The UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) can, on the one hand, be considered vital for the global governance process—in the sense of urging international cooperation on the ethical, developmental, and standards aspects of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS). On the other hand, the CCW may also embody a global trend that does not augur well for international solidarity, namely the lack of credible and comprehensive collaboration to advance global objectives of peace and security. In 2022, a majority of the 125 nations that belong to the CCW requested limits on a specific type of lethal autonomous weapons: “killer robots.” Yet, most of the major global powers—namely the United States, Russia, and China—opposed not only a ban on LAWS but also on any restrictions on the development of these weapons, not least because the United States, Russia, and China are actively developing this weapons technology. While there is currently much focus on the technological evolution of LAWS, less has been written about how ethical values can exert influence on a growing global consciousness around factors such as power, technology, human judgment, accountability, autonomy, dehumanization, and the use of force. This introduction lays the groundwork for dealing with these issues. It does so by showing that all these factors warrant a pluralist approach to the global governance of LAWS, based on multiple grounds, including the military, tech, law, and distinctive theoretical-ethical orientations; the rationale being to combine this expertise into a collection for publication. Reflecting the contributing authors’ firsthand experiences of the ethics surrounding the management of LAWS to address decisive and critical questions at an expert level, it provides a framing for the collection, showing that the use of international legal mechanisms like the CCW are crucial to considering both the potential and the limits of LAWS, as well as what it can contribute to areas such as international law, human rights, and national security.

Regulating war has long been a concern of the international community. From the Hague Conventions to the Geneva Conventions and the multiple treaties and related institutions that have emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, efforts to mitigate the horrors of war have focused on regulating weapons, defining combatants, and ensuring access to the battlefield for humanitarians. But regulation and legal codes alone cannot be the end point of an engaged ethical response to new weapons developments. This short essay reviews some of the existing ethical works on lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), highlighting how rule- and consequence-based accounts fail to provide adequate guidance for how to deal with them. I propose a virtue-based account, which I link up with an Aristotelian framework, for how the international community might better address these weapons systems.

Accountability for developing, deploying, and using any emerging weapons system is affirmed as a guiding principle by the Group of Governmental Experts on Emerging Technologies in the Area of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems. Yet advances in emerging technologies present accountability challenges throughout the life cycle of a weapons system. Mindful of a lack of progress at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons since 2019, this essay argues for a mechanism capable of imputing accountability when individual agent accountability is exceeded, forensic accountability unreliable, and aspects of political accountability fail.

This article explains why regulating autonomy in weapons systems, entailing the codification of a legally binding obligation to retain meaningful human control over the use of force, is such a challenging task within the framework of the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. It is difficult because it requires new diplomatic language, and because the military value of weapon autonomy is hard to forego in the current arms control winter. The article argues that regulation is nevertheless imperative, because the strategic as well as ethical risks outweigh the military benefits of unshackled weapon autonomy. To this end, it offers some thoughts on how the implementation of regulation can be expedited.