AI Warfare and Its Implications for Behavioral Ethics As frequent visitors to the Ethics Unwrapped website know, one of our focuses is behavioral ethics, the study of the psychology of moral decision making. Defense correspondent Katrina Manson’s new book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare (2026) prompts us to revisit this topic. As we noted in […] Ver
AI Warfare Is Already Here. We Need the AI Ethics To Go With It Foreign policy and defense correspondent Katrina Manson’s impressive new book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare (2026) has put the ethics of AI warfare directly in the spotlight, which is good. Although ethical issues surrounding the use of AI to wage war have been considered in detail by […] Ver
AI Ethics: Moral Certainty Defeated by Factual Uncertainty A year ago today (“today” being the date this blog post is written–February 3, 2026), we published our first of several blog posts on AI ethics, this one titled “AI Ethics: ‘Just the Facts, Ma’am.’” Our central contention was that to make sound moral judgments one must first be in possession of the facts, at […] Ver
Moral Dissonance, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Measles Two contradictory items came to our attention almost simultaneously a few weeks ago. The first item was a New Yorker article by Shayla Love entitled “Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?” The second was an article on a measles outbreak that presented about as clear and concrete an example of cognitive dissonance as could be […] Ver
Learning From An Academic Scandal As frequent visitors to Ethics Unwrapped know, our primary focus is upon behavioral ethics—the science of moral decision-making. Behavioral ethics is based on research from such fields as brain science, evolutionary biology, child development, and many others. The most significant contributions come from the discipline of psychology, particularly behavioral psychology. Unfortunately, the field of psychology […] Ver
AI Ethics: If Someone Builds It, Will We All Die? Many interested in AI have been eagerly awaiting the just-published, provocatively-titled book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowski and Nate Soares. Yudkowski has been a major AI naysayer for 20 years and, with Soares, founded the nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in 2005. The […] Ver
AI Ethics: What Duties Do We Owe a Sentient Digital Mind? In his new book, Mind Crime: The Moral Frontier of Artificial Intelligence (2025), Nathan Rourke analyzes many of the same questions that others paying attention to the AI revolution find concerning. Will fierce competition between corporations and between countries lead to creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) before humanity is ready to handle it? Will this […] Ver
AI Ethics: As If Human Oxford University computer scientist Nigel Shadbolt and co-author Roger Hampson (S&H), like so many others these days, believe that we must think carefully about the ethical issues surrounding the development of artificial intelligence (AI), so they’ve written As If Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (2025). S&H are AI Doubters. S&H point out a litany of […] Ver
Moral Challenges: When to Comply and How to Defy About a decade ago, Sunita Sah—a trained physician who is now teaching organizational psychology at Cornell’s S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management—had a pain in her chest and consulted a physician who ordered a CT scan. Sah asked the doctor why she was ordering the CT scan, and the doctor responded that she was checking […] Ver
AI Ethics: The Atomic Human Sound moral judgments must be based on facts. People court disaster when they make morally-tinged decisions based on nothing more than speculation. We believe that at this particular point in time, artificial intelligence (AI) presents the world with several of its most critical moral issues. We have addressed AI ethics in several recent blog posts […] Ver