Science grad with 10 years engineering experience. I had to turn down a lot of jobs before I found one that didn’t involve killing people. It took two years. I’m paid about half of what I could get if I sold my morals. Totally worth it.
For what it’s worth, I believe at the moment of death, people can no longer lie to themselves and have to face what they’ve done through the eyes of their inner child. Some people have these realisations at some earlier point, too. But I don’t believe anyone gets away with it.
That’s what “live each day like it’s going to be your last” means to me. Face up to the decisions you made as if you’re your own jury, because eventually you will be.
Did you intend this to be paradoxical?
A bit, yes. There’s an inherent paradox in the argument about necessity. Put it another way: if the next technology turns all of your enemies into steam, but as a side effect, also does the same to their families, are you forced to develop it, because the people on the other side of the world will just get there first if you don’t? What if the one after that is super low resource yet it also kills anyone who has ever shaken hands with your enemy? etc etc. I would argue that creating a new weapon, or developing existing ones further is not made more or less moral on the basis that your enemy might be doing it, because if you know your enemy’s mind that well, you could easily defeat them using a slingshot.
This is likely wrong…Some of us would brutally murder each other with sticks and stones if they had nothing better.
Not sure I follow, this seems to be what I was saying. Read it back. The difference is that now we have technology capable of remotely erasing huge populations, and no means whatsoever of keeping it out of the hands of the freaks that invariably take power. It’s therefore immoral to develop weapons because if you are clever enough to know how to do that, you should be clever enough to know how the resulting products will end up being used.
most defense work is not creating the atomic bomb. Most of it is incremental improvements
So the difference between them then is just one of scale. Oppenheimer probably never got a good night’s sleep again in his life, but it’s easy to persuade a thousand people to each do a thousandth of what he did. Then each person is only a thousandth as responsible as Oppenheimer. But each increment is still an evil deed, just a smaller one.
“Concern for man himself and his fate must always constitute the chief objective of all technological endeavors…in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.” People working on weapons are ignoring, forgetting or equivocating over this simple fact. Good people don’t make bombs and sleep well at night. Find another job, where you can look back at your life’s work and honestly believe you made the world a better place.
Anyway, we agree that psychopathic megalomaniacs are a feature of the human creature. And whether or not they are flying drones, driving tanks, or a leading a hoard of mounted Visigoths at your village, I think most of us would rather remove them as a threat from a safe distance… Like with a missile.
Most of us would prefer our enemies killed at range, without having to look then in the eye, sure. But look at what you’re mixing up here: the psychopathic megalomaniacs who are sitting barking orders a world away from the lethality radii, and the grunts and (invariably) innocent collateral who are atomised inside them.
No, what you said was that it didn’t matter whether or not you took the job, because it would get done anyway. And that is a flawed argument.
Yet psychopathic megalomaniacal leaders are a feature of the human race further back than recorded history, where remote mass destruction of estranged populations is a very recent development. Therefore it is immoral to develop, create and deploy weaponry like this and, “we will be the victims of it if we do not”, is a similarly weak moral argument to the one above. Just because we expect someone else to do the immoral thing does not render us any more moral for having done it. I don’t think. Yes, you can argue necessity, but how far does that go? If a pacifist somehow held in their hands a button which would kill every non-pacifist in the world, should they push it? And, in creating any new technology, we do need to ask, “is introducing this worth the risk of it falling into the wrong hands?” . Similar to how anti privacy laws creep in. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear, until the next government gets in and you need to hide being gay, or brown, or a woman. It’s not a question of whether or not “the good guys” get the weapon, it’s a question of what happens when the bad guys do, because they certainly will, because that’s what bad guys do.
The flaw is explained in what I just said.
Ultimately, doing something evil just because you decide someone else would do it if you didn’t, so you might as well benefit doesn’t make it any less evil of you to do that thing. In fact, it makes it worse.
This argument is deeply flawed, and I’ve heard engineers working on arms projects using it to justify what they’re doing. That, and the “I just build it, it’s not me pulling the trigger” are trotted out to soothe dying moral consciences all the time. There are far too many bright minds being used to create death and suffering.
The fact that by partaking in this industry, you form a critical part of the decision and event chain that leads to bad people killing innocent people is important, morally, and completely unchanged by whether it not someone else will do it. So it does matter if you turn that job down, and not just for your own conscience.
If enough people turn down these jobs then that will change politics. And those that do choose to take them need to face up to their responsibility in enabling and perpetuating horror.
Meh, your guess is as good as mine.