George R. Lucas Jr

Abstract This article evaluates the ?drive toward greater autonomy? in lethally-armed unmanned systems. Following a summary of the main criticisms and challenges to lethal autonomy, both engineering and ethical, raised by opponents of this effort, the article turns toward solutions or responses that defense industries and military end users might seek to incorporate in design, testing and manufacturing to address these concerns. The way forward encompasses a two-fold testing procedure for reliability incorporating empirical, quantitative benchmarks of performance in compliance with formalized and programmable rules of engagement, and a conception of ?due care? in product liability. This would be designed in analogy with procedures currently followed by well-intentioned governments and militaries with their own (human) military personnel, both to ensure against failure, and to accept responsibility and compensate victims of inadvertent and unintended accidents. The procedure is designed specifically to address objections first posed by Robert Sparrow (2007) and Noel Sharkey (2007), and echoed in P.W. Singer's critically acclaimed Wired for War (2009), that lethal autonomous systems cannot be meaningfully held accountable for commission of war crimes, and thus the development, manufacture, and deployment of such systems would constitute a violation of international law.

Although the use of military force for humanitarian ends seems utterly divorced from the use of such force to combat terrorism, both uses answer to similar descriptions. Both appear to encourage nations that are not necessarily themselves under attack to set aside the reigning conventions of national sovereignty and territorial integrity for the overriding purposes of international law enforcement and protection of vulnerable noncombatants. Both involve offensive rather than purely defensive uses of military force. Both answer to criteria of justification that can be derived more readily from the normative moral principles of the classical just war tradition than from purely descriptive revisions of the 'legalist paradigm' in international relations, because the latter is deeply wedded by precedent to notions of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and a purely defensive use of military force. Most significantly, the justification for both kinds of military action depends essentially upon a notion of 'the international community' that is inchoate and urgently in need of rigorous reformulation. In this paper, I attempt to formulate criteria for the justifiable use of military force for these non-defensive purposes, with attention to the nuances of internationalism that several of the resulting criteria entail. Challenges to the de facto role of the United Nations as the sole authoritative representative of this community, and alternatives to its authority in legitimating the use of military force for purposes of international law enforcement, are considered

What significance does "ethics" have for the men and women serving in the military forces of nations around the world? What core values and moral principles collectively guide the members of this "military profession?" This book explains these essential moral foundations, along with "just war theory," international relations, and international law. The ethical foundations that define the "Profession of Arms" have developed over millennia from the shared moral values, unique role responsibilities, and occasional reflection by individual members the profession on their own practices - eventually coming to serve as the basis for the "Law of Armed Conflict" itself.This book focuses upon the ordinary men and women around the world who wear a military uniform and are committed to the defense of their countries and their fellow citizens. It is about what they do, how they do it, what they think about it, how they behave when carrying out their activities, and how they are expected to behave, both on and off the battlefield - and what everyone needs to know about this. The book also examines how military personnel are treated and regarded by those whom they have sworn to defend and protect, as well as how they treat and regard one another within their respective services and organizational settings. Finally, the book discusses the transformations in military professionalism occasioned by new developments in armed conflict, ranging counterinsurgency warfare and humanitarian military intervention, to cyber conflict, military robotics, and private military contracting. From China to Russia, author George Lucas effectively sheds light on today's military ethics in existence throughout the world. What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

The Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics is a comprehensive reference work that addresses concerns held in common by the military services of many nations. It attempts to discern both moral dilemmas and clusters of moral principles held in common by all practitioners of this profession, regardless of nation or culture. Comprising essays by contributors drawn from the four service branches as well as civilian academics specializing in this field, this handbook discusses the relationship of ethics in the military setting to applied and professional ethics generally. Leading scholars and senior military practitioners from countries including the US, UK, France, China, Australia and Japan, discuss various national cultural views of the moral dimensions of military service. With reference to the responsibilities of professional orientation and education, as well as the challenges posed by recent technological developments, this handbook examines the difficulties underpinning the fundamental framework of military service. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, war theory, ethics philosophy, sociology, war and conflict studies, and security studies.

Originally presented at a forum sponsored by Concerned Philosophers for Peace at the Eastern Division annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Philadelphia, PA: 29 December 2008), this essay discusses two ethical challenges in foreign policy likely to be confronted by the new U.S. presidential administration. The increased reliance on private military contractors, including security contractors, poses a number of difficulties, the most troubling of which is the erosion of civil-military relations. Modern military campaigns cannot be waged without some degree of reliance on the logistical support such contractors provide, but their use makes it easier for governments to hide the true risks and costs of modern war from the electorate, serving to undermine key conceptions of “just war” principles like “legitimate authority” and “public declaration” of war. On the other hand, the dramatic increase in maritime piracy forces an unpleasant choice between either increasing defense spending on appropriate weapons systems and personnel during a global economic crises in order to provide enhanced maritime security, or else, ironically, relying even more on private security contractors to protect global shipping and transportation. Both these and similar foreign policy challenges focus attention on the need for “ethical interoperability,” the ability to share common notions of military ethics, public service, and professional responsibility among coalition military forces otherwise drawn from a variety of disparate national, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds.

Whatever else one might say concerning the legality, morality, and prudence of his actions, Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, is right about the notion of publicity and informed consent, which together constitute the hallmark of democratic public policy. In order to be morally justifiable, any strategy or policy involving the body politic must be one to which it would voluntarily assent when fully informed about it. This, in essence, was Snowden's argument for leaking, in June 2013, the documents that revealed the massive NSA surveillance program:So long as there's broad support amongst a people, it can be argued there's a level of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally wrong program, as it was an informed and willing decision.... However, programs that are implemented in secret, out of public oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that's a problem. It also represents a dangerous normalization of “governing in the dark,” where decisions with enormous public impact occur without any public input.

This article, an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Military Ethics devoted to emerging military technologies, elaborates the present status of certain predictions about the future of warfare and combat made by postmodern essayist, Umberto Eco, during the First Gulf War in 1991. The development of military robotics, innovations in nanotechnology, prospects for the biological, psychological, and neurological ?enhancement? of combatants themselves, combined with the increasing use of nonlethal weapons and the advent of cyber warfare, have operationalized the diffuse, decentralized, ?neoconnectionist? vision of warfare in the post-Clausewitzian, postmodern world that Eco first prophesied. On the one hand, such technologies threaten to make war ever more ubiquitous as the path of least resistance, rather than the option of last resort, for the resolution of political conflict. On the other hand, these same technologies offer prospects for lessening the indiscriminate destructive power of war, and enhance prospects for the evolution from state-centered conventional war, to discriminate law enforcement undertaken by international coalitions of peacekeeping forces

Against the backdrop of the current “ethics controversy” within the American Anthropological Association over the U.S. Army’s “Human Terrain Systems” project, this article evaluates the moral obligations of scholars and academics asked by their governments to contribute their unique expertise toward the waging or ending of wars of which those scholars morally disapprove. Citing the examples of moral dilemmas occasioned by conflicts between duties of scholarship and duties of citizenship from past wars, together with examples like “Doctors without Borders” at present, I argue that it is not automatically, or in principle, morally objectionable for scholars and academics to provide assistance to their governments or militaries, even in what they regard as unjustifiable wars, nor would suchassistance necessarily involve an inherent violation of professional principle (as the AAA Executive leadership has claimed in recent public proclamations). Rather, the permissibility, or in some cases even obligation, to assist one’s government when requested depends critically upon the government’s intention in lodging this request, as well as upon both what the scholar is being asked to do, and whether those specific activities would result in violations of accepted canons of professional practice. I illustrate the resulting decision dilemmas with cases of anthropologists or psychologists asked to assist in humanitarian military interventions or in mitigating or helping to end misguided or mistaken campaigns of counter-terrorism.