Law, Ethics and Emerging Military Technologies: Confronting Disruptive Innovation

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.

George Lucas is Distinguished Chair in Ethics Emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy and Professor Emeritus of Ethics and Public Policy at the Graduate School of Defense Management at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His earlier books include The Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics (2015), Military Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know (2016), Ethics and Cyber Warfare (2017) and Ethics and Military Strategy in the 21st Century: Moving Beyond Clausewitz (2019).