Military Ethics And Emerging Technologies

This volume looks at current and emerging technologies of war and some of the ethical issues surrounding their use. Although the nature and politics of war never change, the weapons and technologies used in war do change and are always undergoing development. Because of that, the arsenal of weapons for twenty-first century conflict is different from previous centuries. Weapons in today’s world include an array of instruments of war that include, robotics, cyber war capabilities, human performance enhancement for warriors, and the proliferation of an entire spectrum of unmanned weapons systems and platforms. Tactical weapons now have the potential of strategic results and have changed the understanding of the battle space creating ethical, legal, and political issues unknown in the pre-9/11 world. What do these technologies mean for things such as contemporary international relations, the just-war tradition, and civil-military relations? Directed at readers in the academic, scientific, military, and public policy communities, this volume offers current thought on ethics and emerging technologies from internationally-recognized scholars addressing the full spectrum of issues in present warfare technology. It includes current and ongoing topics of multi-discipline and international interest, such as ethics, law, international relations, war studies, public policy, science and technology. This book was originally published in various issues and volumes of the Journal of Military Ethics.

In this volume, internationally renowned researchers attempt to address the fundamental and applied ethical and legal problems posed by emerging military technologies and present their insights.

The essays in this volume illustrate the difficult real world ethical questions and issues arising from accelerating technological change in the military and security domains, and place those challenges in the context of rapidly shifting geopolitical and strategic frameworks. Specific technologies such as autonomous robotic systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, cybersecurity and cyberconflict, and biotechnology are highlighted, but the essays are chosen so that the broader implications of fundamental systemic change are identified and addressed. Additionally, an important consideration with many of these technologies is that even if they are initially designed and intended for military or security applications, they inevitably spread to civil society, where their application may raise very different ethical questions around such core values as privacy, security from criminal behaviour, and state police power. Accordingly, this volume is of interest to students of military or security domains, as well as to those interested in technology and society, and the philosophy of technology.

This book addresses issues of legal and moral governance arising in the development, deployment, and eventual uses of emerging technologies in military operations. Proverbial wisdom has it that law and morality always lag behind technological innovation. Hence, the book aims to identify, enumerate, and constructively address the problems of adequate governance for the development, deployment, and eventual uses of military technologies that have been newly introduced into military operations or which will be available in the near future. Proposals for modifications in governance, the book argues, closely track the anxieties of many critics of these technologies to the extent that they will proliferate, prove destructive in unanticipated ways, and partially or wholly escape regulation under current treaties and regulatory regimes. In addition to such concerns in domestic and especially in international law, the book addresses ethical norms in the professions involved in the design and eventual use of specific technologies, principally involving the professional norms of practice in engineering and the military (as well as biomedical and health care practice), which impose moral obligations on their members to avoid reckless endangerment or criminal negligence in the course of their activities. Thus, in addition to exploring the application of existing legal regimes and moral norms, the book examines how these professions might develop or improve the voluntary constraints on forms of malfeasance that are enshrined in their histories and codes of best practices. This book should prove of great interest to students of ethics, military studies, philosophy of war and peace, law, and international relations.

Governing Military Technologies in the 21st Century is one of the first books to tackle the big five technological threats all in one place: nanotech, robotics, cyberwar, human enhancement, and, non-lethal weapons, weaving a historical, legal, and sociopolitical fabric into a discussion of their development, deployment, and, potential regulation.

Contemporary security has expanded its meaning, content and structure in response to globalisation and the emergence of greatly improved world-wide communication. The protocols of modern warfare, including targeted killing, enhanced interrogations, mass electronic surveillance and the virtualisation of war have changed the moral landscape and brought diverse new interactions with politics, law, religion, ethics and technology. This book addresses how and why the nature of security has changed and what this means for the security actors involved and the wider society. Offering a crossdisciplinary perspective on concepts, meanings and categories of security, the book brings together scholars and experts from a range of disciplines including political, military studies and security studies, political economy and international relations. Contributors reflect upon new communication methods, postmodern concepts of warfare, technological determinants and cultural preferences to provide new theoretical and analytical insights into a changing security environment and the protocols of war in the 21st century. A useful text for scholars and students of security studies, international relations, global governance, international law and ethics, foreign policy, comparative studies and contemporary world history.

This volume looks at current and emerging technologies of war and some of the ethical issues surrounding their use. Although the nature and politics of war never change, the weapons and technologies used in war do change and are always undergoing development. Because of that, the arsenal of weapons for twenty-first century conflict is different from previous centuries. Weapons in today’s world include an array of instruments of war that include, robotics, cyber war capabilities, human performance enhancement for warriors, and the proliferation of an entire spectrum of unmanned weapons systems and platforms. Tactical weapons now have the potential of strategic results and have changed the understanding of the battle space creating ethical, legal, and political issues unknown in the pre-9/11 world. What do these technologies mean for things such as contemporary international relations, the just-war tradition, and civil-military relations? Directed at readers in the academic, scientific, military, and public policy communities, this volume offers current thought on ethics and emerging technologies from internationally-recognized scholars addressing the full spectrum of issues in present warfare technology. It includes current and ongoing topics of multi-discipline and international interest, such as ethics, law, international relations, war studies, public policy, science and technology. This book was originally published in various issues and volumes of the Journal of Military Ethics.