. The task for critical thought must therefore be to unpack, engage, and challenge these limits. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, the book offers a close reading of the technology-biopolitics-complex that informs and produces contemporary subjectivities, highlighting the perilous implications this has for how we think about the ethics of political violence, both now and in the future.
Introduction: The conditioned human

1. Biopolitics and the technological subject

2. Biopolitical technologies in Arendt and Foucault

3. Anti-political (post)modernity

4. Procedural violence

5. Ethics as technics

6. All hail our robot overlords

7. Prescription drones

Conclusion: For an ethics beyond technics

Index

Elke Schwarzis Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester