Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Re-Examining the Law and Ethics of Robotic Warfare

295 Pages·2021·2.796 MB·English

by  Jai Galliott, Duncan MacIntosh, Jens David Ohlin

Lethal Autonomous Weapons
ii
The Oxford Series in Ethics, National Security,
and the Rule of Law
Series Editors
Claire Finkelstein and Jens David Ohlin
Oxford University Press
About the Series
The Oxford Series in Ethics, National Security, and the Rule of Law is an interdisciplinary book
series designed to address abiding questions at the intersection of national security, moral and
political philosophy, and practical ethics. It seeks to illuminate both ethical and legal dilemmas
that arise in democratic nations as they grapple with national security imperatives. The synergy
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augment the rule of law in the context of contemporary armed conflict and national security.
The book series grew out of the work of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) at
the University of Pennsylvania. CERL is a nonpartisan interdisciplinary institute dedicated to
the preservation and promotion of the rule of law in twenty- first century warfare and national
security. The only Center of its kind housed within a law school, CERL draws from the study of
law, philosophy, and ethics to answer the difficult questions that arise in times of war and con-
temporary transnational conflicts.
Lethal Autonomous Weapons
Re- Examining the Law and Ethics
of Robotic Warfare
E J G
ditEd by ai alliott
d M i
uncan ac ntosh
& J d o
Ens avid hlin
1
iv
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Galliott, Jai, author. | MacIntosh, Duncan (Writer on autonomous weapons), author. |
Ohlin, Jens David, author.
Title: Lethal autonomous weapons : re-examining the law and ethics of robotic warfare /
Jai Galliott, Duncan MacIntosh & Jens David Ohlin.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020032678 (print) | LCCN 2020032679 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197546048 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197546062 (epub) |
ISBN 9780197546055 (UPDF) | ISBN 9780197546079 (Digital-Online)
Subjects: LCSH: Military weapons (International law) | Military weapons—Law and legislation—
United States. | Weapons systems—Automation. | Autonomous robots—Law and legislation. |
Uninhabited combat aerial vehicles (International law) | Autonomous robots—Moral and
ethical aspects. | Drone aircraft—Moral and ethical aspects. | Humanitarian law.
Classification: LCC KZ5624 .G35 2020 (print) | LCC KZ5624 (ebook) | DDC 172/.42—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032678
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032679
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197546048.001.0001
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Bianca Baggiarini is a Political Sociologist and Senior Lecturer at UNSW,
Canberra. She obtained her PhD (2018) in sociology from York University in
Toronto. Her research is broadly concerned with the sociopolitical effects of au-
tonomy in the military. To that end, she has previously examined the figure of the
citizen- soldier considering high- technology warfare, security privatization, neolib-
eral governmentality, and theories of military sacrifice. Her current work is focused
on military attitudes toward autonomous systems.
Deane-P eter Baker is an Associate Professor of International and Political Studies
and Co- Convener (with Prof. David Kilcullen) of the Future Operations Research
Group in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the UNSW Canberra.
A specialist in both the ethics of armed conflict and military strategy, Dr. Baker’s
research straddles philosophy, ethics, and security studies.
Dr. Baker previously held positions as an Assistant Professor of Ethics in the
Department of Leadership, Ethics and Law at the United States Naval Academy
and as an Associate Professor of Ethics at the University of KwaZulu- Natal in
South Africa. He has also held visiting research fellow positions at the Triangle
Institute for Security Studies at Duke University, and the US Army War College’s
Strategic Studies Institute. From 2017 to 2018, Dr. Baker served as a panelist on the
International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons.
Steven J. Barela is an Assistant Professor at the Global Studies Institute and a
member of the law faculty at the University of Geneva. He has taught at the Korbel
School of International Studies at Denver University and lectured for l’Université
Laval (Québec),  Sciences Po Bordeaux, UCLA, and the Geneva Academy of
International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. In addition to his PhD in
law from the University of Geneva, Dr. Barela holds three master’s degrees: MA
degrees in Latin American Studies and International Studies, along with an LLM
in international humanitarian law and human rights. Dr. Barela has published in
respected journals. Finally, Dr. Barela is a series editor for “Emerging Technologies,
Ethics and International Affairs” at Ashgate Publishing and published an edited
volume on armed drones in 2015.
viii
viii List of Contributors
M.L. (Missy) Cummings received her BS in Mathematics from the US Naval
Academy in 1988, her MS in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate
School in 1994, and her PhD in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia
in 2004. A naval pilot from 1988–1 999, she was one of the US Navy’s first female
fighter pilots. She is currently a Professor in the Duke University Electrical and
Computer Engineering Department, and the Director of the Humans and Autonomy
Laboratory. She is an AIAA Fellow; and a member of the Defense Innovation Board
and Veoneer, Inc., Board of Directors.
S. Kate Devitt is the Deputy Chief Scientist of the Trusted Autonomous Systems
Defence Cooperative Research Centre and a Social and Ethical Robotics
Researcher at the Defence Science and technology group (the primary research
organization for the Australia Department of Defence). Dr. Devitt earned
her PhD, entitled “Homeostatic Epistemology: Reliability, Coherence and
Coordination in a Bayesian Virtue Epistemology,” from Rutgers University
in 2013. Dr. Devitt has published on the ethical implications of robotics and
biosurveillance, robotics in agriculture, epistemology, and the trustworthiness
of autonomous systems.
Nicholas G. Evans is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Massachusetts Lowell, where he conducts research on national security and
emerging technologies. His recent work on assessing the risks and benefits of dual-
use research of concern has been widely published. In 2017, Dr. Evans was awarded
funding from the National Science Foundation to examine the ethics of autono-
mous vehicles.
Prior to his appointment at the University of Massachusetts, Dr.  Evans
completed postdoctoral work in medical ethics and health policy at the Perelman
School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Evans has conducted
research at the Monash Bioethics Centre, The Centre for Applied Philosophy and
Public Ethics, Australian Defence Force Academy, and the University of Exeter. In
2013, he served as a policy officer with the Australian Department of Health and
Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration.
Jai Galliott is the Director of the Values in Defence & Security Technology Group
at UNSW @ The Australian Defence Force Academy; Non- Residential Fellow at
the Modern War Institute at the United States Military Academy, West Point; and
Visiting Fellow in The Centre for Technology and Global Affairs at the University
of Oxford. Dr. Galliott has developed a reputation as one of the foremost experts
on the socio- ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and is regarded as
an internationally respected scholar on the ethical, legal, and strategic issues as-
sociated with the employment of emerging technologies, including cyber systems,
autonomous vehicles, and soldier augmentation. His publications include Big
Data & Democracy (Edinburgh University Press, 2020); Ethics and the Future of
Spying: Technology, National Security and Intelligence Collection (Routledge, 2016);
Military Robots: Mapping the Moral Landscape (Ashgate, 2015); Super Soldiers: The
Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (Ashgate, 2015); and Commercial Space
Exploration: Ethics, Policy and Governance (Ashgate, 2015). He acknowledges the
support of the Australian Government through the Trusted Autonomous Systems
List of Contributors ix
Defence Cooperative Research Centre and the United States Department of
Defence.
Natalia Jevglevskaja is a Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales
at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. As part of the collaborative
research group “Values in Defence & Security Technology” (VDST) based at the
School of Engineering & Information Technology (SEIT), she is looking at how
social value systems interact and influence research, design, and development of
emerging military and security technology. Natalia’s earlier academic appointments
include Teaching Fellow at Melbourne Law School, Research Assistant to the ed-
itorial work of the Max Planck Commentaries on WTO Law, and Junior Legal
Editor of the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law. 
Armin Krishnan is an Associate Professor and the Director of Security Studies at
East Carolina University. He holds a MA degree in Political Science, Sociology, and
Philosophy from the University of Munich, a MS in Intelligence and International
Relations from the University of Salford, and a PhD in the field of Security Studies
also from the University of Salford. He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor
at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Intelligence and National Security Studies
program. Krishnan is the author of five books of new developments in warfare, in-
cluding Killer Robots: The Legality and Ethicality of Autonomous Weapons (Routledge,
2009).  
Alex Leveringhaus is a Lecturer in Political Theory in the Politics Department
at the University of Surrey, United Kingdom, where he co- directs the Centre for
International Intervention (cii). Prior to coming to Surrey, Alex held postdoctoral
positions at Goethe University Frankfurt; the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and
Armed Conflict; and the University of Manchester. Alex’s research is in contempo-
rary political theory and focuses on ethical issues in the area of armed conflict, with
special reference to emerging combat technologies as well as the ethics of interven-
tion. His book Ethics and Autonomous Weapons was published in 2016 (Palgrave
Pivot). 
Rain Liivoja is an Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, where he
leads the Law and the Future of War Research Group. Dr. Liivoja’s current research
focuses on legal challenges associated with military applications of science and
technology. His broader research and teaching interests include the law of armed
conflict, human rights law and the law of treaties, as well as international and com-
parative criminal law. Before joining the University of Queensland, Dr. Liivoja held
academic appointments at the Universities of Melbourne, Helsinki, and Tartu. He
has served on Estonian delegations to disarmament and arms control meetings. 
Duncan MacIntosh is a Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University. Professor
MacIntosh works in metaethics, decision and action theory, metaphysics, philos-
ophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of science. He has written on
desire- based theories of rationality, the relationship between rationality and time,
the reducibility of morality to rationality, modeling morality and rationality with
the tools of action and game theory, scientific realism, and a number of other topics.
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x List of Contributors
He has published research on autonomous weapon systems, morality, and the rule
of law in leading journals, including Temple International and Comparative Law
Journal, The Journal of Philosophy, and Ethics.
Bertram F. Malle is a Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological
Sciences and Co- Director of the Humanity- Centered Robotics Initiative at Brown
University. Trained in psychology, philosophy, and linguistics at the University
of Graz, Austria, he received his PhD in psychology from Stanford University in
1995. He received the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Outstanding
Dissertation award in 1995, a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award
in 1997, and is past president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology. Dr. Malle’s
research focuses on social cognition, moral psychology, and human- robot in-
teraction. He has distributed his work in 150 scientific publications and several
books. His lab page is at http:// research.clps.brown.edu/ SocCogSci. 
Tim McFarland is a Research Fellow in the Values in Defence & Security
Technology group within the School of Engineering and Information Technology
of the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy.
Prior to earning his PhD, Dr. McFarland also earned a Bachelor of Mechanical
Engineering (Honors) and a Bachelor of Economics (Monash University).
Following the completion of a Juris Doctor degree and graduate diplomas of Legal
Practice and International Law, Dr. McFarland was admitted as a solicitor in the
state of Victoria in 2012.
Dr. McFarland’s current work is on the social, legal, and ethical questions
arising from the emergence of new military and security technologies, and their
implications for the design and use of new military systems. He is also a member of
the Program on the Regulation of Emerging Military Technologies (PREMT) and
the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law (APCML).
Jens David Ohlin is the Vice Dean of Cornell Law School. His work stands at the
intersection of four related fields: criminal law, criminal procedure, public interna-
tional law, and the laws of war. Trained as both a lawyer and a philosopher, his re-
search has tackled diverse, interdisciplinary questions, including the philosophical
foundations of international law and the role of new technologies in warfare. His
latest research project involves foreign election interference.
In addition to dozens of law review articles and book chapters, Professor Ohlin
is the sole author of three recently published casebooks, a co- editor of the Oxford
Series in Ethics; National Security, and the Rule of Law; and a co- editor of the forth-
coming Oxford Handbook on International Criminal Justice.
Donovan Phillips is a first- year PhD Candidate at The University of Western
Ontario, by way of Dalhousie University, MA (2019) and Kwantlen Polytechnic
University, BA (2017). His main interests fall within the philosophy of lan-
guage  and philosophy of mind, and  concern propositional attitude ascrip-
tion, theories of meaning, and accounts of first- person authority. More broadly,
the ambiguity and translation of law, as both a formal and practical exercise, is
a burgeoning area of interest for future research that he plans to pursue further
during his doctoral work.
List of Contributors xi
Avery Plaw is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts,
Dartmouth, specializing in Political Theory and International Relations with a par-
ticular focus on Strategic Studies. He studied at the University of Toronto and McGill
University and previously taught at Concordia University in Montreal and was a
Visiting Scholar at New York University. He has published a number of books, in-
cluding the Drone Debate: A Primer on the U.S. Use of Unmanned Aircraft Outside of
Conventional Armed Conflict (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), cowritten with Matt
Fricker and Carlos Colon; and Targeting Terrorists: A License to Kill? (Ashgate, 2008).
Sean Rupka is a Political Theorist and PhD Student at UNSW Canberra working
on the impact of autonomous systems on contemporary warfare. His broader re-
search interests include trauma and memory studies; the philosophy of history and
technology; and themes related to postcolonial violence, particularly as they per-
tain to the legacies of intergenerational trauma and reconciliation.
Matthias Scheutz is a Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science in the
Department of Computer Science at Tufts University and Senior Gordon Faculty
Fellow in Tuft’s School of Engineering. He earned a PhD in Philosophy from the
University of Vienna in 1995 and a Joint PhD in Cognitive Science and Computer
Science from Indiana University Bloomington in 1999. He has over 300 peer-
reviewed publications on artificial intelligence, artificial life, agent- based com-
puting, natural language processing, cognitive modeling, robotics, human- robot
interaction, and foundations of cognitive science. His research interests include
multi- scale agent- based models of social behavior and complex cognitive and affec-
tive autonomous robots with natural language and ethical reasoning capabilities for
natural human-r obot interaction. His lab page is at https:// hrilab.tufts.edu. 
Jason Scholz is the Chief Executive for the Trusted Autonomous Systems Defence
Cooperative Research Centre, a not- for- profit company advancing industry-
led, game- changing projects and activities for Defense and dual use with $50m
Commonwealth funding and $51m Queensland Government funding.
Additionally, Dr. Scholz is a globally recognized research leader in cognitive psy-
chology, decision aids, decision automation, and autonomy. He has produced over
fifty refereed papers and patents related to trusted autonomous systems in defense.
Dr. Scholz is an Innovation Professor at RMIT University and an Adjunct Professor
at the University of New South Wales. A graduate of the Australian Institute of
Company Directors, Dr. Scholz also possesses a PhD from the University of Adelaide.
Austin Wyatt is a Political Scientist and Research Associate at UNSW, Canberra.
He obtained his PhD (2020), entitled “Exploring the Disruptive Impact of Lethal
Autonomous Weapon System Diffusion in Southeast Asia,” from the Australian
Catholic University. Dr. Wyatt has previously been a New Colombo Plan Scholar
and completed a research internship in 2016 at the Korea Advanced Institute of
Science and Technology.
Dr. Wyatt’s research focuses on autonomous weapons, with a particular em-
phasis on their disruptive effects in Asia. His latest published research includes
“Charting Great Power Progress toward a Lethal Autonomous Weapon System
Demonstration Point,” in the journal Defence Studies 20 (1), 2020.
Introduction
An Effort to Balance the Lopsided Autonomous Weapons Debate
JAI GALLIOTT, DUNCAN MACINTOSH, AND
JENS DAVID OHLIN
The question of whether new rules or regulations are required to govern, restrict,
or even prohibit the use of autonomous weapon systems— defined by the United
States as systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without fur-
ther intervention by a human operator or, in more hyperbolic terms, by the dys-
phemism “killer robots”— has preoccupied government actors, academics, and
proponents of a global arms- control regime for the better part of a decade. Many
civil- society groups claim that there is consistently growing momentum in support
of a ban on lethal autonomous weapon systems, and frequently tout the number
of (primarily second world) nations supporting their cause. However, to objective
external observers, the way ahead appears elusive, as the debate lacks any kind of
broad agreement, and there is a notable absence of great power support. Instead, the
debate has become characterized by hyperbole aimed at capturing or alienating the
public imagination.
Part of this issue is that the states responsible for steering the dialogue on auton-
omous weapon systems initially proceeded quite cautiously, recognizing that few
understood what it was that some were seeking to outlaw with a preemptive ban.
In the resulting vacuum of informed public opinion, nongovernmental advocacy
groups shaped what has now become a very heavily one- sided debate.
Some of these nongovernment organizations (NGOs) have contended, on legal
and moral grounds, that militaries should act as if somehow blind and immune to
Jai Galliott, Duncan MacIntosh, and Jens David Ohlin, Introduction In: Lethal Autonomous Weapons.
Edited by: Jai Galliott, Duncan MacIntosh and Jens David Ohlin, © Oxford University Press (2021).
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197546048.003.0001.