Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper provides an alternative, cyber security based conceptual framework for the ethics of automated warfare. The large body of work produced on fully or partially autonomous warfare systems tends to overlook malicious security factors such as possibilities of cyber attacks when it comes to the moral and legal decision-making. The argument presents a risk-based justification to why hazards of exploiting technical vulnerabilities cannot be dismissed in legal, ethical, and policy considerations when warfare models are being implemented and deployed. The assumptions of the paper are supported by a broader conceptual model that contains the risk perspective of cyber exploits through the lenses of the Decision Theory, Just War Theory, as well as standard and non-standard defense ethics. The paper argues that a conventional risk-benefit analysis without considering ethical factors is insufficient for making legal and policy decisions on automated warfare. This approach provides the substructure for security and defense experts as well as legal scholars, ethicists, and decision theorists to work towards common justificatory grounds that will accommodate the technical security concerns that have been overlooked in current legal and policy models.