Professor Peter Lee

Professor of Applied Ethics and Associate Dean for Research in the University of Portsmouth Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Peter Lee is a Professor of Applied Ethics and Associate Dean for Research in the University of Portsmouth Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Prof. Lee is also a Member of the Peace, Conflict & Security Research Group at Portsmouth University. His research has spanned the ethical, operational and other human aspects of UK Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (drone) operations, the ethics of AI and autonomous weapon systems, moral injury and mental harms in military and police personnel, and politics and ethics of war. In 2014 he contributed ethics insights to the International Committee of the Red Cross Conference: ‘Autonomous Weapon Systems: Technical, Military, Legal and Humanitarian Aspects’. From 2016-2018 he was granted unprecedented research access to the two RAF Reaper squadrons for his book, Reaper Force: The Inside Story of Britain’s Drone Wars.  In 2020 Peter led two research projects which explored legal, ethical, and moral perspectives on advanced technology and emerging weapon systems and, separately, moral injury in police online child sex crime investigators and RAF Reaper (drone) operators. In April 2023 he commenced a collaborative EPSRC-funded project to create a Trustworthy Autonomous Robotic Drone System to Support Battlefield Casualty Triage. Peter is a member of the UK Ministry of Defence Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy Ethics Advisory Panel. 

VIDEO: Bringing ethics training to drone pilots | Professor Peter Lee

BOOK BY DR. PETER LEE

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Peter Lee, Ishmael Bhila & Alison Wakefield, ‘Autonomous Vehicle: Opportunities, Threats and Challenges’, ASIS (2024)

Peter Lee, ‘Ethics of Military Cyber Surveillance’, in Michael Skerker and David Whetham (Eds), Cyber Warfare Ethics (Havant: Howgate Publishing, 2021)

Peter Lee, ‘Armed drone systems: the ethical challenge of replacing human control with increasingly autonomous elements’, in Christian Enemark, Ed., Ethics of Drone Strikes: Restraining Remote-Control Killing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

Peter Lee, Bettina Renz & Tom Smith, ‘Legal, Ethical and Moral Perspectives on Advanced Technology and Weapon System Use in Current and Future Conflicts’ (60,000-word Research Report for DSTL, 2020) Not publicly Available.

The Canberra Working Group (Peter Lee co-author), ‘Guiding Principles for the Development and Use of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems’, E-International Relations (2020) https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/15/guiding-principles-for-the-development-and-use-of-laws-version-1-0/

Deane-Peter Baker, Erin Hahn, Peter Lee and Ian MacLeod, ‘Introducing Guiding Principles for the Development and Use of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems’, E-International Relations (2020) https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/15/introducing-guiding-principles-for-the-development-and-use-of-lethal-autonomous-weapon-systems/

Peter Lee, ‘An Ethics Framework for Autonomous Weapon Systems’, Air and Space Power Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Autumn/ Winter 2019) pp. 60-81.

Peter Lee (2018) 'Reaper Force: Inside Britain's Drone Wars' (London: John Blake Publishing)