In a world increasingly governed by the automated logic of artificial intelligence (AI), human agency and moral responsibility seem more fragile than ever.
This crisis extends beyond what it means to be human—it questions what it means to take a human life.
Nowhere is this clearer than in modern warfare, where algorithmic decision-making threatens to hollow out the very idea of moral agency. At the heart of this digital transformation lies a profound question: what happens to freedom— that most human of concepts—when life and death are decided by code?
To answer this, perhaps it is worth turning to the grand architect of dialectics, Hegel.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) argued that freedom was not the absence of constraint, but the realisation of ethical life within the state. In his Philosophy of Right (1820), he saw the state as the highest expression of Spirit (Geist), reconciling individual will with the collective good. True freedom, he insisted, arose when individuals acted not on whim, but according to rational, universal principles.
Yet in the age of algorithmic warfare, Hegel’s vision of the state as the embodiment of ethical life is under threat. From the battlefields of Ukraine, where AI tools (for a country under attach, out of necessity) shape targeting decisions, to the skies above Gaza, where Israel’s Lavender programme reportedly automates kill lists with minimal human oversight, algorithmic violence is recasting war itself and in very real time. Such a shift risks erasing the subjectivity Hegel saw as essential to moral action. The calculating logic of code threatens to replace the tragic weight of human judgement—transforming the state from a moral actor into a machine of pure efficiency.
So, what would Hegel have made of this?
Born in Stuttgart in 1770, Hegel witnessed Europe’s transformation through revolution and war. He studied theology, turned to philosophy, and rose to prominence in Berlin, seeing the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the birth of the modern state. Central to his method was the dialectic: the movement of history through conflict and resolution—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—unfolding Spirit. For Hegel, the state was no mere tool of power, but the living realisation of ethical life—a place where freedom emerged through rational self-government.
But if he were alive today, it is fair to say that Hegel would probably look upon the algorithmic transformation of war with profound unease. In a world where machines can decide who lives and who dies, the reason of AI no longer serves freedom—it becomes an indifferent, unfeeling logic. The state, once a moral actor, risks becoming a calculating engine, stripped of Spirit and blind to moral consequence.
When AI is used in warfare, the same cold rationality prevails. Even in Britain, the Ministry of Defence has unveiled its Digital Targeting Web, pledging over a billion pounds to integrate drones, satellites and soldiers under the gaze of AI. In the days following, shares in Palantir, the controversial US AI giant, rose nearly 9%.
For Hegel, freedom was not licence, but “the truth of necessity.” It required moral reflection and the reconciliation of will with universal principles. War, he believed, tested this freedom most severely, demanding soldiers and statesmen who felt the weight of their actions.
“The will which is truly free is that which has not only overcome the external world but also itself,” he wrote. But when decisions of life and death are ceded to algorithms, that freedom is emptied of its substance.
“The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea,” Hegel wrote. But what happens if the thinking is ceded to the machine? Algorithmic warfare threatens to strip the state of its ethical dimension, reducing armies—and perhaps even police forces—to hybrid systems for managing death.
Algorithmic war strips violence of the self. It turns moral calculation into mere computation. The tragedy of the August 2021 drone strike in Kabul, where a US drone killed ten civilians after a mistaken algorithmic analysis, is an example that is worth contemplating in this way.
There was no malevolent will, only the indifferent precision of data models. Did the operator who fired the missile feel moral responsibility? Or were they doubly insulated from the notion of harm – first by the algorithm’s recommendation, then by the physical distance of an unmanned drone?
Hegel argued that “it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognised as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.” But what of a world where no fighter need confront death directly, where killing is outsourced to code and those most likely to be harmed are not fighters bit civilians?
The language of algorithmic warfare is wrapped in the rhetoric of progress. In May 2025, Defence Secretary John Healey declared that Britain’s AI-driven defence initiatives are “essential to keeping pace in a new era of warfare.” Hegel would have recognised this as “objective spirit”—the outward expression of collective will.
But also he warned that when objective spirit is detached from the ethical substance of community, it degenerates into a hollow abstraction.
This abstraction is already very real.
Israeli officers describe human review of Lavender’s kill lists as bureacratic.
“Everything was statistical, everything was neat”, one said, “it was very dry,”
So targeting decisions are accelerated by AI and war’s moral burden is reduced to a technical task. Hegel argued that “a person is the immediate embodiment of free will; it is in this characteristic that a human being must be recognised as a person.”
But what happens when algorithmic war reduces civilians to data points? And soldiers to technicians of death?
Hegel believed that war, for all its horror, could reveal the moral seriousness of the state – its willingness to bear the ultimate responsibility for life and death. But algorithmic war risks turning that burden into a distanced function. It no longer arrives as an ethical weight, but as a calculation.
Freedom, Hegel told us, is the understanding of necessity, and necessity is blind only so long as it is not understood. But if the decisions of war are no longer made by conscious subjects, what freedom truly remains? In an age of algorithmic sovereignty, the state risks becoming a ghost in the machine – an engine of power that forgets the moral ends it was meant to serve.
Some argue that algorithmic warfare reduces civilian casualties and removes the fog of war. But it also erases the human presence that once gave war its tragic dignity – the hesitation, the moral doubt, the trembling hand. As Hegel saw, freedom is not the mere absence of constraint. It is the painful reconciliation of will and of necessity. In ceding will and necessity to algorithms, we risk creating a new form of unfreedom: a world where killing is no longer an act of will, but a line of code executed without conscience (or consequence).
Hegel did not foresee drones or facial recognition software. But he foresaw the danger of reducing ethical life to a rational system, detached from the moral subject.
“The purely formal will is the will in abstraction, in the sense that it is apart from its content,” he warned. In algorithmic war, that abstraction becomes supercharged. The distance AI enables between act and deed creates in us a will that calculates, but does not choose in a truly moral sense.
As we hurtle towards an age of war by algorithm, the question Hegel would pose remains clear: will the state remain the realisation of ethical life, or will it become the final alienation of Spirit—a space of rationality without soul, of power without responsibility?
This, frankly, is terrifying.
If Hegelian history is the story of freedom becoming conscious of itself, our challenge is to ensure that freedom does not vanish into the indifferent machinery of our own making.
We must rage— and rage—against the dying of that Spirit’s light.
Did you find this story interesting? Please support AOAV's work and donate.
Donate