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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 â#x80;taking the human out-of-the-loopâ#x80;#x99; 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.

Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Chapter 1: Ethics and the Autonomous Weapons Debate -- What This Book Is Not About -- Autonomous Weapons and the Ethics of Cyber Warfare -- Autonomous Weapons, Ethics, and 'Super-Intelligence' -- Autonomous Weapons and the Ethics of Counterterrorism Operations -- Autonomous Weapons Technology and Armed Conflict: An Ethical Perspective -- The Use of Force: Permission and Restriction -- Jus ad bellum and Autonomous Weapons -- Jus in bello and Autonomous Weapons -- Jus post bellum and Autonomous Weapons

AbstractThis essay contends that the ethics around the use of spy technology to gather intelligence (TECHINT) during espionage and counterintelligence operations is ambiguous. To build this argument, the essay critically scrutinizes Cécile Fabre's recent and excellent book Spying through a Glass Darkly, which argues that there are no ethical differences between the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) obtained from or by human assets and TECHINT in these operations. As the essay explains, Fabre arrives at this position by treating TECHINT as a like-for-like replacement for HUMINT. The essay argues instead that TECHINT is unlikely to act as a like-for-like replacement for HUMINT. As such, TECHINT might transform existing practices of espionage and counterintelligence, giving rise to new ethical challenges not captured in Fabre's analysis. To illustrate the point, the essay builds an analogy between TECHINT and recent armed conflicts in which precision weapons have been deployed. Although precision weapons seem ethically desirable, their availability has created new practices of waging war that are ethically problematic. By analogy, TECHINT, though not intrinsically undesirable, has the capacity to generate new practices of intelligence gathering that are ethically problematic—potentially more than HUMINT. Ultimately, recent negative experiences with the use of precision weaponry should caution against an overly positive assessment of TECHINT's ethical desirability.

This article discusses the need for an ethical framework for emerging robotic technologies. The temptation, arguably driven by sci-fi treatments of artificial intelligence, is to ask whether future robots should be considered quasi-humans. This article argues that such sci-fi scenarios have little relevance for current technological developments in robotics, nor for ethical approaches to the subject: for the foreseeable future robots will merely be useful tools. In response to emerging robotic technologies, this article proposes an ethical framework that makes a commitment to human rights, human dignity and responsibility a central priority for those developing robots. At a policy level, this entails (1) assessing whether the use of particular robots would result in human rights violations and (2) creating adequate institutions through which human individuals can be held responsible for what robots do.

This paper examines the lack of engagement between liberal political philosophers and humanitarians on the issue of humanitarian intervention. It argues that the recent emergence of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) agenda provides a great opportunity to overcome this mutual disinterest in each other's positions. R2P, especially as formulated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, is fairly demanding. In order to formulate an adequate response, liberals and humanitarians need to reconsider their positions. In this respect, insights provided by liberal political theory are helpful to humanitarians. Firstly, liberal reasoning offers justifications for potential restrictions of the humanitarian scope of concern in the course of halting mass atrocities. Second, liberal values indicate how humanitarians can respond to the challenges posed by post-war reconstruction. Conversely, humanitarian considerations should prompt liberals to think harder about the conduct of military intervention, as well as the material basis of successful post-atrocity reconstruction.