Abjecting humanity: Dehumanizing and posthumanizing the military

ANDRES VACCARI

Supersoldiers: The ethical, legal and social implications

Ashgate Publishing

Lugar: Surrey; Año: 2015; p. 9 - 24

Ethical questions around war are often posed around notions of the human?humanness, humaneness, humanity?and its shadows: the inhuman, dehumanized, posthuman. There are two questions here, one metaphysical and one ethical. The first one is about the ontological limits of the human in a novel military context populated with new actors who straddle the categories of human and machine, biology and technology. As a way of an answer, I offer a framework to consider a broad range of (real and prospective) hybrids with military applications, such as synthetic organisms, cyborgs, autonomous robots, human-machine systems, and modified humans in general. My aim is to link two problems: human agency and the ontology of new hybrids. The metaphysics of agency (particularly, in relation to intentionality) has been the traditional basis on which to distinguish natural from made, human from nonhuman?and this is the central link between the two questions.