Judgment, liability and the risks of riskless warfare

Abstract

Critics of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) claim that they are both inherently unethical and unlawful under current international humanitarian law (IHL). They are unethical, it is said, because they necessarily preclude making any agent fairly accountable for the wrongful effects of AWS, and because allowing machines to make life or death decisions seriously undermines human dignity: only moral beings should make such decisions and only after careful moral deliberation, for which they could be held accountable. AWS are inherently unlawful, critics say, because they cannot possibly comply with the core IHL principles of discrimination and proportionality.