Killing Robots and Just War Theory
I&#x27;m no expert on ethics but what I&#x27;ve read about just war is unconvincing. It&#x27;s just not clear to me what a reasonable justification is. Say it&#x27;s if you&#x27;re being attacked...<p>I guess we&#x27;d all agree if your neighbor is driving armor over the border, you&#x27;re being attacked.<p>But can you attack them before they get the border? Surely yes, why would you wait until they have the greatest advantage?<p>What about when the order is given? Surely yes, why wait two weeks for them to organize themselves? Hit them while they&#x27;re getting ready to kill you.<p>What about while they&#x27;re deciding? Of course, thinking about attacking is threatening too. Get them while they&#x27;re deciding, that way you minimize the amount of harm you have to cause to them.<p>What about if they&#x27;re simply driving their armor around, building up just in case you attack them? That seems fair, doesn&#x27;t it? But why should you let them threaten you into giving any concessions?<p>It just never really seems like it ends. There&#x27;s always some wrinkle where you can say &quot;but he started it&quot; and it&#x27;s not actually all that clear.<p>By the same logic, I don&#x27;t see how you can really say your war is just, just because you follow certain rules. &quot;We won&#x27;t kill any civilians&quot; seems fair, but like it says in the article, there are no civilians. They&#x27;re either driving a tank, or they built the tank, or they clean the tank, or they bought the tank, or they trained the driver, or they say nice things to the tank driver.<p>Likewise &quot;we won&#x27;t use WMD&#x2F;cluster bombs&#x2F;rape&#x2F;genocide&quot;. All those things will happen if things get desperate enough. I mean sure, if you can roll into their capital and everybody thinks it&#x27;s great, we won&#x27;t have to pour agent orange all over. But if it&#x27;s not going our way, we will lower our standards. First by saying things that aren&#x27;t nice, then by doing things that aren&#x27;t nice. This is why international conflicts are not simply decided by a tug-of-war or a game of football. We can&#x27;t accept the result thus far, so we will do something not nice, anything between sending diplomats home to ICBMs, until we get our way. The fact is there are no rules, we only say there were rules and that the loser broke them. If we&#x27;d lost, they&#x27;d say we did something wrong.<p>&#x2F;rant