Grounding Drones' Ethical Use Reasoning.

In this paper we look into some of the arguments put forward in favor of building lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), which would be superior to human ethical judgment, by design. Starting with the circumstances where most of the LAWS programs originated, we question the very premises of the current discourse and in particular Arkin’s work (e.g. what is the evidence for the eventual moral superiority of machines? does it help that the discussion of ethics is framed in a context of classical interstate war conflict?) of the approach. We sketch an alternative view, which would reframe the whole roboethics discourse in terms of conflict resolution and prevention as well as policy making.