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Almost all of the robotic weapons used today in war or in military missions require a human operator to make key decisions: they are unmanned systems. The lethal autonomous weapons systems (the so-called killer robots) are weapons programmed to autonomously select their target and decide whether or not to attack without any meaningful human intervention. These lethal autonomous weapons do not yet exist, but the technological developments could afford to produce them incredibly quickly. We describe the main objections advanced against the development and use of these weapons: issues of compliance with international humanitarian law, problems of accountability for fully autonomous weapons, lack of human emotions and empathy, deskilling of the military profession and destabilization of the traditional norms of military virtue and reduction of the war to murder. Behind the most part of these objections to the lethal weapons systems there is the fear that, because of using them, we could irremediably loose our humanity. According to the critics of robot killers, i.e., these are machine whose use in battlefield crosses a fundamental moral line, that we should not overcome if we are still interested in beings humans. We show that these concerns are not justified, because killer robot represent only the last effort of human beings to produce, through technology, tools with which to fight and defeat the enemy.

The article examines the moral questions that arise from the military use of enhancement technologies and claims that emerging biotechnologies can help improve the attitudes and capabilities of the soldiers without jeopardizing their integrity and humanity. Even if the military use of enhancement technologies is considered ethically justifiable, our conclusion is that soldiers should ever be compelled to take drugs or receive biotechnological treatments they object to.