Just war and robots’ killings

Should lethal autonomous weapons systems—‘killer robots’—be used in war? There is a growing campaign in favour of an international prohibition. The procase remains a minority report, and those who have argued for it have done so on an implicitly consequentialist basis. Our task is to defend the permissibility of killer robots, and indeed the morally obligatory nature of their development and use, but on the basis of the non-aggregative structure of right assumed by Just War theory. This is necessary because the most important arguments against killer robots, proposed by Rob Sparrow, make the same assumptions. We show that killer robots can satisfy the demands of respect; in particular, those demands do not require individual responsibility for every person killed in war. Instead, the crucial moral question on which the policy debate turns is whether the technology can satisfy the requirements of a fair re-distribution of risk.