IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - July 2021 - 97

Koch
people can be significant as well. For an overview of the
ongoing debates see the work in [14].
AI IN DEFENSE AND THE COMMON GOOD
Instrumental knowledge providing " power " is never an end in
itself, but always meant " for " something. This is particularly
true when it is used for defense, i.e., for protecting the Common
Good of nations or coalitions of nations against external
physical threats, i.e., against military threats emanating from
other nations and nonstate actors. There are nonphysical, e.g.,
economic or ideological,3 and internal threats as well, e.g.,
those related to public security [15], which we exclude here.
In this sense, we consider cognitive and volitive assistance
systems under research, being developed, and to be
leveraged for protecting the Common Good, to which the
individual good is essentially related and which it serves.
" The political community [...] exists for the
Common Good: This is its full justification and
meaning and the source of its specific and basic
right to exist " summarizes a classical text a long
tradition of political thought: " The Common
Good embraces the sum total of all those conditions
ofsocial life which enable individuals,families,
and organizations to achieve complete and
efficaciousfulfilment. " [16]
This description of the Common Good rooted in the
nature of persons and their ends seems to be quite in line
with The Declaration ofIndependence of the United States
of America, which describes the objective fulfillment,
which the Common Good safeguards and promotes, as
" Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness " [11].
The very notion of the Common Good as understood
here embraces natural law and inalienable human rights
based upon it, e.g., not to be induced to act immorally.
Although being fundamental to the Western, i.e., European
and American, civilization [9],4 and having evolved
in a process, it seems to have universal validity.
" In the first half of the second century B.C., the
social natural law developed by the Stoic philosophers
came into contact with leading teachers
of Roman Law. Through this encounter, the
3An early vision of what is now called 'Hybrid Warfare,' seen as " a
continuum of engagement in order to limit the dissonance between
a nation's will and that of other state and non-state actors, " is
sketched by Jill Long [10]: " War is the coherent execution of all
means to bring about sufficient adherence to a nation's will in the
international (global) arena; resulting in armed conflict only when
all other means fail. "
4Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a
revealed law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical
order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and
reason as the true sources of law - and to the harmony of objective
and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both
spheres are rooted in the creative reason ofGod.
JULY 2021
juridical culture ofthe West was born, which was
and is ofkey significancefor thejuridical culture
ofmankind. This pre-Christian marriage between
law and philosophy opened up the path that led
via the Christian Middle Ages and the juridical
developments ofthe Age ofEnlightenment all the
way to the Declaration ofHuman Rights. " [9]
The Grundgesetz of 1949, which commits modern Germany
to inviolable and inalienable human rights as the foundation
of every human community, and of peace and justice
in the world, is in line with this development. According to
this tradition, readiness for defense must not only be technologically
credible, but also correspond to the consciously
accepted " responsibility before God and man, inspired by the
determination to promote world peace as an equal partner in a
united Europe, " as the very first sentence of the German constitution
states [17].5
Also rooted in ancient Roman and medieval juridical
thinking, but from a different philosophical perspective, political
thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Samuel
von Pufendorf (1632-1694), and John Locke (1632-1704)
have made the notion of inalienable rights a key element in
The Constitution ofthe United States as well. Especially von
Pufendorf's political concepts have become part of the cultural
background of the American Revolution. In view of
these considerations, European and U.S.-American legal traditions
at least in certain, but essential, points coincide.
According to these considerations, the precepts of the
natural law are to the practical reason, i.e., to the vast corpus
of positive law, e.g., to the detailed and complex RoE,
what the first principles of demonstration are to the speculative
reason; because both are self-evident principles
(Thomas Aquinas as quoted, in [11, p. 40]). In other
words, knowledge of the nature of persons and their
proper ends seem to be the precondition of the possibility
for digital ethics for AI used in the defense domain.
Both overexpectation and overfear apparently characterize
the public apprehension of risks and opportunities
of AI. A Google search for images illustrating " Artificial
Intelligence " reveals a psychogram of modern man with
his or her pseudoreligious hopes and gloomy forebodings.
As Figure 2 shows, intelligently looking alien beings in
black, turquoise, blue, or white are mysteriously rising
from circuits and data, cool and superior, quite different
from us, yet somehow " in the Image of Man. " Artists'
views inspired by Michelangelo's " Creation " symbolize
emerging intelligence; robots pose as Rodin's " Thinker. "
At the same time that the Image of Man is increasingly
shaped according to the model of machines, human, even
superhuman qualities are somehow associated with AI.
5 " Conscious of their responsibility before god and man, inspired by
the determination to promote world peace as an equal partner in a
united Europe, the German people, in the exercise of their constituent
power, have adopted this basic law. "
IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
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