TNR’s morality tease
Glancing through The New Republic homepage today I came across an article by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann on U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. What caught my attention was the article’s tease: “Questioning our highly effective yet ethically dubious tactic against terrorism.” Foolishly I read through the six-page article expecting to find discussion of both the effectiveness and the ethical dubiousness of drone strikes. Instead, I found six pages on the effectiveness of drone strikes. Indeed, the closest the article got to ethics was a brief mention of the illegality of U.S. government assassinations and a short discussion of the views of Pakistanis on drone strikes.
Now I realize that Bergen and Tiedmann probably did not write their own article tease, so someone else at TNR is going to have to pay for misleading me here. But still, I wish the tease had been accurate – too many policy debates cover only the empirical effectiveness of a policy, ignoring its normative justifiability. In an article on a topic as morally controversial as targeted assassinations, there is little excuse for not touching on, you know, the controversy.
-Marc
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