Hume’s Law as Another Philosophical Problem for Autonomous Weapons Systems

ABSTRACT This article contends that certain types of Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS) are susceptible to Hume’s Law. Hume’s Law highlights the seeming impossibility of deriving moral judgments, if not all evaluative ones, from purely factual premises. If autonomous weapons make use of factual data from their environments to carry out specific actions, then justifying their ethical decisions may prove to be intractable in light of the said problem. In this article, Hume’s original formulation of the no-ought-from-is thesis is evaluated in relation to the dominant views regarding it (viz., moral non-descriptivism and moral descriptivism). Citing the objections raised against these views, it is claimed that, if there is no clear-cut solution to Hume’s is-ought problem that presently exists, then the task of grounding the moral judgements of AWS would still be left unaccounted for.