Hacker News Reader

I don't know that I would agree with you that morality is relative, but I strongly agree with your larger point that you shouldn't let other people build your moral code for you. I also would never[1] work for the NSA or a defense contractor.

[1] By "never," I mean that I cannot imagine a realistic scenario in which I would accept such a job. I can imagine an unrealistic scenario in which the head of the NSA has kidnapped my child and is holding New York hostage with a ticking time bomb in which I would accept such a job gladly.

That is the best "HN Disclaimer", I have seen on a comment.

As someone who has done both of those things, the pay is great and the work is interesting. The only thing that sucks is the work environment. SCIFs are a terrible place to be a programmer.

Are SCIFs terrible work environments for software developers specifically or does that assessment apply to other roles in the same environment? What made it so terrible?

> Personally I would never work for the NSA or a defense contractor, but I understand why some people do.

I used to work for a defense contractor and would do so again happily. I think there's just as much of an ethical consideration in play when you're building robots to put people out of work faster than our safety net can keep up with as when you're building robots to fight our wars so American soldiers won't have to.

Does anyone else have a feeling that the idea that it is unacceptable to suffer soldier casualties during war is ultimately emasculating for the US army?

This is not the first time this happens in history, either. The golden age fearsome Roman Legions used the Glatius, a short, broad, and extremely lethal sword as their main service weapon. By the 3rd century A.D. the population had grown so unmanly that some young men would chop off one of their fingers just to avoid being recruited, and the Legions were increasingly composed of long conquered barbarians, who were pitted against new waves of far away barbarians.

These new Legions brought longer, thinner swords into battle. Those were great from a personal safety point of view (you could hold your foe at a longer range), but were harder to use in closed formation and ultimately less effective in the offensive. We all know how that ended for them....

We just spent a decade trying to make people live like we want them to without actually living with them - Lesson #1 of any Counter-Insurgency.

And all that concern about pilots getting captured is why drones will take over everything but strategic bombing. Can't have people getting captured and showing up on the nightly news.

Your analogy is such a long way from modern consequences that I wonder if it really applies. But we have made modern war so expensive, nobody can afford another one. If there is a reason we are not at war with Iran, I'd say that's it.

"Emasculating," or unintentionally beneficial?

> But we have made modern war so expensive, nobody can afford another one.

It's a rich irony that this very same argument was proudly claimed.. about 100 years ago.

I'd say the ethical considerations are much greater in the latter case, since building drones is also putting people out of work (it's well known that poor people enlist in greater numbers than other social classes).

  > My point isn't to start an off-topic debate, it's to 
  > point out that morality is complex and subjective, 
  > and it's up to the individual to make their own decisions.

Did the author make the opposite point? (I'm having trouble seeing it if he did. For example, the sentence that follows what you quoted exemplifies the author's efforts to not define morality in strict terms: "However, we [engineers] are part and parcel of industrial modernity with all its might, advantages and flaws, and we therefore contribute to human suffering as well as flourishing.")