Responsibility and War Machines

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that while unmanned systems certainly exacerbate some problems and cause us to rethink who we ought to hold morally responsible for military war crimes, traditional notions of responsibility are capable of dealing with the supposed ‘responsibility gap' in unmanned warfare and that more moderate regulation will perhaps prove more important than an outright ban. It begins by exploring the conditions under which responsibility is typically delegated to humans and how these responsibility requirements are challenged in technological warfare. Following this is an examination of Robert Sparrow's notion of a ‘responsibility gap' as it pertains to the deployment of fully autonomous weapons systems. It is argued that we can reach a solution by shifting to a forward-looking and functional sense of responsibility incorporating institutional agents and ensuring that the human role in engineering and unleashing these systems is never overlooked.