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That depends on the function of the knife. If the knife is meant for buttering bread, then obviously no. If you're creating a combat knife then absolutely, yes.
by sparkie 9y ago
That depends on the function of the knife. If the knife is meant for buttering bread, then obviously no. If you're creating a combat knife then absolutely, yes.
Which is precisely the point made in the article. It's not about what you're making, it's about what you're making it for.
- catshirt 9y agoso if i can repurpose someone else's example: you're suggesting that if i make a knife for buttering bread and it kills someone because i was careless in my creating of the knife, there is "obviously" no ethical impact because my intent was good? and this leads to my real point. find me 1 programmer who perpetuates this myth that there exists an engineer who says its impossible for their job to invoke ethics. funny that the top of this list says it's a "falsehood programmers believe" yet not a single person here wants to take that side. either it's painfully obvious or it's not a myth. pick one.
- Semiapies 9y agoThe problem is that in programming, if you build a halfway decent butter-knife, the NSA will use it to pry open your window and eavesdrop on you with it, the CIA will torture people with it, and various dictatorships will stab dissidents in the eyes with it. It's not like bad actors only use Obviously Evil Software. They use many of the same tools we use for similar tasks. The more general software is, the more bad actors are using it, too. Now, sure, if you're working on Disposition Matrix 2.0 assassinating selection system, or a botnet framework, the moral and ethical fallout is obvious. Short of that, things quickly get a lot murkier, and at some point, the creators of, say, gcc just aren't to blame for every harmful thing compiled with it. At some point, it's simply not a falsehood.