“I just woke up one morning and it struck me that I was a murderer. so I quit.”
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That's the reason for the ABM limitation treaties
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treat...
Study history: WWII, Cold War, etc. If you play nice with dictators, you will be annihilated. We have been enjoying the benefits of freedom and democracy our ancestors fought for, without considering the costs of their sacrifices.
Extensive data and studies (ex: Zimbardo, Milgram) supports that humans have immense capacity for evil- checks and balances are there to avoid this dark side of human nature.
Missiles are there to deter evil (order), not necessarily to propagate it (chaos). So there you have it.
There's a 1918 plaque in Bath, NC that reads "Bath, originally the Indian town of Pampticough, was settled by white men about 1690 and incorporated in 1703. It is the oldest town in North Carolina."
What enabled the replacement of the original inhabitants was technology, in the form of ships, guns, and, arguably, health care. Given that events like this are some of the sources of the 'freedom and democracy our ancestors fought for', are you willing to grant that evil depends on which side you stand on? Are you willing to discuss the idea that maybe technology isn't neutral?
Democratization might work, but isn't there a risk for the user to corrupt its intended purpose due to the inherent darkness of human nature?
Ex: Initial intents of democratizing knowledge (Google) or social networks (Facebook) both ultimately ended up corroding society with misinformation, fueled by human greed in the ad industry.
What do you say of missiles, and as extension, nuclear weapons? Do you want dictatorships to have them as well? They will ultimately, but we cannot control their use for deterrence or destruction (MAD policy).
Sure, it is people who make decisions, and so they have moral responsibility (at least in my model of the world and in yours.) Consider our examples; whether it's ships and guns leading to the colonization of the US, nuclear weapons leading to the threat of nuclear destruction, or TCPIP, HTTP, HTML, etc leading to the societal effects of Google and Facebook, there are unintended consequences that wouldn't be present if the technology were absent.
> Democratization might work, but isn't there a risk for the user to corrupt its intended purpose due to the inherent darkness of human nature?
> What do you say of missiles, and as extension, nuclear weapons? Do you want dictatorships to have them as well?
So, again from our examples, in your view, 'we' (the ones with the technology) are the 'good guys', and 'they' (the ones without the technology) are the 'bad guys.' Is there something besides the technology that actually makes us morally superior, or are all humans created equal? I don't see how you can have it both ways. To me, it looks like technology is the difference, making its case for neutrality suspect IMO.
I'm not convinced this follows. It's seems like what the OP is saying is that technology has the ability to amplify the morals of those wielding it. That technology is the difference is exactly the point. It's amoral and when owned by the "good guys" (whatever your definition), it amplifies those morals and ethics and vice versa for the "bad guys".
In other words, it's not the technology but the morals of those who own it that is the root of good/evil. Unless your point is that a neutrality requirement is that technology must be incapable of being used for either good or ill, the neutrality claim is valid. (Personally, I prefer the term 'amoral' to neutral but I suspect the OP meant the same thing).
I think my main point is that it is the technology-wielding side that prevails, independent of morality. Which means that technology has a moral impact, in reshaping what would otherwise be a fairer fight. Having won, the tech-wielders claim they are the good guys, independent of the actual morality of the situation. "Might makes right." "History is written by the victors."
That’s an interesting systematic perspective if you can get to the view that morals/ethics are subjective and a response to social standing. Almost sounds as a Nietzche-ian perspective
Maybe more like we bend the compass to see what we want to see in it.
I'm reminded of a line from the title assassin in 'Grosse Point Blank'... "When I left, I joined the army, and when I took the service exam my psych profile fit a certain... moral flexibility would be the only way to describe it... and I was loaned out to a CIA-sponsored program, and we sort of found each other. That's how it works."
Probably more the latter ('casting it as moral because they are in a position to do so') than the former ('know what they are doing')... IMO, most people, most of the time, think they're doing the right thing, from their perspective. However I'd want to leave room for the idea that they may not be weighing, or even conscious of, systemic moral and ethical factors.
I think I am more, silently, responding to your second comment,
> That’s an interesting systematic perspective if you can get to the view that morals/ethics are subjective and a response to social standing.
I tend to view morals and ethics as part of an objective Platonic (technically, Judeo-Christian) ideal. So the 'subjective' description rubs me the wrong way, though it is an accurate description of the observed effects.
And China now is far too powerful for us to even think about fighting a hot war against, yet if you shared the facts about it with anyone from half a century ago, they wouldn't have to think for more than a second before recognizing it as a dictatorship, a nationalist, supposedly-socialist single-party country with a cult of personality, suppression of rights in neighboring territories, and ongoing genocide. We're playing nice with them, because if we don't, we'll be annihilated.
If humans have immense capacity for evil, one of the best things we can do is limit how much damage their dark side can do. Lots of technology is great - communications technology so you can learn about the rest of the world, the ability to increase food production and provide clean water, healthcare, protection from the elements, transportation, and so forth. It's not clear to me that missiles are really the right tool.
Charges that would be considered equivalent to land mines are used to implode buildings.
Demolition charge equivalents put out oil fires.
And any projectile or missile ever made can be fired in a purely defensive use, although that's more of a moral boundary than a benign usage per se.
But I also worked in ad tech for many years.
So I have things to atone for. :-)
The military is mostly reacting to the executive branch and doesn't have the same perceived corrupting influence.
Edit: https://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/06/middleeast/us-collateral-... has some more info.
No, I'm not judging, maybe I would do it myself. I'm just refusing to pretend there's is anything honourable about that.
If the difference between criminal and lawful is just a matter of profit margins, I suspect it's hard for people think of you as being dirty, and the only question is how dirty.
I suspect in part it comes from the country having its genesis in a war, its first president being a general, and its republic built around a president whose title is "commander in chief."
That and its economic supremacy / dominance is supported in part by its military dominance.
The head of this new force and later the whole country, Eisenhower, even warned us that the military-industrial complex he leveraged was starting to become too powerful: https://youtu.be/uGd-rkPoGa4
Nonetheless is it bad to associate welfare with honor?
Defense contracting has complex returns for its owners. On the one hand it’s a ton of fucking money for stuff that again, never sees combat. On the other hand, you have to spend that money in Alabama, not New York or Los Angeles (where rich people want to live). On the other hand, you’re spending a lot of that money in Alabama.
I sympathize with the idea that the graft and inefficiency, in this abstract sense, is unethical, at least at the same magnitude as building a missile platform. It will never be used, making it only abstractly a support of violence against innocents. Whereas some enlisted are ultimately sent out to go kill people in the Middle East — but weren’t they just the ones to lose the welfare lotto of a cushy deployment in the 9,999 other places you could be sent? Or that the drones that actually routinely perform violence at a distance are considerably cheaper than the SpaceX missile platform, so if you sought to reduce the military budget the drones would be the LAST thing that gets cut and actually violence per dollar would RISE? Anyway, the ethics are hard to boil down to some pithy one liner, it’s an immature and unjust reduction of the complexities of real politics and how we measure things.
Besides, the EU also does this. A lot of governments do.
A company like Blackwater is much closer to actual mercenaries - they're trying to build their own private, independent military-industrial complex, in a sense, by selling their services to existing complexes.
For this matter, Department of Defense is also a euphemism. It used to have the more honest name Department of War until that was changed in the late 1940s.
(A side effect here: the military finds it harder to recruit in places which have good job markets and higher minimum wages, because their value proposition isn't as strong in comparison, and the risk of moral injury and regular old injury weighs against that choice. Here's an article about it, from a right-leaning news site no less: https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/02/us-army-recruiting-proble...)
While "just following orders" isn't a defense for war crimes, I think there's a lot of sympathy for people who enlist and follow the rules of war, and we don't see them as morally culpable for making the wars happen (or giving the military the ability to engage in war). Most of them would prefer to finish their agreed term of service and go back home.
Meanwhile, defense contractors profit specifically from military engagements ("Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired...") and have more of an incentive to see wars happen, and they generally employ people who can find equivalent jobs and careers outside of defense, so if you're the sort of person who finds the military-industrial complex unethical, it makes a lot more sense to pin it on the industrial part of that complex.
It does differ by region and time, though.
Still, great observation.
There are many people who forego more lucrative careers (in a monetary sense) as a private contractor because of the idea of service. In other words, they feel they are serving a higher purpose in the military and would be selling out to go to a defense contractor. Ironically, these careers in the military are the ones with the largest retention incentives due to this very reason.
Woah! It is insane that they are able to do this.
Does anyone know how much money/effort is going into achieving this? Might be interesting to compare such insane investments into destructive stuff vs investments in fighting poverty and such.
( although if you're financing hundreds of fancy weapon systems you may be irrationally diverting funds from productive ventures like healthcare. )
My dad came home and quit.
Since then I've been kinda aware that a lot of engineers work is on the balance is a net negative. Especially true in the US and getting worse.
While it's tempting to say that there's no moral dimension this far out, I think that's not quite true - there is a moral dimension to making technology work more smoothly. It increases the ability of anyone with some power to do things at scale. On the one hand, it gives ability for anyone with tiny amounts of power to make use of it (consider the effect of, say, typewriters in the Soviet Union, or even farther back, the printing press in the hands of Luther's supporters). On the other hand, it absolutely increases the ability of people with massive amounts of power to use that power more efficiently (like the "war cloud"). My own view here is that, for those of us whose day job is in improving infrastructure / technical leverage, this increases how important it is for us as members of society to make sure that power is distributed equitably and justly. Since it's indirect, we don't have to advocate for this through what we choose to be directly employed on (the way we would if we were literally working on missile targeting software), and it's often difficult to do so, but we should advocate for this through how we engage with the political process (broadly defined) in the rest of our lives.
There's also a question of what sort of improvements you make to it. Security improvements are generally a thing you can feel good about: people with small amounts of power are much more likely to have security flaws exploited than to use security flaws offensively, so even if there's an argument that hardening some software makes it harder to attack evil businesses or evil governments, it also has the much more practical effect of making it harder for those entities to attack dissidents' personal devices. And similarly for what you choose to do: working on Signal helps the low-power individual much more than working on SELinux, even though both are conceivably dual-use.
[1] https://firstdonoharm.dev/
Not because I agree with the thought behind it. I think national defence is a necessity. I'd have no problems writing the software. But because the coder had the guts to put his money where his mouth is, and leave the job.
I respect that. About a million times more than keyboard SJW who type a lot but change not at all.
But helping out the US in developing high-precission weapons does the opposite.
1. It might save lifes, as the alternative is dumb carpet bombing. As we know during WW2, carpet bombing killed mostly civilians and destroyed cities.
2. Most weapons that the US has, are there for deterrence, and not necessary meant to be used, and in the long run hopefully they are never used.
3. The US is the better greater power by a long stretch. I know it gets a lot of flak here, but while it has done many mistakes, the US has done more good that usually gets forgotten. The alternative is China (in the Pacific) or Russian hegemony in half of Europe. I am talking as someone born in a former communist country. And almost all former communist countries in Europe are staunch US supporters/allies as they have lived first hand communism, and experienced its rotten system.
It's better to spend efforts in education and culture instead of spending more on police defense. It's better to spend efforts in negotiations and ways to sign peace treaties instead of making wars. It's better to spend efforts in making chirurgical items instead of spending efforts in making weapons.
These missiles are there to protect the economic hegemony.
Also, WW1, the US stayed away as much as it could, the eventually had to intervene as its ships started sinking
The point of having lots of weapons, is not to have to use them, but be credible threat to not have the other side dare to use their weapons on you.
Russia/Putin and China are developing hypersonic nuclear missiles. What is the US going to do about it? Sing, kumbaya and pray for world peace.... ?
Not defending isolationism, but wasn’t the last invasion of the US around 1812?
No, both were US territories.
They weren't states, but they weren't independent, either.
The way to make peace is to make sure it is not worthwhile for someone else to attack you.
Eventually, Hitler happened to lose that war with even negotiation being impossible. Generally, Hitler said something is pretty bad argument for anything, as that man said a lot of bullshit in his life.
Don't give people a reason to litigate and they won't fight.
Try to consider that countries where there is a common level of wealth and welfare, have lower rates of criminality (i.e. Norway).
Have you ever thought how much money has been spent in "defense" (ironically any country had and has a "defense" ministry, even those countries who attack) during human history? Can you imagine what could have been done if that money had gone into peace research?
I know that when a war has been started then you have to fight but you can try to prevent it. So instead of working on missiles control system it's better if you work on diplomacy and software that provides wealth and knowledge to the people.
Remember: this world could be heaven if we want it to be. Do what you want to do to make it heaven or hell.
It's prevented if you're stronger than the other guy. I can't think of a single example in history of a country starting a war against a much more powerful opponent that was willing to use that power.
Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because they thought the US would be unwilling to fight a Pacific war with them. Hitler declared war on the US believing the US wouldn't fight. The Confederacy didn't believe the Union would fight, or if they did, was a match for the Confederacy.
> Do what you want to do to make it heaven or hell.
The US is a heaven by pretty much any historical measure. Military spending is 3-4% of GDP, a small price to pay to prevent war.
The Taliban supporting Sept. 11th attacks is an example, although you can argue that it doesn't count because many did not view their government as "legitimate". There's at least some who believe drawing major powers into protracted wars is exactly the point of the offensive.
Its a historical fact upon signing Treaty of Versailles a fuse for WW2 was lit.
WW2 was matter of when and not if (well war in Europe that would have colonies involved dragging them into war making it world war)
But to each their own.
I'm trying to focus on active genocide campaigns that the US is supporting with weapons, not the two genocides that were instigated in part by Facebook. Let me know if I'm missing any.
Do you know why the US is the world's biggest arms dealer? Mostly because all of those free, liberal democracies buy very expensive weapons from the US and have the most affluent economies (thus they can afford US aircraft that cost tens of millions of dollars).
In a typical year, 3/4 or more of all US weapons sales go to human rights protecting liberal democracies. Across five years to 2017, 18% of US weapons sales went to Saudi Arabia (12.4% went to Taiwan and Australia by comparison).
Should the US stop selling weapons to Taiwan, so China's annexation is really easy? Should the US stop selling weapons to Australia, so China can be even less worried as they try to intimidate Australia and control Asia?
Does it take all of those liberal democracies to offset Saudi Arabia, or is it one to one? How does the subjective moral scale work exactly? Does it accumulate over time, such that the US has a billion year credit for protecting and aiding Europe and Asia before and after WW2? How many credits is keeping democratic Taiwan apart from China for this long worth? Does the US get a trillion moral credits for being the only nation that is willing to stand up to China militarily re Taiwan? How about South Korea, does one South Korea for 70 years off-set one Saudi Arabia?
So many fascinating questions and that's just scratching the surface.
It was deliberate strategy from the UK and the USA, with the goal to demoralize and punish German & Japanese civilians. Mass civilian death and the total destruction of whole cities was the result. Napalm, for example was specifically developed to create building fires that would spread quickly and not be easily extinguished.
The sheer horror of it is not spoken much of in the west, where the crimes against humanity that Nazi Germany performed are rightly highlighted. But as a person with an ex-pat German father who grew up in the rubble, and a grandfather who helped reconstruct post-WWII Mainz, I was always made acutely aware of it.
Frankly, it makes me cringe every rememberance day when I hear my Canadian friends talk about their heroic grandparents, etc. who flew Lancaster bombers during WWII. My Opa did something far more heroic which was to spend the bulk of the war in an American POW camp, not fighting anybody -- and learning English in the process.
If the Germans had had the capability of bombing London they would have (but couldn't thanks to radar). This was not a small conflict but an existential fight for existence between two groups of countries.
I have a hard time judging the decision to carpet bomb during WWII harshly given the circumstances. Note that both sides had nerve agents that were not deployed because neither wanted that escalation.
There are definitely events, and even wars, where the US has committed atrocities but I don't think carpet bombing during WWII is a good example of it.
That's not to say the Germans wouldn't have tried, if they could have. But they were tied up in the east doing very awful things there. The Russians unfortunately bore the brunt of total Nazi savagery.
The British strategic bombing against Germany started with Operation Abigail Rachel in December 1940:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Mannheim_in_World_W...
Which itself followed the start of the London Blitz in September 1940:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz#First_phase
The first V2 attack against the UK was much later, in September 1944:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket#Operational_history
Moreover, while I concede that the US entering some wars has been good, that does not guarantee that it will continue like that, so if you are developing missile guiding systems you should always reflect on that they might be used for evil. You could even say that many of the Russian scientists were probably thinking they were working on defending against evil.
if you are avoiding politics, you are just blindly following some politics.
Maybe one can't completely avoid politics, but there are reasonable senses in which the word "politics" is used, such that, in those senses, one can avoid politics to some non-negligible degree.
If there is a discussion of one topic which people don't really tend to get upset about much, and then someone makes a big stretch to connect it to some other topic which has a lot of rather heated partisan controversy around it, the person who made the stretch to make the connection is doing the opposite of what might reasonably be called "avoiding politics". Not to say that anything like that happened in any of the relevant cases at hand, just to give an example that I think demonstrates why the concept of "avoiding politics in some sense to some degree" is a sensible concept.
If so, we have to acknowledge that politics and ethics is a Venn diagram with a lot of crossover.