Our guest this week has done something few philosophers of war can claim: he has flown the aircraft he writes about. We sit down with drone pilot and philosopher Joe Chapa to interrogate the widening gap between technological capability and moral judgment on the modern battlefield. Chapa deconstructs the rush to embed machine learning across military hierarchies, cautioning against blind faith in statistical prediction systems operating under the irreducible fog of war. We examine whether remote combat dilutes the martial virtues or merely reconfigures psychological burden, exploring the acute ethical friction between human tactical restraint and algorithmic certainty. Finally, the conversation confronts the geopolitical reality of autonomous weapons, contrasting commercial software dependencies with the elusive promise of an artificial moral conscience.

Joseph Chapa holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Oxford and has served as a Predator pilot and instructor of philosophy at the Air Force Academy, logging more than 1,400 pilot and instructor pilot hours. His work centers on just war theory, military ethics, and especially the ethics of remote and autonomous weapons.

He also knows the Pentagon from the inside. He previously served as the Department of the Air Force’s first Chief Responsible AI Ethics Officer and has taught as a military faculty member at the Marine Command and Staff College. He retired from the Air Force October 1st. He is the author of Is Remote Warfare Moral? (PublicAffairs, 2022), which examines remote warfare within the context of the just war tradition, virtue, moral psychology, and moral responsibility, and, more recently, AI for the Rest of Us (Air University Press, 2026). He writes the weekly newsletter Views Expressed, and we’re delighted to welcome him as our new postdoctoral colleague. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joseph Chapa’s website

Is Remote Warfare Moral? Weighing Issues of Life and Death from 7,000 Miles by Joseph O. Chapa

AI for the Rest of Us: Understanding the Technology That’s Shaping Our World by Joseph O. Chapa (Air University Press)

Views Expressed (Joe Chapa's Substack newsletter)

Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany by Donald L. Miller

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (Discussed in relation to revenge, martial virtue, and moral injury)

As always, listeners can contact us at prostheticgods@gmail.com with questions, comments, and suggestions for future topics.

Hosted by James Hughes and Nir Eisikovits Music & Production by Jake Burley