AN EMINENT Prussian bachelor once argued that rational creatures are bound, by the very nature of reason, to act only according to rules of conduct one would affirm, when at one's rational best, to equally guide everyone's choices. This is not, it turns out, very useful as a day-to-day rule of thumb. It is, however, an excellent test for government policy in a multi-party democracy. If a policy seems advisable when one party is in power, but inadvisable when the other party is in power, then it is inadvisable, full stop. This is how we know that the Obama administration's drone policy is, to put it mildly, inadvisable. As the New York Times reported last week:

“There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity. With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

Why the subjunctive rush? Was the idea that, in Mr Romney's hands, a surfeit of discretion would lead to the outrageous slaughter of innocents? Would counterproductively invite "blowback"? Why the leisurely pace now that Mr Obama's second term is assured? Because the pattern of drone attacks so far, guided ultimately by Mr Obama's moral sensibilities and strategic judgment, have not had such consequences, and can't be expected to have? Does anyone other than the administration itself actually believe this?

Establishing truly general, and thus potentially morally justifiable, "rules of engagement" for drone attacks is urgent for a rather more important reason than the possibility that a less enlightened politician might come to power: America's conduct sets an example for the world. As this newspaper noted earlier this month, "Staying true to America’s principles is one worry. Providing a template for other countries is another. China and Russia have similar technologies but their own ideas about what constitutes terrorism."

We Americans are inclined to think of ourselves as a morally upstanding lot who act according only to the highest ideals in our violent escapades abroad. Much of the rest of the world is inclined to view us rather differently, as smugly unwitting Thrasymacheans who cannot see the difference between what is right and what America, in its unmatched might, gets away with. The question Americans need to put to ourselves is whether we would mind if China or Russia or Iran or Pakistan were to be guided by the Obama administration's sketchy rulebook in their drone campaigns. Bomb-dropping remote-controlled planes will soon be commonplace. What if, by another country's reasonable lights, America's drone attacks count as terrorism? What if, according to the general principles implicitly governing the Obama administration's own drone campaign, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue turns out to be a legitimate target for another country's drones? Were we to will Mr Obama's rules of engagement as universal law, a la Kant, would we find ourselves in harm's way? I suspect we would.

Now, I hope we can all be fairly sure that the White House will remain undroned. But if its safety is due more to fear of overwhelming American retaliation, or to the unsurpassed excellence of America's defences, and not so much to the fact that America's drone war is constrained by a generally acceptable framework of rules, then Mr Obama's people need to kick it back into high gear. It's simply chilling to consider the possibility that the White House might really believe that absent the threat of Mitt Romney there are in this matter no grounds for haste.

Read on:The dronefather

(Photo credit: AFP)