Professor Deane-Peter Baker 

Dr Deane-Peter Baker is a Professor of Ethics in the School of Humanities and Social Science at UNSW Canberra, and Director of the Military Ethics Research Lab and Innovation Network (MERLIN). He is also a Senior Visiting Research Fellow in the Kings College London Centre for Military Ethics. He is co-author of the first full-length treatment of the ethics of special operations, The Ethics of Special Ops: Raids, Recoveries, Reconnaissance, and Rebels, with Roger Herbert and David Whetham, (Cambridge University Press 2023). In response to the Brereton report, Baker was selected by Australia’s Special Operations Command to design and develop the command’s ethics education and training response. He is the only scholar to serve on the expert panels for both the ADF Ethics Doctrine and the ADF Character Doctrine. Baker engages widely across the ADF, including contributing to the ethics components of the Australian Command and Staff Course and the Defence Strategic Studies Courses (the ADF’s most senior course). He also engages internationally, including with US, UK and European special forces. He served as a panellist on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons (IPRAW) and convened ‘The Canberra Group’, an independent and international group of scholars and practitioners who together developed the international ‘Guiding Principles for the Development and Use of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems’. In 2024 a research team led by Prof Baker was awarded a multi-million dollar contract by DARPA to contribute to their Autonomy Standards and Ideals with Military Operational Values (ASIMOV) program, which aims to develop benchmarks to objectively and quantitatively measure the ethical difficulty of future autonomy use cases and readiness of autonomous systems to perform in those use cases within the context of military operational values. Other key publications include Should We Ban Killer Robots? (Polity Press 2022), Morality and Ethics at War: Bridging the Gaps Between the Soldier and the State (Bloomsbury Academic 2020), Citizen Killings: Liberalism, State Policy and Moral Risk (Bloomsbury Academic 2016), and Just Warriors Inc.: The Ethics of Privatized Force (Continuum/Bloomsbury 2020)

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