Timothy Dubber

Advocates of banning autonomous weapons systems invoke the Martens Clause, arguing that widespread public opposition constitutes “dictates of public conscience” sufficient to ground prohibition absent explicit treaty language. This claim rests on polling reporting stable opposition to autonomous weapons, interpreted as a categorical moral conviction against delegating life-and-death decisions to machines. This article argues that this abhorrence-based case fails to justify, with current evidence, a blanket prohibition. Drawing on experimental research in moral psychology and studies of public attitudes toward autonomous weapons, I show that these intuitions fail to meet the necessary epistemic standards, due to framing issues, differences across demographic categories, and plausibly due to structural concerns regarding how advocacy groups are incentivised to shape public opinions rather than simply measure them. This critique neither establishes moral acceptability of autonomous weapons nor rejects intuition-based arguments in principle; rather, it clarifies epistemic limits of current appeals to public conscience and their inability to meet the threshold of “crystallised moral consensus” that the Martens Clause requires. The article concludes by proposing systematic experimental methods capable of identifying stable moral opposition to specific high-risk configurations of military autonomy, supporting discriminating regulation rather than categorical prohibition.

Dignity objections to autonomous weapon systems are prominent in contemporary military ethics, yet their theoretical foundations remain underexamined. This article reconstructs those foundations, showing what categorical dignity objections require to function as absolute prohibitions. Five apparently distinct dignity objections (concerning relationship, disrespect, abdication, dehumanisation, and reciprocal risk) each demand that specific constitutive relationships obtain between those who kill and those who are killed. These accounts all depend on an underlying assumption that dignity is constituted through mutual recognition, which imposes three structural requirements on lethal force: mutuality (bilateral accountability), symmetry (equal standing to make claims and demand justifications), and second‐personal engagement (actual address between particular individuals). These requirements are systematically violated not by autonomous weapons specifically but by organised armed conflict generally: beyond‐line‐of‐sight engagement forecloses mutuality, ambushing and cross‐domain fires foreclose symmetry, and organisationally mediated violence forecloses second‐personal structure. Thus, no principled distinction between autonomous weapons and accepted military means has survived scrutiny. Dignity theorists thus face an inescapable dilemma: apply recognition's requirements consistently and embrace functional pacifism, or abandon dignity's categorical stringency. Three alternative pathways (pro tanto weighing, bifurcated wartime dignity, and reformulating dignity along non‐recognition lines) are identified for those committed to retaining dignity without collapsing into a pacifist stance.