Comment by stickfigure
4 years ago
I hope recent events have illustrated that if it weren't for the people who develop lethal weapons, we (as in you and I) would be helpless against the bullies of the world. Unilateral pacifism is cute philosophy only when there are rough men standing ready to do violence on their behalf.
I strongly agree with this sentiment. However, it is hard for an ethical person to participate in developing war technology when possession and usage of the weapons is purely a political question, and history also has seen our side of geopolitics commit atrocities.
My stance has previously been that I am unwilling to work on weapons technology, because history has shown that these weapons sometimes end up being used for an indefensible cause. Then all of a sudden you're an accomplice to murder, and getting away with it.
In the light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which is just a continuation of its historical imperialism, working on weapons is something I would be perfectly okay with and probably even motivated to do. But stop for a moment and think what a history of aggressive military actions does to our society's ability to recruit for this important job.
I was a reviewer for a book on ethical machine learning that wasn’t published. I’ll never forget, the author stated “don’t work on anything that could cause harm.” Here I am reading this while working in defense being like “that’s a lazy and dumb position.” Nearly anything in the wrong hands could cause harm.
It’s not unethical to work in the auto industry because people can die in car accidents. It’s not unethical to work in the beer business because people can become alcoholics. It’s not unethical to work for a credit card company because people can bury themselves in debt. And it’s not unethical to work in defense because the weapons may fall into the wrong hands.
What’s unethical is encouraging these problems and not trying to prevent them. And yeah, it’s hard to navigate these ethical issues, but we’re professionals like doctors and lawyers and part of the reason we get paid like we do is because we may have to wrestle with these issues.
> It’s not unethical to work in the auto industry because people can die in car accidents.
Why not? Cars are pretty fucked in a lot of ways. I wouldn't consider someone working in the auto industry to be morally bankrupt but that doesn't mean that automobiles are not ethically ambiguous
> It’s not unethical to work in the beer business because people can become alcoholics
Why not? You are producing a dangerous drug that is constantly killing people. Would you say that people manufacturing illegal heroin are absolved from their externalities?
> It’s not unethical to work for a credit card company because people can bury themselves in debt.
Also why not? Credit cards, like automobiles, are pretty fucked in a lot of ways.
> it’s not unethical to work in defense because the weapons may fall into the wrong hands
Once again, why not? It seems as though weapons have consistently fallen into the wrong hands for all of history.
Im not saying that all people in these industries are bad people, but we can't pretend that our actions have no externalities just because those externalities are accepted by society as normal
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I'm not sure I've sufficiently communicated the background of my moral ambiguity here. I came of age during the War on Terror; the years where Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria were the primary fronts for Western military power. The brutal necessity of the Western world standing up to aggression against dictatorships was not so obvious during these years; from my vantage point of Western media the impression was that dirt-poor suicide bombers were the biggest risk to our civilization. And we were dealing with those with an aggression that at best left a dubious aftertaste.
One could be excused during these two decades for erroneously assuming that the world has for the foreseeable future moved on towards trade and economic competition, rather than wars of aggression. With nuclear weapons ensuring the balance. It was probably naïve, but not helplessly naïve. Against this backdrop, regularly seeing weddings and maybe-civilians bombed from drones on dubious intel, it doesn't seem like a childish or cowardly stance to just turn one's back on the weapons industry. I'd call that a reflected decision.
The same reasoning is almost palpable in European politics, which made a 180 degree shift away from this in the two weeks after Putin dispelled these notions. My point is, it wasn't obvious from where I stood that we would be back here today. Now that we are, the calculus seems clearer.
Maybe with a more measured US-led use of military force since 2000, Western defense politics wouldn't have required so much hand-wringing.
You can be happily manufacturing weapons for a good cause today only to see your government turn evil the next day. Unfortunately people don't cluster around ideas but geography and that's is out of control for most.
This does not mean we shouldn't do something but we have to realize nothing is permanent and the fruits of our labor can very well be misused the next day.
Like anything difficult there are real risks and trade-offs, but just refusing to engage in difficult pragmatic issues is not the ethical position imo, it's just the easy one that feels good. It puts the burden of actual complex ethical decisions onto other people.
The west needs the capability to defend the ideals of classical liberalism and individual liberty. In order to do that it needs a strong military capability.
https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html
>> It puts the burden of actual complex ethical decisions onto other people.
People who may not have even considered the ethical situation. It seems the people who are concerned about the ethics or morality of a necessary but questionable job are exactly the ones you want in that role (although not activists who would try to shut it down entirely).
By your logic, engaging in weapon manufacturing is the only accepted conclusion. In fact, people that refuse to do so are participating just fine, even though you don't agree with their contribution.
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The flaw in that logic is that, if it weren't for the people who develop lethal weapons for the bullies, we wouldn't have to fear the bullies.
Also, I think the design space of "radical defense" is under explored. Our (western) armies are still designed for attack and force projection, although we have long since renamed our war ministers secretaries of defense.
But I wonder if you could develop defense capability to make your country unattackable. Not by threat of retaliation, but for example by much much stronger missile defense. Or by educating ("indoctrinating") your own population, so that an occupier would not find a single collaborator? Or by mining your own infrastructure, and giving every citizen basic combat training (a bit like the swiss)? Or by fostering a world-wide political transformation that is designed to prevent wars from happening at all?
I think if we wanted to spend money researching stuff to keep us safe, it doesn't necessarily have to be offensive weapons.
The flaw in this logic is somewhat related to law enforcement, in that if your military is min/maxed for defense, someone who wants to do you harm only has to be right once in order to actually do you harm. Looking at nuclear weapons and missile defense (ignoring the existence of dirty bombs etc.), your opponent needs to only be right once for one of your cities and hundreds of thousands of civilians to be gone. And likewise, if you've focused on defense you're likely wholly unprepared for any sort of retaliation.
The Swiss approach what with literally bunkering in the mountains and everything is interesting, but the logistics for larger countries would be exponentially harder (and most lack the geographic help). "Fostering world-wide political transformation" is so pie in the sky it's honestly not worth serious discussion. It's fanciful.
Someone will always be willing to make weapons for the bullies because a lot of people don't view them as bullies in the first place. Ask people in Iraq, or Chechnya, or Ireland, or Pakistan, or Taiwan, who the bullies are, and you'll get wildly different answers that will cover approximately 90% of the worldwide population.
> The flaw in that logic is that, if it weren't for the people who develop lethal weapons for the bullies, we wouldn't have to fear the bullies.
You can't uninvent weapons, and you can't prevent the bullies from making their own weapons.
The problem with an impenetrable defensive shield is that it gives your potential enemies the heebie-jeebies (technical geopolitical term) that, now that you have the shield, you can attack them without fear of reprisal. If the enemy thinks you're working on a credible shield (or even a shield you think is credible) their best option is to attack now before you, emboldened by your sense of invulnerability, attack them.
This is an ongoing concern of US weapons policy. By refusing to back down from improving our missile defense capabilities, we undermine MAD and our adversaries’ willingness to engage in disarmament (thereby making it more likely these weapons will be used).
> The flaw in that logic is that, if it weren't for the people who develop lethal weapons for the bullies, we wouldn't have to fear the bullies.
False. Bullies are a problem even if no one has weapons beyond what can be grabbed and used from the environment without any invention. Heck, bullies are a problem if everyone just has the weapons built in to their bodies.
> But I wonder if you could develop defense capability to make your country unattackable.
Not without incidentally developing a huge edge in offensive weapons that would make you attackable when it inevitably diffused to others. Uniquely defensive technology mostly doesn't exist.
> Not by threat of retaliation, but for example by much much stronger missile defense.
Much better interceptor missiles mean the technology for much better missiles generally. Directed energy interception means direct energy weapons. Hypervelocity kinetic interceptors are general purpose hypervelocity kinetic weapons.
> Or by educating ("indoctrinating") your own population, so that an occupier would not find a single collaborator?
That kind of indoctrination can also be used offensively, but the enemy doesn't need collaborators to attack you. (They might need it to conquer without genocide, but attackers willing to commit genocide for land are not unheard of, nor are attackers whose goal isn't conquest.)
> Or by mining your own infrastructure, and giving every citizen basic combat training (a bit like the swiss)?
Mining your infrastructure is itself creating a vulnerability to certain kinds of attacks.
> Or by fostering a world-wide political transformation that is designed to prevent wars from happening at all?
It's been tried, repeatedly. The League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the UN. It’ll be nice if someone ever finds the “one wired trick to prevent war forever”, but it seems distinctly improbable and particularly suicidal to bank your defense on the ability to find it.
Especially since we cannot really help Ukraine with anything but tech and they are outnumbered, so the only advantage we can give is how much better our weapons are than Russian ones.
Have you considered, though, that we (as in you and I) might be some of these bullies in the world and that these rough men aren't just standing by, but are actively doing violence on our behalf ? One needn't look much further past recent events to find examples aplenty.
I understand the point you are trying to make, but it's not as easy as pretending that the weapons "we" develop are purely for morally and ethically righteous purpose.
With respect you may be making some unfounded assumptions about what I've built and what I believe.
My point was really about the fact that this job title "Lethality Engineer" actually exists. And moreover, that it asked for medical qualifications, which would go against any doctor's Hippocratic oath.
Most of us who've done defence related work are happy at the edges, with tactical information systems, coms or guidance (my stuff ended up in targeting).
But when it comes down to figuring out how fragments can be arranged around a charge to make sure the waveshape optimally penetrates as many nearby skulls as possible... hmmm suddenly not so gung-ho about it.
That's not a distant, theoretical morality about tyrants and bullies. I've no problems contemplating my family's military history and am plenty proud of it, even though we'd all rather live in a world without this stuff.
Until the lethal weapons are turned on those (countries, groups, people) who develop them. Kind of like gun owners are more likely to be harmed (or harm others) by their own guns, notwithstanding the arguments about personal protection used to justify such ownership.
This has already happened with groups the US has armed in the past. The US itself has been the bad guy sometimes.
There is no proper resolution to this struggle, and people who are guided by their conscience should not be attacked for having a "cute philosophy" that relies on "rough men standing ready to do violence on their behalf."
A sibling comment put it well that refusing to wrestle with these important questions is the unethical position as it just pushes the decision off onto other people. "Cute philosophy" is a perfect way to describe that because it's completely untenable if everyone were to think that way.
The gun thing is completely tautological though. Yes, if you have a gun you're more likely to be injured by your gun than someone who doesn't. How would someone who doesn't own a gun be injured by their own guns in the first place? It's like saying you're more likely to be in a car accident if you own a car. Of course you are.
If everyone were to think that way there would be no need for those weapons in the first place.
When I said gun owners are more likely to be harmed by their Gus, I meant as opposed to using the gun to protect themselves. Instead of an incident where the gun came in handy, it is more likely the the gun is used in a wrongful way or against oneself. I’m not sure where the tautology is
I generally agree with this, however, the rough men willing to do violence on our behalf are more and more becoming the quirky scientists who are very disconnected from the actual impact of their work. I think there's a big difference between those types of people. It seems like people don't feel the weight of violence as much as they used to. I imagine this will increase as we develop more AI driven weapons.
This doesn't square with my experience in defense. I worked in software and we saw plenty of combat and aftermath footage and were always aware that the design decisions we made and the tools we built meant life-and-death for someone. We did our best to make sure it was the right people.
I'd add, the weight of violence—if anything—is going up. People today are devastated when a dozen soldiers and scores of civilians are killed in a suicide bombing or urban conflict, but go back to Vietnam and those incidents barely register because they happened all the time. The number of people killed in any given armed conflict has dropped quite a bit in the last 50-or-so years. (The Syrian Civil War is one big exception.)
Thanks for sharing your experience. To your last point, I think it's a tradeoff. The number of individuals getting killed is going down, but we're closer than ever to the ability kill everyone more easily (beyond nukes: weaponized viruses, etc). Scientists who are drawn to a field of research may not be practically connecting the dots about what they're actually working on, or the full implications of their work (eg: gain of function research). These are the people I'm referring to when I mention them not realizing the weight of violence that they are contributing to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
This comment is confusing two completely separate things. There's a world of difference between not being willing to defend yourself and actively trying to come up with more aggressive and lethal weapons.
The argument that "we need defense!" only justifies the need to stockpile and develop _sufficiently_ lethal and tactical weaponry to neutralize incoming threats (like anti-ballistic systems). It doesn't justify inventing deadlier weapons. No dispossessed victim of foreign invasion has ever needed a bioweapon to assert themselves, and there's no chance developing one would ever be used for anything but war crimes. You should absolutely turn down roles like "Lethality Engineer" from an ethical standpoint, even if you agree military defense is necessary.
People raise the spectre of deterrence as a utilitarian justification for needing more powerful weapons ("har har, they'll think twice about attacking us if they know we have nukes!"). But that's narrow thinking. Deterrence can be achieved in other less-damning ways, like strategic alliances and building more robust defense systems.
tl;dr defence != deadlier offence.
We are acting pretty helpless because the bully has nuclear weapons.