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If it makes MIT feel better, I don't think "ethics" when I think of MIT. I think technological leadership and excellence, but definitely not ethics. For starter

If it makes MIT feel better, I don't think "ethics" when I think of MIT. I think technological leadership and excellence, but definitely not ethics. For starters, they have plenty of collaborations with the military (e.g., MIT Lincoln Labs; not saying that can't be ethical... but it usually means someone's going to die). Nothing to be ashamed of. Somebody's gotta do it...

user15128 9y ago
as long as it is not you who is dying?
darawk 9y ago
What's unethical about collaborating with the military? We don't exist in a vacuum. American military hegemony has been an extremely powerful stabilizing force, post-WWII. This idea that it is unethical to build weapons is profoundly wrong, short sighted, and morally selfish. Not to overly pick on your comment, since you did say that it can be ethical, of course. But i've seen this sentiment that military work is unethical echo'd a bunch of times here lately, and I think it's an incredibly naive perspective.
- knuththetruth 9y ago
  I think as human consciousness, morality, and our understanding of history have evolved, the question we now ask is “Stability for whom?” Certainly not for Latin America during the Cold War, for example. Those who oppose collaborating with the military do so because “America military hegemony” has been used for all kinds of horrors, including recent events like the Iraq War. There’s nothing naive about not wanting to be party to at least half a million civilian casualties and the destabilization of the Middle East. You can make some Real Politik argument about the ends justifying the means, if that’s what you truly believe, but you’ll have to do so more explicitly and account for things like Vietnam and the Iraq War. The reductive abstraction of “stability” you pose know longer holds the same kind of sway it once did among most people.
  - darawk 9y ago
    The fact that violence has happened does not mean that it isn't substantially less than it was. The decrease in rates of violence in modern history is profound, and has been discussed at length, here's a chart: https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/6 https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/6 Do you see how it goes down since 1950? The fact that the US has been involved in conflicts is not evidence that the US, on balance, creates more violence. Does that mean the US military has made no mistakes? No, of course not. It's made plenty. But the world is a real place where decisions are made by people, and order is imposed by force. Someone is going to impose it. Surveying the landscape of world powers today, i'll take the US over anyone else, any and every day. And that is the only decision that matters. Talking about civilian deaths de-contextualized from the reality of the alternatives is exactly what I mean by 'naive'.
    - knuththetruth 9y ago
      >Talking about civilian deaths de-contextualized from the reality of the alternatives is exactly what I mean by 'naive'. The alternative to the Iraq War was not having the Iraq War, which by any sane account was the correct course of action. Half a million people didn’t half to die, but they did, because a lot of people embrace a kind of unquestioning idea of authority as “good,” to which you seem to subscribe. >And that is the only decision that matters. You’re free to define the scope of your ethics however you like, but again, these kind of simplistic appeals are increasingly untenable to most people. And many would probably categorize your adherence to their logic as “naive.”
      - darawk 9y ago
        > The alternative to the Iraq War was not having the Iraq War, which by any sane account was the correct course of action. Half a million people didn’t half to die, but they did You'll get no disagreement from me there. Like I said, and you seem to want to ignore, the US has done bad things. The question isn't "has this entity ever done anything wrong", the question you have to answer is: from the pool of available options, who's best? > You’re free to define the scope of your ethics however you like, but again, these kind of simplistic appeals are increasingly untenable to most people. And many would probably categorize your adherence to their logic as “naive.” It's your appeal that's simplistic. You're taking the world as you'd like it to be, rather than how it actually is. Someone has to have power. And if it's not the people you support, who's it going to be?
- cup 9y ago
  >an extremely powerful stabilizing force For the American empire. Less so for the rest of the world.
  - bobthechef 9y ago
    To be sure, there is plenty that the American empire can be criticized for. But if not the American empire, then whom? You think that power vacuum wouldn't be filled with something worse? Look at the contenders. The US, with all its flaws, is preferable. I am not endorsing American evils, but keep in mind that this kind of trivialization of geopolitical realities is unwise. It's better to focus on repairing what the US does wrong instead of suggesting that the entire empire must fall without thinking about the resulting clusterfuck that would ensue.
  - refurb 9y ago
    I'd say preventing a nuclear war is pretty damn stabilizing across the world.
- fatjokes 9y ago
  That's exactly what I meant when I said it's nothing to be ashamed of, somebody's gotta do it. Just don't kid yourself that it makes you ethical. Sure, you could argue that you're "better than the other guy" or "they started it", but that's a pretty low bar. It just means you're both unethical.
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    Combining unethical and necessary defeats the point of identifying some things as unethical: if you're going to do them anyways, why bother calling them wrong? The motivation behind bringing ethics into the workplace is that broader human interests are that engineers and other front-liners (operators, doctors, technicians, soldiers) should refuse to do things that are excessively bad. If you think they should just suck it up and get the job done, then don't bin the job you want them to do in with other things that they clearly shouldn't. It needs to be considered acceptable to tell your boss no on ethical grounds. To make this concrete, we want there to be one bin for "putting live viral payloads in to vaccines destined for a foreign country," and another bin for "annoying shoppers with eye-level advertisements," and maybe another bin for "improving the efficiency of infrastructure." Ideally, irrespective of where the profit motives lied it would be impossible to recruit anybody for sufficiently nefarious purposes, with the recruitment difficulty scaling with how much harm they knew they were going to do to the world.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - darawk 9y ago
    I respectfully disagree. Consider a thought experiment: You have two groups of people. Group A is ethical (per your definition), well intentioned and smart. Group B is cruel, authoritarian and egotistical. Group A doesn't like to think about war, and certainly doesn't want to contribute to the machinery of war. Group B, on the other hand, delights in it. Group B loves building weapons and thinking about military strategy. Very quickly in this civilization, Group B will come to dominate Group A, and they will build a world in their own image - cruel and inhuman. Given that we know this is the outcome, in what sense is Group A's choice really ethical? The question you have to ask is: If it's not you who has the best weapons, who is it? If it's not you devising military strategy, who is? The answer is someone else. Probably someone who likes those things more than you. Is that the sort of person you want to have that kind of power?
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  There are several reasons. First, weapons are made to kill. Even if they're not used, if they're finally used, the result is someone's death. Second, the USA is not only stabilizing peace, but from time to time disrupts it. Sometimes a war is waged without proper consideration. I think Iraq is the best example, but the intervention in Afghanistan wasn't necessary either. Third, even if you say the above were just mistakes, and the leaders of the USA had good intentions, weapons are a product just like everything else, and so they're sold. The USA has a list of "good" and "bad" states, but circumstances change very quickly nowadays. Also, once you sell a weapon, even to a "good" state, you lose control. On the other hand, there are some military applications that are actually meant to save lives rather than taking them. One good example is clearing land mines - I guess no engineer would have any problems helping in constructing a robot that would disarm mines and other explosives.
  - darawk 9y ago
    In a moral vacuum, I agree. If I could flip a switch and permanently erase nuclear weapons from the world, I think i'd probably flip that switch. However, we don't exist in a world with switches like that. Any weapon the US doesn't develop out of some moral sensibility, another state like Russian or China will. Ceding military strength is not virtuous, it's naive. The choice isn't between "should these weapons exist or not", it's "who should have them?". And the answer to that choice is: the entity you distrust least. For me that's the USG. I distrust them, just less than I do the other candidates. And this is an extremely critical moral choice, because it's the only real one. Any other choice is just burying your head in the sand and saying the world doesn't exist.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
      Well, with WMDs we're past that point already. We have enough nukes to transform this world into hell in a few hours. Any advances in that area are of the nature that Putin mentioned recently, ones that no civilized nation would ever develop. There is an enormous conventional arms market though. These are guns, pistols etc. Their sole aim is to kill people, plain and simple. You could justify it by saying some of those people deserve being killed, but as a creator of the weapon you can't know that, you have no control on how it's used. That's why many people would have moral objections against the production of conventional weapons.
- rayiner 9y ago
  > This idea that it is unethical to build weapons is profoundly wrong, short sighted, and morally selfish. Right. Anything unethical about building photon torpedoes for the federation? No.
  - darawk 9y ago
    I didn't say it was unethical to build weapons for anyone. I said it wasn't unethical to help build them at all. We don't live in a vacuum. If you don't build weapons for the side you prefer, someone else will for the side they prefer. And if all the 'good' people don't support the side they like, guess which side gets all the weapons? If you don't have any 'ethical' people in the military, guess who makes all the decisions? This is really so easy to think through, and the only moral conclusion is pretty clear.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      I was agreeing with you.
      - darawk 9y ago
        Ah sorry. Not up on my star trek references :).
- Chris_Jay 9y ago
  I think it's fair to say that designing weapons that others will use is always an ethical quandary with unknowable complexity. If someone errs on the side of causing no harm - a commonly accepted default if discussions of the Trolly problem are anything to go by - then designing weapons is difficult to justify because it's just impossible to ensure that they'll be used in a way the designer would sanction. I don't necessarily disagree that it's naive to opt for inaction when faced with an ethical quandary of unknowable outcome, but it does seem to be the default position and that does count for a lot. What I find interesting is that in some cases, the broad outcomes of a particular weapon being designed are predictable. Gunpowder is widely credited with destabilizing the feudal social order because it put military supremacy in the hands of the peasantry. Modern drones could well be used to sustain a new social order much in the way that heavy armor and stirrups sustained the feudal one. Whether that's a good thing of course depends on other ethical considerations, but if I had the opportunity to work on a weapons system, I would think much more about those kinds of implications than who would be using it - it seems best to assume the answer to that question is, "everyone".
deviationblue 9y ago
>If it makes MIT feel better, I don't think "ethics" when I think of MIT. You and every Tom, Dick and Harry. And that's okay why?

user15128 9y ago

as long as it is not you who is dying?

darawk 9y ago

What's unethical about collaborating with the military? We don't exist in a vacuum. American military hegemony has been an extremely powerful stabilizing force, post-WWII. This idea that it is unethical to build weapons is profoundly wrong, short sighted, and morally selfish. Not to overly pick on your comment, since you did say that it can be ethical, of course. But i've seen this sentiment that military work is unethical echo'd a bunch of times here lately, and I think it's an incredibly naive perspective.

knuththetruth 9y ago
I think as human consciousness, morality, and our understanding of history have evolved, the question we now ask is “Stability for whom?” Certainly not for Latin America during the Cold War, for example. Those who oppose collaborating with the military do so because “America military hegemony” has been used for all kinds of horrors, including recent events like the Iraq War. There’s nothing naive about not wanting to be party to at least half a million civilian casualties and the destabilization of the Middle East. You can make some Real Politik argument about the ends justifying the means, if that’s what you truly believe, but you’ll have to do so more explicitly and account for things like Vietnam and the Iraq War. The reductive abstraction of “stability” you pose know longer holds the same kind of sway it once did among most people.
- darawk 9y ago
  The fact that violence has happened does not mean that it isn't substantially less than it was. The decrease in rates of violence in modern history is profound, and has been discussed at length, here's a chart: https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/6 https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/6 Do you see how it goes down since 1950? The fact that the US has been involved in conflicts is not evidence that the US, on balance, creates more violence. Does that mean the US military has made no mistakes? No, of course not. It's made plenty. But the world is a real place where decisions are made by people, and order is imposed by force. Someone is going to impose it. Surveying the landscape of world powers today, i'll take the US over anyone else, any and every day. And that is the only decision that matters. Talking about civilian deaths de-contextualized from the reality of the alternatives is exactly what I mean by 'naive'.
  - knuththetruth 9y ago
    >Talking about civilian deaths de-contextualized from the reality of the alternatives is exactly what I mean by 'naive'. The alternative to the Iraq War was not having the Iraq War, which by any sane account was the correct course of action. Half a million people didn’t half to die, but they did, because a lot of people embrace a kind of unquestioning idea of authority as “good,” to which you seem to subscribe. >And that is the only decision that matters. You’re free to define the scope of your ethics however you like, but again, these kind of simplistic appeals are increasingly untenable to most people. And many would probably categorize your adherence to their logic as “naive.”
    - darawk 9y ago
      > The alternative to the Iraq War was not having the Iraq War, which by any sane account was the correct course of action. Half a million people didn’t half to die, but they did You'll get no disagreement from me there. Like I said, and you seem to want to ignore, the US has done bad things. The question isn't "has this entity ever done anything wrong", the question you have to answer is: from the pool of available options, who's best? > You’re free to define the scope of your ethics however you like, but again, these kind of simplistic appeals are increasingly untenable to most people. And many would probably categorize your adherence to their logic as “naive.” It's your appeal that's simplistic. You're taking the world as you'd like it to be, rather than how it actually is. Someone has to have power. And if it's not the people you support, who's it going to be?
cup 9y ago
>an extremely powerful stabilizing force For the American empire. Less so for the rest of the world.
- bobthechef 9y ago
  To be sure, there is plenty that the American empire can be criticized for. But if not the American empire, then whom? You think that power vacuum wouldn't be filled with something worse? Look at the contenders. The US, with all its flaws, is preferable. I am not endorsing American evils, but keep in mind that this kind of trivialization of geopolitical realities is unwise. It's better to focus on repairing what the US does wrong instead of suggesting that the entire empire must fall without thinking about the resulting clusterfuck that would ensue.
- refurb 9y ago
  I'd say preventing a nuclear war is pretty damn stabilizing across the world.
fatjokes 9y ago
That's exactly what I meant when I said it's nothing to be ashamed of, somebody's gotta do it. Just don't kid yourself that it makes you ethical. Sure, you could argue that you're "better than the other guy" or "they started it", but that's a pretty low bar. It just means you're both unethical.
- whatshisface 9y ago
  Combining unethical and necessary defeats the point of identifying some things as unethical: if you're going to do them anyways, why bother calling them wrong? The motivation behind bringing ethics into the workplace is that broader human interests are that engineers and other front-liners (operators, doctors, technicians, soldiers) should refuse to do things that are excessively bad. If you think they should just suck it up and get the job done, then don't bin the job you want them to do in with other things that they clearly shouldn't. It needs to be considered acceptable to tell your boss no on ethical grounds. To make this concrete, we want there to be one bin for "putting live viral payloads in to vaccines destined for a foreign country," and another bin for "annoying shoppers with eye-level advertisements," and maybe another bin for "improving the efficiency of infrastructure." Ideally, irrespective of where the profit motives lied it would be impossible to recruit anybody for sufficiently nefarious purposes, with the recruitment difficulty scaling with how much harm they knew they were going to do to the world.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- darawk 9y ago
  I respectfully disagree. Consider a thought experiment: You have two groups of people. Group A is ethical (per your definition), well intentioned and smart. Group B is cruel, authoritarian and egotistical. Group A doesn't like to think about war, and certainly doesn't want to contribute to the machinery of war. Group B, on the other hand, delights in it. Group B loves building weapons and thinking about military strategy. Very quickly in this civilization, Group B will come to dominate Group A, and they will build a world in their own image - cruel and inhuman. Given that we know this is the outcome, in what sense is Group A's choice really ethical? The question you have to ask is: If it's not you who has the best weapons, who is it? If it's not you devising military strategy, who is? The answer is someone else. Probably someone who likes those things more than you. Is that the sort of person you want to have that kind of power?
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
There are several reasons. First, weapons are made to kill. Even if they're not used, if they're finally used, the result is someone's death. Second, the USA is not only stabilizing peace, but from time to time disrupts it. Sometimes a war is waged without proper consideration. I think Iraq is the best example, but the intervention in Afghanistan wasn't necessary either. Third, even if you say the above were just mistakes, and the leaders of the USA had good intentions, weapons are a product just like everything else, and so they're sold. The USA has a list of "good" and "bad" states, but circumstances change very quickly nowadays. Also, once you sell a weapon, even to a "good" state, you lose control. On the other hand, there are some military applications that are actually meant to save lives rather than taking them. One good example is clearing land mines - I guess no engineer would have any problems helping in constructing a robot that would disarm mines and other explosives.
- darawk 9y ago
  In a moral vacuum, I agree. If I could flip a switch and permanently erase nuclear weapons from the world, I think i'd probably flip that switch. However, we don't exist in a world with switches like that. Any weapon the US doesn't develop out of some moral sensibility, another state like Russian or China will. Ceding military strength is not virtuous, it's naive. The choice isn't between "should these weapons exist or not", it's "who should have them?". And the answer to that choice is: the entity you distrust least. For me that's the USG. I distrust them, just less than I do the other candidates. And this is an extremely critical moral choice, because it's the only real one. Any other choice is just burying your head in the sand and saying the world doesn't exist.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
    Well, with WMDs we're past that point already. We have enough nukes to transform this world into hell in a few hours. Any advances in that area are of the nature that Putin mentioned recently, ones that no civilized nation would ever develop. There is an enormous conventional arms market though. These are guns, pistols etc. Their sole aim is to kill people, plain and simple. You could justify it by saying some of those people deserve being killed, but as a creator of the weapon you can't know that, you have no control on how it's used. That's why many people would have moral objections against the production of conventional weapons.
rayiner 9y ago
> This idea that it is unethical to build weapons is profoundly wrong, short sighted, and morally selfish. Right. Anything unethical about building photon torpedoes for the federation? No.
- darawk 9y ago
  I didn't say it was unethical to build weapons for anyone. I said it wasn't unethical to help build them at all. We don't live in a vacuum. If you don't build weapons for the side you prefer, someone else will for the side they prefer. And if all the 'good' people don't support the side they like, guess which side gets all the weapons? If you don't have any 'ethical' people in the military, guess who makes all the decisions? This is really so easy to think through, and the only moral conclusion is pretty clear.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    I was agreeing with you.
    - darawk 9y ago
      Ah sorry. Not up on my star trek references :).
Chris_Jay 9y ago
I think it's fair to say that designing weapons that others will use is always an ethical quandary with unknowable complexity. If someone errs on the side of causing no harm - a commonly accepted default if discussions of the Trolly problem are anything to go by - then designing weapons is difficult to justify because it's just impossible to ensure that they'll be used in a way the designer would sanction. I don't necessarily disagree that it's naive to opt for inaction when faced with an ethical quandary of unknowable outcome, but it does seem to be the default position and that does count for a lot. What I find interesting is that in some cases, the broad outcomes of a particular weapon being designed are predictable. Gunpowder is widely credited with destabilizing the feudal social order because it put military supremacy in the hands of the peasantry. Modern drones could well be used to sustain a new social order much in the way that heavy armor and stirrups sustained the feudal one. Whether that's a good thing of course depends on other ethical considerations, but if I had the opportunity to work on a weapons system, I would think much more about those kinds of implications than who would be using it - it seems best to assume the answer to that question is, "everyone".

deviationblue 9y ago

>If it makes MIT feel better, I don't think "ethics" when I think of MIT. You and every Tom, Dick and Harry. And that's okay why?