Safeguarding moral perception and responsibility via a partnership approach

Introduction: New Combat Technologies (NCTs) create unprecedented capabilities to control the delivery of military force. But dependence on them generates difficult moral challenges impacting the decision-making process, which are only beginning to be addressed. Method: Some welcome NCTs explicitly whereas others plea to abandon such technologies. In order to arrive at an informed opinion about the impact of NCTs on decision-making, we need to know more about what NCTs are and how they operate. We provide a short overview of the different types of NCTs and discuss the challenges posed to moral perception. Results and discussion: Before NCTs can be deployed, we need to rest assured that their usage enhances, rather than undermines, human decision-making capacities. We propose a design recommendation based on a partnership approach, ensuring that operators use appropriate information in the decision-making process. There are important choices to be made, and sound design is ‘design for responsibility’.