Ethics and Autonomous Weapons

 This book is amongst the first academic treatments of the emerging debate on autonomous weapons. Autonomous weapons are capable, once programmed, of searching for and engaging a target without direct intervention by a human operator. Critics of these weapons claim that ‘taking the human out-of-the-loop’ represents a further step towards the de-humanisation of warfare, while advocates of this type of technology contend that the power of machine autonomy can potentially be harnessed in order to prevent war crimes. This book provides a thorough and critical assessment of these two positions. Written by a political philosopher at the forefront of the autonomous weapons debate, the book clearly assesses the ethical and legal ramifications of autonomous weapons, and presents a novel ethical argument against fully autonomous weapons.

Acknowledgments. Chapter I/Introduction: Ethics and the autonomous weapons debate. Chapter II: Autonomous weaponry: conceptual issues. Chapter III: From warfare without humans to warfare without responsibility? . Chapter IV: Human agency and artificial agency in war. Chapter V: Conclusion. Bibliography. Index.

Alex Leveringhaus is a Research Associate at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC), Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. He is also a James Martin Fellow at the Oxford Martin School. Prior to these positions, he held a joint appointment as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at ELAC and the 3TU Centre for Ethics and Technology, Delft University of Technology.