Just war
The rules limiting when war may be begun and how it may be conducted.
What it commits you to
Just war theory has two halves: jus ad bellum, the conditions for going to war at all, and jus in bello, the rules for conduct once underway. The second half constrains means independently of the justness of the cause, which is why it is the part that transfers most easily to debates about autonomous weapons. Most versions treat combatants and non-combatants as bearing different moral weight.
Which realms lean on this
Ethics is where the realms argue about what counts: the parties, the pleasures, the duties, the care.
ethics · 9 realms — The Benthamite Foundry, The Care Weft, The Contractual Court, The Kantian Citadel, The Longview Foundry, The Middle Kingdom, The Stoic Ramparts, The Ubuntu Weave, The Virtue Garden.
Canon that discusses this
primary · 1921
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Completed during the First World War and published without an authorial name, in the series Wittgenstein edited himself. It ends where most of what people want to say about ethics cannot be said in propositions at all — a limit-statement that is also the sharpest warning available about systems that are fluent and not intelligible.
primary · 300 BCE
Mozi
The one ancient Chinese text that argues for impartial care as a principle rather than as a sentiment: regard others' parents as your own, reject aggressive war and defensive hierarchy, and justify both by an explicit standard. The excerpt below paraphrases the jian xiang ai chapters rather than quoting a translation.
See also
Meaningful human control
ethicsA standard requiring that a human have the time, information and authority to intervene.
Dignity
ethicsA standing that cannot be earned, lost, or traded, and so cannot be the output of an objective.
Care ethics
ethicsObligations arise inside relationships, are partial, and resist general principles.
Deontology
ethicsDuty-first ethics: some things are wrong regardless of the totals they produce.