Autonomous Weapons and Moral Judgements: An Experimental Survey on Public Aƫtudes to "Killer Robots"
Abstract
The advent of autonomous weapons brings intriguing opportunities and significant ethical dilemmas. This article examines how increasing weapon autonomy affects approval of military strikes resulting in collateral damage, perception of their ethicality, and blame attribution for civilian fatalities.
In our experimental survey of U.S. citizens, we presented participants with scenarios describing a military strike with the employment of weapon systems with different degrees of autonomy. The results show that as weapon autonomy increases, the approval and perception of the ethicality of a military strike decreases.
However, the level of blame toward commanders and operators involved in the strike remains constant regardless of the degree of autonomy. Our findings suggest that public attitudes to military strikes are, to an extent, dependent on the level of weapon autonomy.
Yet, in the eyes of ordinary citizens, this does not take away the moral responsibility for collateral damage from human entities as the ultimate "moral agents."