Morally Opposed? A Theory of Public Attitudes and Emerging Military Technologies

• In Event: Technology and Public-Private Relations

Abstract

A critical public policy question is how people and countries think about the moral and practical issues associated with emerging technologies. After all, technology does not exist in a vacuum; it is mediated by how individuals and political institutions make choices about its development and potential use. In the case of autonomous weapon systems (AWS), an emerging technology that can select military targets in war without human involvement, the global policy debate centers in part around arguments about public opposition based on moral concerns. However, when faced with new, still-developing technology, public attitudes may stem not only from inherent moral attitudes, but also from uncertainty about its potential effectiveness. We theorize that the interaction between concerns about effectiveness and morality generates four ideal types as people react to the challenges and opportunities of emerging technologies: consequentialists, moral consequentialists, principled moral reasoners, and technology skeptics. We test our theory through survey experiments conducted over two waves of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. First, we establish the presence and persistence of moral concerns in attitudes towards AWS. We then consider variation in the presence and content of these moral convictions across individuals and find that the hypothesized categories do exist. The categories create a new framework for thinking about the role of morality in military decision-making, especially decisions involving emerging technologies.

Authors

• Michael Horowitz, University of Pennsylvania

• Sarah Maxey, Loyola University Chicago