Exciting news! I have just finalized my research paper on the intersection of autonomous weapons systems and the principles of just war theory. I thought it would be intriguing to explore ethical topics that we do not deliberate on a daily basis, such as ethics in ongoing warfare. I then dug deeper and chose to analyze the ethics of war in relation to modern weapons systems and tools, as technology and autonomous AI is rising in popularity in today’s society.
I have provided the abstract below, so be sure to check out the full work when it is published later this year!
Abstract
Autonomous weapons systems (AWS) are becoming increasingly prevalent on the battlefield, and their role in war is growing. This paper will analyze the trend of increasing use of lethal autonomous unmanned systems in warfare, and weigh its potential ethical impacts. Some believe that autonomous robots could be able to perform more ethically than humans on the battlefield because humans often fall short of moral behavior during combat and fail to comply with the existing laws of war. However, others dispute this view and claim that AWS is ultimately unethical to use in war due to the relative unfamiliarity of these machines, as well as their ability to malfunction in dangerously unpredictable ways. In this paper, I will examine the impact of AWS specifically on the concept of just war theory. I will argue that while AWS does present new challenges for waging war by the principles of jus in bello (justice in war), these challenges can be resolved so that it could be ethical to use these systems. I will show this by first establishing the complications AWS poses for the three core principles of jus in bello, then proposing guidelines that can resolve these complications in some cases, discussing the additional issue of accountability for actions taken by AWS on the battlefield, and finally expressing the correlation of my investigation to a few universal ethical theories.