Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure his solutions are sound. I don’t think you should violate your own morals, but the real issue isn’t that your code can be used for wrong doing, it’s that there are no consequences when it is.

I think weapons manufacturing is a better example than software, because it’s much clearer. Weapons are necessary to defend free society, and when they are misused, we hold the misusers to justice.

Or at least we used to. Because today America is actively bombing civilians in 7 different countries, and no one is ever going to be held accountable for the outright human rights violation. I mean, it’s a war crime to kill civilians. I don’t think you can blame the weapons manufacturers for this though, and I don’t think we should have to. Because it’s our common ethics that should prevent it.

I guess, though, that in a world without accountability, your individual morals is all that’s left, but it’s our ethics that need to change if we actually want change. Because if you personally refuse to write the software, someone else will. Like I said, I think you should absolutely refuse to write the software because you won’t be able to live with yourself, just don’t expect the violators to stop unless we stop them.

Mistakes are going to happen and the world has changed. The battlefield is everywhere now. It's not good, but from a high level the US leading the world led to fewer combat deaths.

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-yea...

Note that that graph is logarithmic.

One country waging most of the wars and maiming instead of killing is not an improvement.

How is it not?

It is an improvement considering the last time we had multiple powers we saw minor countries get carved up by major countries and the whole thing eventually flare up in a war that spanned continents, between major countries, and killed millions.

Even the two power order of the Cold war just meant double the problems - the USSR had its fair share of adventures.

The reason that world has fewer full-fledged wars now is major powers have mutual assured destruction, US-leading doesn't come close as that.

Very few countries have nukes and that is part of the US-leading thing. The MAD thing might work out for us, but it is too early to really tell. Might just be pushing the risk to the tails.

>> I mean, it’s a war crime to kill civilians.

Too broad a statement. Civilians can be killed. They can knowingly be killed, even deliberately killed in some circumstances. Civilian deaths can happen when one attacks military targets. Bombing a military airfield can kill civilians. The fact that a civilian cleaner or cook will be killed does not make the attack a war crime. This is very important from a human rights perspective. If the killing of civilians in war was always criminal, armies will surround themselves with civilians. So, ironically, the possible killing of civilians is necessary to prevent them becoming human shields.

Remember too that the definition of "civilian" is complicated these days. Criminals are 'civilians' and a terrorist is a criminal. They may be an enemy combatant in bunker one day, and a civilian criminal defendant the next.

That argument just doesn’t make a lot of sense when you’re bombing a school in Kenya. I mean, why were you bombing anyone in Kenya to begin with? Has Kenya attacked the US?

I guess you could make a long line of explanations, but the war on terror is killing “combatants“ that weren’t even born in 2001. That’s just crazy.

Source? I did a good faith search to find it, and the closest I got was the 1998 bombings of the US embassies and an attack on a college by Al-Shabaab.

These "combatants" are often non-combative, the logic our government here in the US uses to classify combatant purposefully mis-classifies a huge chunk of the populace.

Your government. Not mine. Not everyone here is american.

I think you might be misinterpreting the way I used the word our, you could replace it with the and my comment would have the same meaning.

I am not inferring global ownership of the US government.

I agree with everything you've said, but the frequency and scale of the killing of civilians by US bombs and missiles is incredible - it's literally at the point where only some of these events (and I guarantee we only know of a fraction of them) get even cursory attention from popular media. And when they do, it seems nobody cares.

We're bombarded (pun intended) with constant scenes of war and fighting. We're continually warned, cautioned and kept frightened about the bugbear de jour (North Korea, Russia, China, Daesh, terrorists, whoever). All this is used to justify the terrible actions and atrocities, of our military forces, used to justify ever creeping mass surveillance of the general population, because hey, we're the good guys! We need to do this to keep us safe! The enemy is worse! Etc

It hit saturation point a long time ago, and we know we can do nothing but continue sleepwalking into the dystopian nightmare that awaits us.

I don't think this is anything new. The US was casually bombing people during the Vietnam era with little or no attention from the media. What got attention was the campaign as a whole, mostly after the fact. Individual actions rarely got a mention. I would also be careful about conflating foreign military adventures with domestic spying. While there is some crossover, balling everything into one big problem makes change impossible.

A standard defense by those who support a status quo is to link everything, to state that any change in one area must involve other changes to any number of other programs. It is a delay tactic. Debate spirals upwards until people are talking about bringing down the entire military-industrial complex, not the specific of how drones are being used in a particular conflict. If you see only an edifice it is because they want you to see an edifice. It keeps them safe from specific questions.

In your weapons example the problem is nobody will admit it’s a war crime. People will see it t their own way and to this point there’s no official legal consensus about what to call it. So this is left entirely to the morals of the individuals. This isn’t always the case.

There are plenty of situations where legal barriers are put in place to prevent supplying abusive regimes (for example) with certain types of equipment, software, weapons, etc.

The fact that no one will admit that it’s a war crime is exactly the point I’m making. How do you stop that with individual morals? I probably wouldn’t work in weapons manufacturing, just like I wouldn’t write spysoftware for the NSA, but a lot of people would.

If our ethics as a society allow it, then our individual morals don’t really matter.

Herd immoralization.

Even in weapons manufacturing there are “no go” weapons like around biological warfare where even the simple production is seen as bad.

I am starting to feel like this makes sense in other domains (namely, facial recognition has almost only applications with bad side effects in practice)

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