4 ms·

If persons employer determines your friendship status with them, then maybe they are better off not being associated with you.

molf 9y ago
It goes both ways. It is hard to be friends with someone that makes fundamentally different moral choices.
- _pmf_ 9y ago
  > It is hard to be friends with someone that makes fundamentally different moral choices. It's also how we arrive at a common baseline for morality.
robin_reala 9y ago
That’s a misreading of OP’s point: it’s not the employer that they have a problem with, it’s the morality of their employment.
- nextlevelwizard 9y ago
  Except that is literally what he said. As soon as they work for defense contractors they are no longer considered friends. Presumably no matter what they do, as long as they are associated they are guilty. Be it cleaning floors, writing software, testing hardware, or what have you.
  - geomark 9y ago
    It's not quite that abrupt. I used to work for a defense contractor. I started as a rather naive young engineer. I worked hard for many years on projects that were not weapons systems or even fielded systems, mostly R&D and advanced technology. It was very cool technology. But over the years I gradually became more and more aware of the kind of systems my employer was developing. And although I did not work directly on those systems I knew that some of the technology I was developing would eventually find its way into future versions of those systems. Colleagues would always say "We aren't building bombs so it's ok." But what we were building were key subsystems used for targeting. I eventually left for the non-defense world. So it isn't that friends suddenly became ex's overnight. It is after coming to the realization that over time they either had sold out their ethics in order to make good money working on cool technology regardless of what it is used for, or that they really bought the indoctrination that what they were doing was important patriotic work. As for the latter, I heard that stuff a lot, and I always thought it was a bad sign that the boss had to kept telling you that you are doing important work. You weren't privy to much beyond your own compartmented subsystem but over time you could eventually piece together the bigger story. As for the former, that's similar to the non-defense world where a lot of smart engineers are developing shady stuff, except that it isn't resuling in thousands of people in far away lands being killed week in and week out as a result.
deleted 9y ago
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geomark 9y ago
I suppose that is true. Then they won't have to be bothered by being asked to consider what the systems they are developing are used for. They won't have to rationalize that the many thousands of children who are killed as collateral damage when the systems they designed are used to attack terrorists in far away lands are a justifiable cost of maintaining the American way of life.

molf 9y ago

It goes both ways. It is hard to be friends with someone that makes fundamentally different moral choices.

_pmf_ 9y ago
> It is hard to be friends with someone that makes fundamentally different moral choices. It's also how we arrive at a common baseline for morality.

robin_reala 9y ago

That’s a misreading of OP’s point: it’s not the employer that they have a problem with, it’s the morality of their employment.

nextlevelwizard 9y ago
Except that is literally what he said. As soon as they work for defense contractors they are no longer considered friends. Presumably no matter what they do, as long as they are associated they are guilty. Be it cleaning floors, writing software, testing hardware, or what have you.
- geomark 9y ago
  It's not quite that abrupt. I used to work for a defense contractor. I started as a rather naive young engineer. I worked hard for many years on projects that were not weapons systems or even fielded systems, mostly R&D and advanced technology. It was very cool technology. But over the years I gradually became more and more aware of the kind of systems my employer was developing. And although I did not work directly on those systems I knew that some of the technology I was developing would eventually find its way into future versions of those systems. Colleagues would always say "We aren't building bombs so it's ok." But what we were building were key subsystems used for targeting. I eventually left for the non-defense world. So it isn't that friends suddenly became ex's overnight. It is after coming to the realization that over time they either had sold out their ethics in order to make good money working on cool technology regardless of what it is used for, or that they really bought the indoctrination that what they were doing was important patriotic work. As for the latter, I heard that stuff a lot, and I always thought it was a bad sign that the boss had to kept telling you that you are doing important work. You weren't privy to much beyond your own compartmented subsystem but over time you could eventually piece together the bigger story. As for the former, that's similar to the non-defense world where a lot of smart engineers are developing shady stuff, except that it isn't resuling in thousands of people in far away lands being killed week in and week out as a result.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

geomark 9y ago

I suppose that is true. Then they won't have to be bothered by being asked to consider what the systems they are developing are used for. They won't have to rationalize that the many thousands of children who are killed as collateral damage when the systems they designed are used to attack terrorists in far away lands are a justifiable cost of maintaining the American way of life.