Singer, P. W. "The Ethics of Killer Applications: Why Is It So Hard To Talk About Morality When It Comes to New Military Technology?". Journal of Military Ethics, Vol.9, No.4 (2010): 299-312.

Singer, P. W. "The Ethics of Killer Applications: Why Is It So Hard To Talk About Morality When It Comes to New Military Technology?". Journal of Military Ethics, Vol.9, No.4 (2010): 299-312.

• Discussions about technology and ethics are difficult to have because they require legal and moral authorities to engage with technologies that they do not come close to understanding and require engineers to think about big moral and ethnic questions (301).
• Unfortunately, a major result of this mismatch in competences is that many engineers and scientists simply ignore ethical questions that they find challenging or inconvenient. This means that technological progress often continues without regards to ethics of development or use (301-302).
• The slow advance of legal and moral principles raises further issues considering the extremely rapid pace of technological progress, meaning that the technologies that raise ethical questions will come into use long before proper moral, ethical, or legal frameworks have been created (308).
• It is often assumed that technological progress in the 21st Century has lifted the 'fog of war'. However, recent experience has shown that war is still complex and dirty and defies easy answers. Enemies have used tactics that have made ethical actions in warfare more difficult, such as hiding beyond noncombatants (303).
• There is not a clear and universally accepted set of ethics in warfare. Instead, understandings of appropriate ethics around technology vary both within and between cultures. Moreover, there are essentially different attitudes towards technology in different parts of the world, especially in Japan and other industrialized East Asian countries (306-307).
• The advance of smart technology, such as limited AI systems in drones, raises new problems for the application of the laws of war. These innovations do not erase human agency, but they do mean that crucial decisions are made remotely, and this makes it difficult to judge responsibility and culpability (308).
• The author argues that any discussion of ethics must also address why ethics are important in war. Mr. Singer then goes on to argue that they are important because being moral makes soldiers ultimately more effective and disciplined than those armies that are barbarous (309). This last point is highly debatable, as many savage and criminal armies are extremely effective, like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Moreover, it means that ethics would not matter if that claim could be proved wrong. In my estimation, ethical conduct is a goal in its own right.