Marc Champagne

York University, Kwantlen Polytechnic University

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About

Marc Champagne is a philosopher whose work sits at the intersection of ethics, metaphysics, and emerging technologies, with a particular focus on the moral status of autonomous systems. His most influential contribution, “Bridging the Responsibility Gap in Automated Warfare” (2013, 87 citations), tackles a pressing challenge in military ethics: how to assign moral accountability when autonomous weapons cause harm without direct human control. Champagne argues for a nuanced framework that preserves human responsibility without requiring moment-by-moment supervision, offering a path through the so-called “responsibility gap.” In later work, including “A Comparative Defense of Self-initiated Prospective Moral Answerability for Autonomous Robot Harm” (2023) and “The Mandatory Ontology of Robot Responsibility” (2021), he deepens this inquiry, critically examining whether concepts like artificial moral agency can be justified without first resolving foundational metaphysical questions. Champagne’s approach is distinctive for its insistence that ethical debates about robots cannot bypass ontology: we must clarify what robots *are* before deciding what they *ought* to be. His work is essential reading for anyone grappling with the moral dimensions of artificial intelligence, autonomous warfare, and the philosophy of technology.