Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Question: Can soldiers justify killing some as a means to influence the decisions of others?
This essay received an honourable mention in the 5th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics, Graduate Category.
Written by University of Oxford DPhil student, Robert Underwood.
Lt. Col. Bob Underwood is a U.S. Army officer and a Fellow in its Advanced Strategic Plans and Policy Program. He is pursuing a DPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford and will assume command of 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the summer of 2019. The opinions expressed here are his own and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
Killing in war eliminates threats but also plays a part in influencing the decisions of other persons beyond those we might kill. This suggests that killing in war has a communicative function, and that the message is an important consideration that can feature in the balance of reasons to kill some but not others in war. This is true provided combatants can permissibly kill some as means to communicate to others. I argue that just combatants, those that fight for just aims, can permissibly kill to communicate and that unjust combatants cannot. This is a new reason to revise our intuition that combatants on both sides hold equal rights to kill, the so-called moral equality of combatants (MEC). Continue reading
The ‘Killer Robots’ Are Us
Written by Dr Michael Robillard
In a recent New York Times article Dr Michael Robillard writes: “At a meeting of the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva in November, a group of experts gathered to discuss the military, legal and ethical dimensions of emerging weapons technologies. Among the views voiced at the convention was a call for a ban on what are now being called “lethal autonomous weapons systems.”
A 2012 Department of Defense directive defines an autonomous weapon system as one that, “once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator. This includes human-supervised autonomous weapon systems that are designed to allow human operators to override operation of the weapon system, but can select and engage targets without further human input after activation.” “
Follow this link to read the article in full.
Jeff McMahan on What Rights Can be Defended by Means of War
On the evening of Thursday 7 February, Jeff McMahan, Honorary Fellow of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Professor Philosophy at Rutgers University, delivered an insightful and fascinating Astor Lecture at the University of Oxford.
McMahan’s topic was the relatively underdiscussed question of the extent to which states are morally entitled to resist what he called ‘lesser aggressors’, who are seeking not to take over the state in question or to inflict major harm or damage, but some lesser goal, such as control over some relatively insignificant piece of territory. McMahan mentioned the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands Islands as a possible example. Continue reading
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