Let’s hear it for the Methodists. I declare an interest. I am from non-conformist stock on both sides - dour, pledge-signing, earnest folk. No surprise to me and my kind that the established church spent its recent synod counting the number of women bishops that you can get on the head of a pin (answer: for the time being, none). Meanwhile, the Methodists grappled with the ethical elements of one of the major politico-military issues of the day - the use of unmanned military drones.

The Methodists are on to something. A debate is beginning to get traction in the US. This has been stoked by former president Jimmy Carter, a one-time southern Baptist who is now a professor at a Methodist university. He published a trenchant op-ed piece in The New York Times last month asserting that ‘the US is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights’. A major factor in this was president Obama’s expansion of the programme of targeted assassinations undertaken by drones. Carter said: ‘We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.’

This is not simply a US debate; the UK is involved up to the hilt. We bought some US Reaper drones and keep them in constant rotation over the Pakistan/Afghanistan war zone. Our drones are not just for surveillance. The Ministry of Defence accepts that they have caused at least four civilian fatalities since 2008. The MoD is sufficiently concerned to have issued a ‘joint doctrine note’ on unmanned aircraft systems to prompt debate last year. Urgency was necessary because ‘there is a general expectation across defence, academia and industry that unmanned aircraft will become more prevalent, eventually taking over most or all of the tasks currently undertaken by manned systems’.

The drones are coming and there are going to be many more of them. Smaller drones are used primarily for surveillance, but the largest can operate at high altitude and long range, performing ‘specialised missions including broad area surveillance and penetrating attacks’. We are a long way from hand-launched, rubber-band model aircraft. BAE is developing a twin-engine Mantis with a 22-metre wingspan ‘which would carry a range of weapons’. It is the use of these that needs a bit more scrutiny - as, to its credit, the MoD acknowledges.

The key issue raised by drones is actually a general one - the ethics and law of assassination. The MoD dedicates a whole chapter in its consultation to ‘moral, legal and ethical issues’. Drones are, of course, immensely controversial in Pakistan, where they have simultaneously eliminated militants and enraged the population. Estimates of deaths caused by US drones in Pakistan alone vary between 2,000-3,000 people. The US asserts that most of these were militants. Others were ‘collateral damage’ or, as we might put it more transparently, innocent bystanders. The US depresses acknowledgement of collateral damage by assuming that any dead male of military age was an insurgent.

The MoD paper strives to be balanced. It can see some up-sides to drones, making a sly dig at US battlefield conduct as it does so (‘robots cannot be driven by anger to carry out illegal actions such as those at My Lai’) but some problems (‘to a robotic system, a school bus and a tank are the same - merely algorithms in a program’). The Methodists have taken up issues which need much wider debate. As a speaker at its conference said: ‘The targeted killings carried out by the CIA in northern Pakistan demonstrate only too clearly the ethical challenges that will face us as this technology proliferates.’ In Israel, the ethical issues have already migrated into legal ones. No litigation followed Operation Wrath of God, recently covered in Spielberg’s Munich, but in 2005 the Israeli Supreme Court did consider targeted killings against alleged terrorists in Gaza. It decided that, in particular circumstances, civilian combatants could be legitimate targets for assassination if directly participating in hostilities.

Elsewhere, it is the executive and not the courts that is, literally, calling the shots. President Obama, to the dismay of Carter and many others, has made increased use of targeted killings. An unpleasant degree of electorally helpful hype surrounds ‘terror Tuesdays’ when he signs off the following week’s targets. The great temptation, of course, is that drone attacks appear to be an effective reprisal at minimal risk against an enemy none too scrupulous about its own targets. And Obama’s homeland security adviser has come out fighting. Drones, says John Brennan, have an ‘unprecedented ability… to precisely target a military objective while minimising collateral damage’. He goes on to say ‘one could argue that never before has there been a weapon that allows us to distinguish more effectively between an al-Qaida terrorist and innocent civilians’.

International law is struggling to keep up. The US has invented the handy concept of ‘unlawful combatants’ to legitimate a variety of actions from drone killings to water boarding. No one else is much persuaded. The UN has been trying for a consensus but got nowhere. But there needs to be some internationally agreed regulation of the use of this technology - and the broader use of targeted assassination. At the moment, an attitude of quiet and slightly embarrassed acquiescence carries us through. However, just wait until Iran and China start playing by the same rules.

So the Methodists are right in their choice of relevance and morality; the Anglicans can tell us when they have the time to join in.

Roger Smith is director of the law reform and human rights organisation Justice