Preemptive Strikes and the Ethics of Surprise Attacks

Preemptive strikes and other military operations sometimes involve an element of surprise. Illustrating via historical examples, I argue that surprise attacks can sometimes be unethical for five under analysed reasons: they can involve ambiguous signals regarding whether a country wishes to declare war on another, can involve hidden chains of intermediate causal events that risk harming innocent people, can severely deprive combatants from reasonable opportunities to surrender, can involve uninterpretable or unexplainable causes especially in the era of autonomous weapons, or risk incentivizing net negative long-term equilibrium states where surprise attacks could become the norm rather than the exception.

Adrian K. Yee (PhD Toronto) is Research Assistant Professor @ Lingnan University, Department of Philosophy and fellow of the Hong Kong Catastrophic Risk Centre. He studies contemporary issues in artificial intelligence, economics, and politics. Recently, he has written on automated misinformation detection, the ethics of autonomous weapons, counter-terrorism analysis, and social media algorithms. He retains secondary research interests in all areas of poverty studies. Methodologically, he is informed by the natural & social sciences with the goal of solving real-world problems. Website: https://sites.google.com/site/adriankyee/home.