Imagining spectral violence: On morality and meaning in the cyber-nuclear age

This article is about our relationship to two lethal technologies that blow the mind: nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence – and their mutual imbrication. Our diagnosis is that we are missing an ethical critique adequate to the (emergent/resurgent) technologies of mass destruction. In particular, we are dissatisfied with the persistence and dominance of algorithmic reasoning and/in contemporary just war theory, manifest in deterrence theory. We argue that such approaches fail to take into account the intrinsically human capacity to exercise moral judgement and the quintessential human-ness of ethical relations. In response to deprivation of ethics as algorithmic thinking, we summon a distinctly human quality – the imagination – and argue that it is pivotal to exploding the conceptual categories that hamper ‘ethical’ theorising. Imagining the Apocalypse is not the answer; imagining otherwise is. With this in mind, we foreground the imagination as vital to ethical reasoning and political critique.