Just War Principles Applied to Drone and AI Warfare - Prof. Michael Krom

Prof. Michael Krom considers the question of the use of AI and autonomous drones, drawing upon just war theory with virtue ethics to protect human agency and moral responsibility in a new age of warfare.

This lecture was given on September 24th, 2026, at Cornell University.

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About the Speaker:

Michael Krom started reading Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae shortly after his conversion at the end of college. Upon learning about Flannery O’Connor’s “hillbilly Thomist” habit of reading Aquinas every night, he started studying two articles a day and completed the Summa while in graduate school at Emory University. As a professor at Saint Vincent College, he saw the urgent need for collegians and seminarians to receive a solid foundation in Aquinas’s philosophical theology. In 2020, he published Justice and Charity: An Introduction to Aquinas’s Moral, Economic, and Political Thought (Baker Academic Press), and teaches a Thomistic philosophy course each fall. In addition to continuing work on the moral, economic, and political topics covered in the book, his current research is on the influence of monastic spirituality on Aquinas; he is working on a monograph tentatively entitled Aquinas Among the Benedictines.

Keywords: Just War Theory, Thomas Aquinas, Drone Warfare, Artificial Intelligence Ethics, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Natural Law, Virtue Ethics, Catholic Social Teaching, Moral Agency, Morality, Morals, Double Effect