Hacker News Reader

Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

What's unethical about collaborating with the military? We don't exist in a vacuum. American military hegemony has been an extremely powerful stabilizing force, post-WWII. This idea that it is unethical to build weapons is profoundly wrong, short sighted, and morally selfish.

Not to overly pick on your comment, since you did say that it can be ethical, of course. But i've seen this sentiment that military work is unethical echo'd a bunch of times here lately, and I think it's an incredibly naive perspective.

View on HN

I think as human consciousness, morality, and our understanding of history have evolved, the question we now ask is “Stability for whom?” Certainly not for Latin America during the Cold War, for example.

Those who oppose collaborating with the military do so because “America military hegemony” has been used for all kinds of horrors, including recent events like the Iraq War. There’s nothing naive about not wanting to be party to at least half a million civilian casualties and the destabilization of the Middle East.

You can make some Real Politik argument about the ends justifying the means, if that’s what you truly believe, but you’ll have to do so more explicitly and account for things like Vietnam and the Iraq War. The reductive abstraction of “stability” you pose know longer holds the same kind of sway it once did among most people.

The fact that violence has happened does not mean that it isn't substantially less than it was. The decrease in rates of violence in modern history is profound, and has been discussed at length, here's a chart:

https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/6

Do you see how it goes down since 1950? The fact that the US has been involved in conflicts is not evidence that the US, on balance, creates more violence.

Does that mean the US military has made no mistakes? No, of course not. It's made plenty. But the world is a real place where decisions are made by people, and order is imposed by force. Someone is going to impose it. Surveying the landscape of world powers today, i'll take the US over anyone else, any and every day. And that is the only decision that matters. Talking about civilian deaths de-contextualized from the reality of the alternatives is exactly what I mean by 'naive'.

>Talking about civilian deaths de-contextualized from the reality of the alternatives is exactly what I mean by 'naive'.

The alternative to the Iraq War was not having the Iraq War, which by any sane account was the correct course of action. Half a million people didn’t half to die, but they did, because a lot of people embrace a kind of unquestioning idea of authority as “good,” to which you seem to subscribe.

>And that is the only decision that matters.

You’re free to define the scope of your ethics however you like, but again, these kind of simplistic appeals are increasingly untenable to most people. And many would probably categorize your adherence to their logic as “naive.”

> The alternative to the Iraq War was not having the Iraq War, which by any sane account was the correct course of action. Half a million people didn’t half to die, but they did

You'll get no disagreement from me there. Like I said, and you seem to want to ignore, the US has done bad things. The question isn't "has this entity ever done anything wrong", the question you have to answer is: from the pool of available options, who's best?

> You’re free to define the scope of your ethics however you like, but again, these kind of simplistic appeals are increasingly untenable to most people. And many would probably categorize your adherence to their logic as “naive.”

It's your appeal that's simplistic. You're taking the world as you'd like it to be, rather than how it actually is. Someone has to have power. And if it's not the people you support, who's it going to be?

The question is also, "How is this going to be used, and is it necessary?" Designing weapons to defeat Hitler could easily be justified, cause Hitler. But designing weapons to, say, better fight the Iraq War? Furthering drone strike technology? Given that there was no need for that at all, I can't say that's ethical.

> Designing weapons to defeat Hitler could easily be justified, cause Hitler

You can't just decide to make weapons when Hitler shows up. You need to be ready before Hitler shows up.

> But designing weapons to, say, better fight the Iraq War?

I'm no fan of the Iraq war. However, if we are going to fight the Iraq war, i'd certainly like us to have say, better targeted munitions, and I think Iraqi civilians would too.

> Furthering drone strike technology?

I'm a huge fan of drone strikes, so yes, to that one. That isn't to say i'm a huge fan of their indiscriminate use, of course. But if you're going to do some targeted killings, why not use drones? It exposes our soldiers to less risk, and allows for better, dispassionate targeting aided by automated tools. I think that's a great thing.

Now, I do disagree at the margin with some of the policy choices about how drones have been used. But if someone is going to have the best drones, you'd better believe I want that someone to be the USG.

> Given that there was no need for that at all, I can't say that's ethical.

You're conflating the choice to go to war with the technology to facilitate that war. They are not the same thing. The choice to to war was a mistake. But once the choice has been made, ensuring that victory is swift and precise is absolutely ethical.

This is a ridiculous defence.

If you make weapons, you are a killer. If there were really a hell, you would be going to it.

Be you a blacksmith who crafts swords in the 10th century or a software developer who makes military drone software in the 21st.

That you celebrate the use of drones, which save the life of one American at the expense of many innocent non-Americans, shows how utterly morally bankrupt your views are.

Military drones are an evil, allowing the US to wage wars and kill innocents in "collateral damage", otherwise known as mass-murder, without the PR backlash of losing soldiers.

It's like you didn't even read what I said. The world isn't a moral vacuum. You abdicating power does not mean that nobody has it. It means someone else does. If all of the 'good' people say "weapons and war are immoral", guess who is in control of all the weapons and war? It's really pretty easy to think through, and it's really pretty naive to bury your head in the sand.

We're not talking about abdicating power, here. The US already has that power. The US going to war doesn't give it more power, and not going to war in Iraq is not going to lessen it's power.

I've been pretty clear about not advocating the Iraq war. We're not talking about particular wars. Unfortunately, you don't get to pick and choose every thing that a government does with its power. Power comes from strength. Strength comes from weapons. Not building weapons is abdicating power. Abdicating power empowers others. Who are those others? Do we want them to have power? I think the answer is pretty clearly no.

Not building weapons is not abdicating power. There are lots of other forms of power. Not to mention the US has plenty of weapons already.

In addition, these weapons that are being built are there mostly to reduce the cost of war on our end, while increasing it to others, namely the civilian casualties of the Iraq war (yes, I will continue bringing that up. It doesn't matter if you're not advocating for it; it is a direct result of what you are advocating). That is completely immoral.

> Not building weapons is not abdicating power

Yes, it really is. If you are unarmed, you have no power. All power comes from the threat of violence. Any power not directly derived from that threat is derived from it indirectly.

> In addition, these weapons that are being built are there mostly to reduce the cost of war on our end, while increasing it to others, namely the civilian casualties of the Iraq war (yes, I will continue bringing that up. It doesn't matter if you're not advocating for it; it is a direct result of what you are advocating).

Do you think the military builds new weapons to try to target civilians better? Or do you think, when they "work on drone technology" that they are trying to build better, more precise targeting system that will have less collateral damage? I think the latter. And I think it's especially the latter if 'ethical' people are the ones working on it. If 'ethical' people choose not to build weapons, who's left building them?

"If you are unarmed,"

And at that point, I no longer believe you are trying to engage in a serious discussion. The US is very, very far from "unarmed", so to use that as a justification shows that you're not taking this in good faith.

Armedness is relative. This is painfully obvious. I await your response to the substance of my previous post.

Let me guess though, instead you're going to respond to this by saying "LOL YOU THINK THE US IS RELATIVELY UNARMED!?", completely ignoring the strategic positioning questions related to armaments, and any nuanced notion of military geopolitics. Tell me again which of us is non-serious.

> I'm a huge fan of drone strikes, so yes, to that one. That isn't to say i'm a huge fan of their indiscriminate use, of course. But if you're going to do some targeted killings, why not use drones? It exposes our soldiers to less risk, and allows for better, dispassionate targeting aided by automated tools. I think that's a great thing.

I think you got the correlation backwards here. You imply that we use drones because we had to do so many targeted killings that it would mean a huge risk for the soldiers. To me, it appears the other way around: The only way you can have so many targeted killings is because you're not putting your own people at risk anymore.

One scenario, you have maybe a hundred of your own soldiers killed in battle. The other scenario, you have thousands and thousands of foreign civilians killed by not-so-targeted killings. Of course the government will always have to side with its own citizens, so they relabel the civilians as terrorists to prevent cognitive dissonance.

Yes, I understand that problem and you are correct. However, I still believe they are on balance a good thing. Let me be absolutely precise though: I would prefer a world without complex weapons. However, that world isn't on the menu. Given that someone is going to develop these things, I want it to be the entity I distrust least. On the world stage at the moment, that is the USG.

"You're conflating the choice to go to war with the technology to facilitate that war. They are not the same thing. The choice to to war was a mistake. But once the choice has been made, ensuring that victory is swift and precise is absolutely ethical."

I disagree. Creating these weapons, especially things like drones which make it much, much easier to go to war, and removes the penalty of having your own citizens die in combat, conflates those two things. If it's easier to go to war, and your side doesn't have to suffer casualties, you will go to war more often. Thus, these things are unethical, as you are facilitating war.

> I disagree. Creating these weapons, especially things like drones which make it much, much easier to go to war, and removes the penalty of having your own citizens die in combat, conflates those two things. If it's easier to go to war, and your side doesn't have to suffer casualties, you will go to war more often. Thus, these things are unethical, as you are facilitating war.

You are correct. However, now that drones exist, working on them is going to be about making them more targeted. Making them less likely to kill civilians, and more efficient about what they do. In large part, I agree with the targeted killing of the individuals targeted by drone strikes. What I would like to do is make the weapons and targeting systems of those drones better at reducing collateral damage. That seems like an important goal to me, and a perfectly ethical one.

When the next Hitler comes (and knowing human nature it is quite likely), it will be a bit late to start designing weapons to fight him.

> the question you have to answer is: from the pool of available options, who's best?

This question is misleading, as the goal is never to pick the nicest tyrant and is certainly not to backstop their power. While USG is a stabilizing force in the world with regards to its peers that also have significant armaments, it also acts as a destabilizing force towards those it can assimilate with impunity.

It's not that designing or building weapons is wrong by itself. The problem is further advancing the offensive capabilities of the already-uncontested leader of the race - a leader which continually opts for routine use of those capabilities when it is easy. The infrastructure for remotely piloting drones halfway around the world isn't going to help defend in a mortal war against China, but it does make nicer day jobs for those roflstomping the latest economically-deviant backwater.

Coupled with the domestic political fuckery from the military-industrial-surveillance complex, the current answer is to just say no. If you want to build weapons, do so in the privacy of your own shed - you'll be better prepared to defend yourself when this overstretched empire collapses.

There are several reasons. First, weapons are made to kill. Even if they're not used, if they're finally used, the result is someone's death.

Second, the USA is not only stabilizing peace, but from time to time disrupts it. Sometimes a war is waged without proper consideration. I think Iraq is the best example, but the intervention in Afghanistan wasn't necessary either.

Third, even if you say the above were just mistakes, and the leaders of the USA had good intentions, weapons are a product just like everything else, and so they're sold. The USA has a list of "good" and "bad" states, but circumstances change very quickly nowadays. Also, once you sell a weapon, even to a "good" state, you lose control.

On the other hand, there are some military applications that are actually meant to save lives rather than taking them. One good example is clearing land mines - I guess no engineer would have any problems helping in constructing a robot that would disarm mines and other explosives.

In a moral vacuum, I agree. If I could flip a switch and permanently erase nuclear weapons from the world, I think i'd probably flip that switch. However, we don't exist in a world with switches like that. Any weapon the US doesn't develop out of some moral sensibility, another state like Russian or China will. Ceding military strength is not virtuous, it's naive. The choice isn't between "should these weapons exist or not", it's "who should have them?". And the answer to that choice is: the entity you distrust least. For me that's the USG. I distrust them, just less than I do the other candidates.

And this is an extremely critical moral choice, because it's the only real one. Any other choice is just burying your head in the sand and saying the world doesn't exist.

Well, with WMDs we're past that point already. We have enough nukes to transform this world into hell in a few hours. Any advances in that area are of the nature that Putin mentioned recently, ones that no civilized nation would ever develop.

There is an enormous conventional arms market though. These are guns, pistols etc. Their sole aim is to kill people, plain and simple. You could justify it by saying some of those people deserve being killed, but as a creator of the weapon you can't know that, you have no control on how it's used. That's why many people would have moral objections against the production of conventional weapons.

> but as a creator of the weapon you can't know that, you have no control on how it's used

That's not entirely true, especially if you are working for a military. You don't have total control over how it's used, but you can decide which government you work for.

I think it's fair to say that designing weapons that others will use is always an ethical quandary with unknowable complexity. If someone errs on the side of causing no harm - a commonly accepted default if discussions of the Trolly problem are anything to go by - then designing weapons is difficult to justify because it's just impossible to ensure that they'll be used in a way the designer would sanction. I don't necessarily disagree that it's naive to opt for inaction when faced with an ethical quandary of unknowable outcome, but it does seem to be the default position and that does count for a lot.

What I find interesting is that in some cases, the broad outcomes of a particular weapon being designed are predictable. Gunpowder is widely credited with destabilizing the feudal social order because it put military supremacy in the hands of the peasantry. Modern drones could well be used to sustain a new social order much in the way that heavy armor and stirrups sustained the feudal one. Whether that's a good thing of course depends on other ethical considerations, but if I had the opportunity to work on a weapons system, I would think much more about those kinds of implications than who would be using it - it seems best to assume the answer to that question is, "everyone".

>an extremely powerful stabilizing force

For the American empire. Less so for the rest of the world.

To be sure, there is plenty that the American empire can be criticized for. But if not the American empire, then whom? You think that power vacuum wouldn't be filled with something worse? Look at the contenders. The US, with all its flaws, is preferable. I am not endorsing American evils, but keep in mind that this kind of trivialization of geopolitical realities is unwise. It's better to focus on repairing what the US does wrong instead of suggesting that the entire empire must fall without thinking about the resulting clusterfuck that would ensue.

I'd say preventing a nuclear war is pretty damn stabilizing across the world.

> This idea that it is unethical to build weapons is profoundly wrong, short sighted, and morally selfish.

Right. Anything unethical about building photon torpedoes for the federation? No.

I didn't say it was unethical to build weapons for anyone. I said it wasn't unethical to help build them at all. We don't live in a vacuum. If you don't build weapons for the side you prefer, someone else will for the side they prefer. And if all the 'good' people don't support the side they like, guess which side gets all the weapons? If you don't have any 'ethical' people in the military, guess who makes all the decisions? This is really so easy to think through, and the only moral conclusion is pretty clear.

I was agreeing with you.

Ah sorry. Not up on my star trek references :).

That's exactly what I meant when I said it's nothing to be ashamed of, somebody's gotta do it. Just don't kid yourself that it makes you ethical. Sure, you could argue that you're "better than the other guy" or "they started it", but that's a pretty low bar. It just means you're both unethical.

Combining unethical and necessary defeats the point of identifying some things as unethical: if you're going to do them anyways, why bother calling them wrong? The motivation behind bringing ethics into the workplace is that broader human interests are that engineers and other front-liners (operators, doctors, technicians, soldiers) should refuse to do things that are excessively bad. If you think they should just suck it up and get the job done, then don't bin the job you want them to do in with other things that they clearly shouldn't.

It needs to be considered acceptable to tell your boss no on ethical grounds.

To make this concrete, we want there to be one bin for "putting live viral payloads in to vaccines destined for a foreign country," and another bin for "annoying shoppers with eye-level advertisements," and maybe another bin for "improving the efficiency of infrastructure." Ideally, irrespective of where the profit motives lied it would be impossible to recruit anybody for sufficiently nefarious purposes, with the recruitment difficulty scaling with how much harm they knew they were going to do to the world.

I respectfully disagree. Consider a thought experiment: You have two groups of people. Group A is ethical (per your definition), well intentioned and smart. Group B is cruel, authoritarian and egotistical. Group A doesn't like to think about war, and certainly doesn't want to contribute to the machinery of war. Group B, on the other hand, delights in it. Group B loves building weapons and thinking about military strategy. Very quickly in this civilization, Group B will come to dominate Group A, and they will build a world in their own image - cruel and inhuman. Given that we know this is the outcome, in what sense is Group A's choice really ethical?

The question you have to ask is: If it's not you who has the best weapons, who is it? If it's not you devising military strategy, who is? The answer is someone else. Probably someone who likes those things more than you. Is that the sort of person you want to have that kind of power?

> Very quickly in this civilization, Group B will come to dominate Group A, and they will build a world in their own image - cruel and inhuman.

You're skipping the important part of the argument here, and going directly from the premise to your desired outcome without arguing why that will happen.

If what you describe were the unconditional outcome, how is it that our world is not gradually becoming more cruel and inhuman? I mean, there certainly are cruel and inhuman aspects to it, but for the most part, we live in a world that's vastly more prosperous and sophisticated than any other epoch before that, and also less violent. You included the link to Our World In Data yourself to prove that point.

Obviously, there are other aspects that contribute to the success of a society besides its military engagement. This can arguably be seen in how the influence of the US is slowly diminishing even though they have the largest military expenses by a wide margin.

> If what you describe were the unconditional outcome, how is it that our world is not gradually becoming more cruel and inhuman?

Because not everyone makes the same naive choice to bury their head in the sand and say "moral people don't build weapons". There is a long tradition of great scientists making the only moral choice and choosing to develop weapons for the powers they trusted the most. Those people made the extremely hard, but ultimately correct choice to build weapons of war for imperfect powers. They did so because they knew that if they didn't, someone else would. And that someone else might be building them for an even less ethical power.

In your scenario, Group A got dragged into the mud by Group B. If they wanted to stay ethical, they would've been "dominated". They chose strength and survival over staying "clean". Like I said before, it's fine, and I'd probably agree with it. It may even be the lesser of two evils. I need to reiterate that I'm not disagreeing with Group A's actions here to resist. I'm just saying accept the fact that you're probably trading your ethics for it.

I think the key difference between our points of view is how strictly we want to define "being ethical". I'm pretty strict about the definition. At the same time, I'm okay with being labeled unethical from time to time.

How are you defining ethics if not commensurate with the predictable consequences of your choices? If it is predictable that your choices will lead to more suffering and a worse-off world, how is that ethical?

> Sure, you could argue that you're "better than the other guy" or "they started it", but that's a pretty low bar. It just means you're both unethical.

Something about supporting the military when it means resisting oppressive authoritarian hegemony, for instance, seems pretty ethical to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com