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Comment by geomark | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention the many (ex) friends working for "defense" contractors.

Ex because I really can't be friends with them any longer.

Evil quotes deployed because calling it defense is a farce considering what the systems they are developing are used for.

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Well, given the effectiveness that most defense contractors seem to display, they might be doing a humanitarian service. If the government is going to spend that money regardless, it's probably better that it goes into planes that can't fly and boats that dissolve in water than actually effective projects.

Sabotage is a venerable tradition, but I basically don't think it's better for anyone to be murdered by a knife that's rusty.

If persons employer determines your friendship status with them, then maybe they are better off not being associated with you.

It goes both ways. It is hard to be friends with someone that makes fundamentally different moral choices.

> It is hard to be friends with someone that makes fundamentally different moral choices.

It's also how we arrive at a common baseline for morality.

That’s a misreading of OP’s point: it’s not the employer that they have a problem with, it’s the morality of their employment.

Except that is literally what he said. As soon as they work for defense contractors they are no longer considered friends. Presumably no matter what they do, as long as they are associated they are guilty. Be it cleaning floors, writing software, testing hardware, or what have you.

It's not quite that abrupt. I used to work for a defense contractor. I started as a rather naive young engineer. I worked hard for many years on projects that were not weapons systems or even fielded systems, mostly R&D and advanced technology. It was very cool technology. But over the years I gradually became more and more aware of the kind of systems my employer was developing. And although I did not work directly on those systems I knew that some of the technology I was developing would eventually find its way into future versions of those systems. Colleagues would always say "We aren't building bombs so it's ok." But what we were building were key subsystems used for targeting. I eventually left for the non-defense world.

So it isn't that friends suddenly became ex's overnight. It is after coming to the realization that over time they either had sold out their ethics in order to make good money working on cool technology regardless of what it is used for, or that they really bought the indoctrination that what they were doing was important patriotic work. As for the latter, I heard that stuff a lot, and I always thought it was a bad sign that the boss had to kept telling you that you are doing important work. You weren't privy to much beyond your own compartmented subsystem but over time you could eventually piece together the bigger story. As for the former, that's similar to the non-defense world where a lot of smart engineers are developing shady stuff, except that it isn't resuling in thousands of people in far away lands being killed week in and week out as a result.

I suppose that is true. Then they won't have to be bothered by being asked to consider what the systems they are developing are used for. They won't have to rationalize that the many thousands of children who are killed as collateral damage when the systems they designed are used to attack terrorists in far away lands are a justifiable cost of maintaining the American way of life.

You can't deny that lots of innovations came from defense research. APARNET came from the DoD. I personally wouldn't want to work in defense, but I wouldn't disrepect people working in there either.

I never understood the disdain for working in the arms sector. After all, weapons are just tools, it's the politicians who decide what to do with them. You should despise the king, not the gunsmith.

Just like the guy pulling the lever in the gas chamber.

There's a big difference though. A country without a solid defence sector is not really sovereign - it has to buy its weapons from other countries, which can cut the supply at any time, or just refuse to sell you current-gen tech altogether.

There simply would be no USA without its defense sector - it is essential to its existence. Citizens of other countries (France, UK, Sweden etc.) understand that and you don't hear them dumping on their defense companies. It's pretty much only Americans who are so out of touch with the realities of the world that they think weapons are evil and rest of the world will just leave them be (even if they can't defend themselves).

Well, as a citizen of the UK who’s currently living in Sweden, I’ll provide the counterpoint that I refuse to work with any of our morally corrupt ‘defence’ industries and always bring it up as a red line with any company I interview at.

Which industry is not morally corupt then? I can see maybe single companies in given industries not behaving like total assholes, but on the whole I think all industries are rotten.

It’s a reasonable point; I stay away from tobacco, and am iffy about gambling and alcohol for the same reasons. But on the whole, the stuff I build is either generally beneficial for the user or at least inoffensive.

Buy hey, that’s just my opinion :) You do what you think’s best and I’ll do the same. My point was just that it’s not just the US who has people who are ‘out of touch’ (apparently).

I'm not universally against weapons manufacturing or the defense sector, but if your company is selling weapons to Saudi Arabia (or the US military, really) you should do some serious introspection about whether you are harming the world for your own profit and / or intellectual curiosity.

And in the vast majority of the cases the guy pulling the lever happened to be on that side of the gas chamber door because his nation had a strong defense sector and the government that was supposed to protect the people on the wrong side of that door had a weak defense sector. Maybe ask yourself what side of the door you want to be on before getting up on that high horse.

I'd rather die than participate in mass murder.

I mean, I don't want to die, but if you are gassing people, you've not really come out ahead of the people you are gassing.

> I'd rather die than participate in mass murder.

There were relatively few perpetrators of mass murders, while the murdered people counted in millions. In other words - not all Germans "pulled levers of gas chambers", while most of for example Eastern European Jews got gassed (or shot).

Sure. I guess my point is that worrying about which side of the gas chamber walls you end up on is a morally feeble position. The goal must be to not have gas chambers.

What an embarrassing comment for you. Do you even realize that most of those in the gas chambers were Germans? So your comment really makes no sense, in addition to being cowardly.

I choose death over murdering the innocent, and I'll take as many of my superiors issuing those orders with me as I can.

> Do you even realize that most of those in the gas chambers were Germans?

Citation needed? Unless you were talking about the operators, not the victims... (it's not clear for me).

> I choose death over murdering the innocent, and I'll take as many of my superiors issuing those orders with me as I can.

There is a saying in Polish "we know ourselves only to the degree we've been tested before" - in other words, it's hard to tell beforehand how one would behave in an extreme situation.

Sorry, but the embarrassment here is yours. The overwhelming majority of those in the gas chambers were Polish, not German. The fact that you do not know even this simple fact makes you completely unqualified to use this example in any argument you make.

Meh, I'm only mildly embarrassed about getting a fact wrong. Having no personal integrity however, and admitting that you'd pull the lever in the gas chambers, is another story.

Believe it or not, there are some folk who abhor all violence, for whom there is literally no situation where a weapon of arms sector level sophistication could be used for good. In this case, there's simply no justification for the arms sector's existence.

I suspect these are fringe beliefs though, as they are naturally eliminated via evolution of the human specie.

At first that seems reasonable. But when you know that you are working specifically on weapons systems that are currently being used to do great evil then it no longer seems reasonable. When the rationale becomes so convoluted and twisted as it is now, like drone strikes on families in far away places are acceptable because we must fight terror at any cost, knowing that many of the terrorists were created as part of plans to control regions and overthrow governments by the same government now killing them, it has lost any and all moral basis. If you are a gunsmith developing those systems you share that same derth of morality.

But what if I want to be prepared in case aliens invade the earth?

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