MORALITY - Eye in the Sky - Film - Drone Strike - ethical issues
The film I referred to on Thursday was 'Eye in the Sky' - Helen Mirren one of the leading actors
The ethical issue was whether a drone strike should be completed to 'take out' a terrorrist leader who rarely came 'into view'.
(I seem to remember in Pakistan/Afghanistan or that area).
The terrorist leader was undoubtedly a 'bad person' and a high value target, no question, and this was their chance, maybe never to be repeated.
Unfortunately there was a young girl playing in the street just outside of the building, she kept moving into and out of the area where a sstrike would have killed her.
The tension was both with the commanding officers in a high tech command centre including obviously, large TV screens/monitors, they could clearly see the girl from cameras mounted on the drone , and the 'pilot' and 'co-pilot' (female of course) in a room that controlled the drone also with a large monitor (like they were looking through the cockpit window, they could clearly see the girl.
The final decision as to whether or not to push the 'fire' button rested with the pilot, if instructed by the commanding officer.
The pilot couldn't bring himself to press the button and the co-pilot refused on the basis of not having the authority to override the pilots decision, possibly also out of loyalty to the pilot.
I won't spoil the plot for you (I found the film very gripping), but the most chilling sequence was at the end, where the pilot's drone control room was seen as one of a row of standalone 'bunkers' in a grassy field (presumably in the mid-west and hundreds of miles from the cmmand centre, the sun was setting and the pilot and copilot were walking across to their cars to go home, asking each other what they were going to do that evening. Just another day at tthe office.
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