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 ca

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".