The international debate on the ethics and legality of autonomous weapon systems (AWS), along with the call for a ban, primarily focus on the nebulous concept of fully autonomous AWS. These are AWS capable of target selection and engagement absent human supervision or control. This paper argues that such a conception of autonomy is divorced from both military planning and decision-making operations; it also ignores the design requirements that govern AWS engineering and the subsequent tracking and tracing of moral responsibility. To show how military operations can be coupled with design ethics, this paper marries two different kinds of meaningful human control (MHC) termed levels of abstraction. Under this two-tiered understanding of MHC, the contentious notion of ‘full’ autonomy becomes unproblematic.

关于自动武器系统（AWS）的道德和合法性的国际辩论以及对禁令的呼吁，主要集中在完全自动AWS的模糊概念上。这些都是AWS能够在没有人为监督或控制的情况下进行目标选择和参与的功能。本文认为，这种自治的概念与军事计划和决策行动都脱离了。它还忽略了管理AWS工程以及随后的道德责任追踪的设计要求。为了说明如何将军事行动与设计伦理相结合，本文将两种不同的有意义的人类控制（MHC）结合在一起，称为抽象级别。在对MHC的这种两层理解下，“完全”自治的争议概念变得毫无问题。