Abstract
Regulating war has long been a concern of the international community.
From the Hague Conventions to the Geneva Conventions and the multiple
treaties and related institutions that have emerged in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, efforts to mitigate the horrors of war have
focused on regulating weapons, defining combatants, and ensuring access
to the battlefield for humanitarians. But regulation and legal codes
alone cannot be the end point of an engaged ethical response to new
weapons developments. This short essay reviews some of the existing
ethical works on lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), highlighting
how rule- and consequence-based accounts fail to provide adequate
guidance for how to deal with them. I propose a virtue-based account,
which I link up with an Aristotelian framework, for how the
international community might better address these weapons systems.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 309-320 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Ethics and International Affairs |
Volume | 37 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2023 |
Keywords
- LAWS
- Lethal autonomous weapon systems
- Virtue ethics
- Aristotle
- Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons