An Ethic of Military Uses of Artificial Intelligence: Sustaining Virtue, Granting Autonomy, and Calibrating Risk

Artificial intelligence in military operations comes in two kinds. First, there is narrow or specific intelligence – the autonomous ability to identify an instance of a species of target, and to track its changes of position. Second, there is broad or general intelligence – the autonomous ability to choose a species of target, identify instances, track their movements, decide when to strike them, learn from errors, and improve initial choices. These two kinds of artificial intelligence raise ethical questions mainly because of two features: the physical distance they put between the human agents deploying them and their targets, and their ability to act independently of those agents. The main ethical questions these features raise are three. First, how to maintain the traditional martial virtues of fortitude and chivalry while operating lethal weapons at a safe distance? Second, how much autonomy to grant a machine? And third, what risks to take with the possibility of technical error? This paper considers each of these questions in turn

The New Testament and violence: round two

The full-text of this article is not currently available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Studies in Christian Ethics, 23(1), February 2010 by SAGE Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. © 2010 Nigel Biggar

Specify and distinguish! Interpreting the New Testament on 'non-violence'

Widely showered with superlatives when it was first published in 1996, and now commonly regarded as a masterpiece, Richard Hay's The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) constructs a pacifist reading of the New Testament. To date, Hay's reading has provoked no systematic refutation from proponents of the doctrine of just war. This essay hopes to offer such a refutation. Its argument has three main planks. First, that Hay's reading of the New Testament stories about god-fearing soldiers, who persist in their profession, is not compelling; second, that he fails to specify sufficiently the meaning of Jesus' teaching and conduct in terms of Jesus' own context (particularly the option of armed violence in the service of religiously inspired nationalism); and third, that Hay's normative moral concepts are often too crude, suffering from a failure to employ valid moral distinctions. The essay concludes by arguing that the doctrine of just war is better able than pacifism to make adequate sense of all the relevant New Testament data

Peace and justice: a limited reconciliation

This paper aims to relax the tension between the political requirements of making peace and moral demands of doing justice, in light of the 'peace processes' in South Africa and Northern Ireland. It begins by arguing that criminal justice should be reconceived as consisting primarily in the vindication of victims, both direct and indirect. This is not to deny the retributive punishment of perpetrators any role at all, only to insist that it be largely subservient to the goal of vindication. Why should we take such an account of justice to be true? The paper offers two reasons. First, Christians - and even secularist liberals - have a prima facie reason in the consonance of this account with the Bible's eudaimonistic conception of justice as ordered to the restoration of healthy community. Second, since all concepts of criminal justice share the basic notion of putting right what is wrong, it would be odd if the repair of damage done to victims (i.e., their 'vindication') were not prominent among its concerns; and there are reasons to suppose that this vindication should actually predominate in relation to the other principles of justice (the retributive 'balancing' of crime and punishment, and the reform of the criminal for his own sake). In its final sections, the paper applies the proposed conception of criminal justice to the 'peace processes' in South Africa and Northern Ireland, and concludes that in both cases, notwithstanding concessions to the politics of peace-making, considerable justice has been done

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs

This response to Justice, Rights and Wrongs argues that Wolterstorff's defence of rights attaching to human subjects withstands Oliver O'Donovan's critique; that the concept of multiple rights is compatible with the affirmation of a larger moral order; that there is a problem with rights thought to be determined in advance of moral deliberation; that love should not only recognize rights (with Wolterstorff) but should react to their violation with retribution (against Wolterstorff); that a biblical and theological case can be made for a Christian form of eudaimonism; and that Wolterstorff's attempt to ground human worth in the love of God rather than in some capacity or other does not work