The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

A new chapter in the ongoing debate about the morality of drones opened last week, with a profile in The Guardian of the philosopher Bradley Strawser. Strawser’s perspective on just war theory and the ethics of drones, which was also featured in a recent news analysis in the Sunday Review, is all the more interesting because, as a professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, he is employed by an institution which is uniquely positioned to act on his views.

Responding to the Guardian article in an essay at Salon, Murtaza Hussain took issue with what he saw Strawser’s overemphasis on the drone pilot’s safety, at the expense of a concern for potential harm to civilians. Murtaza’s objections to drone warfare include the difficulty of surrender, the Obama administration’s looseness in defining potential targets and the common criticism that the relative cheapness of drone warfare encourages less public scrutiny.

Meanwhile, Strawser himself took to the pages of The Guardian to clarify what he saw as a misconstrual of his views in the original piece. There, Strawser takes pains to separate the question of whether United States policy on using drones is justified from the question of whether, assuming that just war conditions have been met, drones are not a “moral improvement over the aerial bombardments of earlier eras.”

Facebook Philosophy: Socrates, via Plato, gave his classic account of friendship in the “Lysis,” but what it might mean to be a friend in the age of Facebook is a task that has fallen to 21st century philosophers. An attempt to clarify what’s at stake can be found in a new entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Shannon Vallor, “Social Networking and Ethics.”. Vallor begins with a brief history of philosophical engagement with the Internet, concluding that much of it has been outmoded by the rise of the more dynamic and interactive “Web 2.0.” Philosophers today must grapple with how the “distinctive kinds of communal norms and moral practices” endemic to social networks are revising our concepts of privacy, identity and community, and of friendship, virtue and the good life. Vallor also thinks philosophers should be concerned about the quality of democracy and public discourse, asking whether users of social networks can “actively mobilize themselves” sufficiently to sustain “any enhancement of a Habermasian public sphere.” Finally, Vallor raises some metaethical questions, including “practical concerns about whether and how philosophers can actually have an impact” on the broader conversation.

The End of Europe: Amid the continent’s recent political and economic misadventures, scores of commentators have attempted to answer the question “whither Europe.” At The New Republic, Amartya Sen offers his take on why “Europe is no longer larger than life.” Sen breaks the problem down into three overlapping dimensions, discussing what has gone right and wrong in each. The first is what Sen calls “the challenge of European unity,” “an old dream” which reached its apotheosis with the desire for “a political unity free from selfdestructive wars” such as those of the 20th century. Second is the practical necessity of authentically democratic politics, of “giving each person not only a vote but also a voice,” for a truly unified Europe. Finally, there is economic policy, where Sen argues that neither Keynsians nor proponents of austerity have thought deeply enough about “what public expenditure should be for.” Ultimately, Sen sees Europe’s fortunes suffering wherever financial union takes priority over political and social unity, an “oddly chosen sequencing” that transforms “economic mishaps into social adversities.”

Also:

The Templeton Foundation has given John Martin Fischer a $5 million grant to study immortality. Ironic, since, according to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Fischer himself doesn’t believe in it.

A paper posted at Experimental Philosophy examines what ordinary people make of one of the chestnuts of analytic epistemology: the Gettier Problem.

At PEA Soup, a wrap-up of testimony by philosophers in the Leveson Inquiry.

An exhibition at The McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College explores the philosophical dimensions of the work of painter Paul Klee.

The “Saturday Poem” at 3quarksdaily voices the perennial parental worry “Philosophy is useless.”