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Why Engineers Must Consider the Ethical Implications of Their Work
An anonymous reader writes "An article by Abbas El-Zein at The Guardian explores the ethical responsibilities for engineers who create and maintain 'technologies of violence.' He says, 'Engineers who see themselves as builders of the shelter and infrastructure for human needs also use their expertise in order to destroy and kill more efficiently. When doctors or nurses use their knowledge of anatomy in order to torture or conduct medical experiments on helpless subjects, we are rightly outraged. Why doesn't society seem to apply the same standards to engineers? There is more than one answer to the question of course, but two points are especially pertinent: the common good we engineers see ourselves serving and our relationship to authority. ... Our ethics have become mostly technical: how to design properly, how to not cut corners, how to serve our clients well. We work hard to prevent failure of the systems we build, but only in relation to what these systems are meant to do, rather than the way they might actually be utilised, or whether they should have been built at all. We are not amoral, far from it; it's just that we have steered ourselves into a place where our morality has a smaller scope.'"
They pay us like shit compared to doctors!
"I have become death, destroyer of worlds."
In Rowanda the slaughter was committed using nothing more than machetes. However the people where whipped into a fervor by people on the radio inciting to violence. Marconi should have seen it coming. He had a responsibility.
More seriously, to paraphrase stephenson and others. human beings are at the top of the food chain because we are the most effective and fearsome killing machines currently known. We will find new ways to kill things, and each other regardless of the intended purpose of a tool, and how many safe guards are built into it. It is what we do and why we are where we are.
Technology is a tool, and a tool can be used a weapon. You should blame the one who wields the weapon. Do we blame Pasteur for biological warfare? I do not, but without him much of what we know about making bio-weapons would not exist.
You can study rockets to go to the moon, but eventually someone is going to shoot them at their neighbor.
You can study a way to get cheap energy for everyone, but eventually someone will make a bomb.
You can create a large forum for the people that is resistant to people stopping you from communication, but someone will eventually create a global spy system that watches everything you do.
It is unfortunate, but I would place the blame not on the person who makes the technology, but the one who decides how to use it. When we complain about doctors helping with torture, we are complaining about the ones there to extend the pain, not the ones who came up with ways keep people alive.
Saying an engineer shouldn't design a better weapon is like saying a doctor shouldn't treat a wounded soldier.
While it is hard to draw exact parallels, society already holds engineers to similar standards to doctors. The outrage over doctors experimenting on helpless test subjects is pretty similar to, say, when engineers use live subjects for testing weapons.
Yeah. The article's author is making a poor analogy. Blaming engineers would be more akin to blaming the scalpel designer for the doctor's experimentation. Its not the scalpel or the gun that is the problem, it is the mind and the intentions behind the hand holding the scalpel or gun. Both can be used for good or bad.
Short of WMD the issue is not as simple as the author suggests.
I'm not sure he saw it that way:
In fact, he was later very much opposed to its use:
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Every single person needs to do this. If you work in the weapons industry and don't feel bad about it, you are a psychopath. Simple.
So your view is that good guys produce no weapons, and bad guys produce lots of weapons...and it's that simple? What happens when the bad guys decide to be bad with their weapons by turning them on the unarmed, defenseless good guys?
Or, is it that some people should work in the weapons industry, but feel really really bad about it. And of course, those of us who have happy jobs are the better people, since we took the "high road" by forcing someone else to be bad. Perhaps we could have a lottery (Shirley Jackson's version), to decide who among us has to be bad so that our good lives can continue safely. Then we can all sit back and bask in the shiny, sunny warmth of just how good we all are, unlike those bad, bad people who make weapons that we can defend ourselves with...
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Designing a missile system to kill lots of brown people on the other side of the world is not very ethically ambiguous. Thing is, there are plenty of technologies that are.
For example, DARPA has been doing lots of research on robots. They point out how self-driving cars can save lives, robots can find and defuse bombs and rescue victims, etc. But these technologies can be used for war just as easily.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I've worked on military systems before that were designed to enable killing.
Mine were more accurate than any predecessors, used better sensors than any predecessors, and had better controls than any predecessors. Sure, it's possible to send it off to kill civilians, but if you're aiming for the bad guy, it will kill only the bad guy, and not the schoolchildren next door.
To me, that's ethical. It'd be great if we could stop killing each other, but until that happens I'm going to do my best to keep everybody outside the conflict safe.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I work in "the weapons industry". I sleep well knowing that my projects are being used so that my baby girls can sleep well at night. But then, I've seen first hand what motivated, evil people do when nobody stops them. But then, I've been to some nasty parts of Africa. At the risk of Godwining the thread, I strongly encourage you to go tour one of the concentration camps in Germany. Those people exist, and to paraphrase, "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."-Orwell,
There is certainly a sort of "mercenary" ethic amongst many defense engineers. As long as there are soldiers willing to pull triggers, there will be engineers willing to design the guns. As well as simple game-theory type reasoning - "I can take the pay for this job; but if I don't, they'll find someone else who will." I get the feeling the article author doesn't know and didn't really talk with any longtime defense engineers - professors can be quite removed from that world.
And this is to say nothing of the defense engineers who are actually gung-ho about their work.
As someone going for a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering, my basic response to Mr. El-Zein is ...
Sod off.
Now stop thinking that the world needs to fix the Middle East or care about your "problems".
Oil is over. Nobody cares about you anymore.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Submitter doesn't like humanity very much. He wishes there were laws, rules, regulations, and guide lines for everything. He wants to hold engineers responsible for their discoveries. He wants to judge each discovery as "good" or "bad", then reward or punish the engineers, scientists, and the craftsmen for whatever results.
Sad as it is, I prefer the world we have, in which men and woman exercise free will.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpCASVFyQoE
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
When doctors or nurses use their knowledge of anatomy in order to torture or conduct medical experiments on helpless subjects, we are rightly outraged. Why doesn't society seem to apply the same standards to engineers?
When a doctor tortures a patient there is a direct cause and effect from the doctor's actions to the pain and suffering of the victim.
When an engineer designs a weapon, he's not actually causing the pain and suffering. Once you get away from "complete responsibility", the rest is easy:
1) If I don't do it, someone else will
2) I need to feed myself and my family
3) It'll only be used on the bad guys
4) It helps protect my country
5) It's the user's responsibility, not mine
6) The boss thinks it's a good idea
7) It has significant non-evil uses
8) No one will ever know it was me
For a concrete example, consider the Collateral Murder video from a couple of years back. Who was responsible for these deaths?
The helicopter pilots got the go-ahead from their commanders, the commanders [probably] got the go-ahead from intelligence services, the services made the correct decision based on the information they had, and the information was somehow "wrong".
Who's to blame for the collateral murder incident? By deftly distributing blame among many players, it changes from personal responsibility to "a failure of the system", or "a tragic accident".
For a second example, consider Bush's Iraq war: he was on TV stating that he had convincing evidence of WMDs in Iraq. A couple of years later it came out that the intelligence services had never said this and tried to convince the president of the opposite. Bush's response was: "We [the administration] didn't get the message". (Note the use of "we" in his statement.)
Who's responsible for the war? The President says he got bad intelligence, the intelligence services say they never gave bad intelligence. It's impossible to lay the blame on someone, it's a "failure of the system".
But don't worry, the problem is fixed - it'll never happen again.
(Epilogue: The Gulf oil spill was largely enabled by failures of the Minerals Management Service, who is responsible for overseeing the safety procedures of off-shore drilling. The problems were largely fixed by renaming the service to Bureau of Ocean Management. The problem is fixed, now we won't have any more disasters. Sorry about that...)
Some of us choose not to design weapons. It isn't theoretical. I've turned down job offers that turned out to be essentially for improving ways to kill people.
Some of us choose to design technologies that work against the NSA's unconstitutional spying rather than for it. Again this isn't theoretical. I've been presented with some choices and taking the high road is ultimately easier to live with, even though people don't thank you for it at the time.
The ethical questions for engineers are far, far simpler than those for doctors or politicians. safe good, unsafe bad. Protects people good, exposes people, bad. Kills or injures people, bad, saves people, good.
Maybe in a world with an agressor and no ready defense technology, the moral landscape would look different. But there is no shortage of military technology. I can choose not to add to it. To add to it is immoral. To not add to it is moral.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
That is what I got out of it.
Think of the Engineers and Scientists who made the a-Bomb.
1. Don't help and you will be the reason for a sustained war costing millions of lives of mostly military personnel.
2. Make the A-Bomb that will kill ten thousand civilians and ending the war.
If I say designed a better targeting system. Did I...
1. Make a system more capable of destroying people.
2. Make a system more capable of not hitting the wrong people.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The world is not divided into "good guys" and "bad guys"
If someone wants to kill me, they automatically become bad guys (to me). It doesn't matter if it's 'unfair' or who started it, when they want to kill me, they automatically become bad.
Of course, they see it the opposite way, and if both of us want to fight less than we want peace, we may be able to come to an agreement, and neither of us be bad anymore.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So basically, no engineer could work for DoD. So, let's take that idea to the extreme. We disarm, and nobody is allowed to work on any defensive weapons, and we all sing Kum ba yah. Make sense? Yeah, I didn't think so either.
Just another day in Paradise
I'm not sure he saw it that way:
In fact, he was later very much opposed to its use:
Oppenheimer was always a very conflicted individual.
Remember that he wasn't an elected politician or military commander, he was a civilian scientist who was tasked to develop the atomic bomb. It was never his job to decide if the bombs should be used and he knew that. In fact, he was very much motivated to both develop these weapons during WWII when he was terrified of the Nazi's developing a nuclear capability and using it on the Allies.
It's unfortunate that he felt bad about it later on. But guess what? A lot of people felt bad about many of their war actions later on. However, it was war. People tend to make different decisions when they are under an extreme amount of stress from a looming predator as compared to when they are relaxing in their vacation house.
Try to envision the time period. The Nazis had annihilated most of Europe and were gassing civilian Jews to death because they didn't think they were the perfect race. They were making lightshades out of Jewish skin for fun. The Japanese were waging a particularly vicious war on the Pacific. The US was stuck between these two insanities and tried to stay out of things for as long as possible. 12 MILLION people died in WWII. After the Nazis surrendered, the US had to start shipping war weary troops to the other side of the world for more fighting.
Was dropping two atomic bombs on Japan a nice thing to do? No. But I think the US was prepared to keep making nukes and dropping them on Japan until Japan surrendered rather than lose more US troops invading Japan.
Short of WMD the issue is not as simple as the author suggests.
Really? Explain to me what purpose an M1 tank or an F22 fighter has besides killing people? What humanitarian purpose do land mines serve? Assault rifles? (target shooting? don't make me laugh) Hand grenades? Let's not pretend that the engineers working on these products have no idea what they will be used for. Plausible deniability does not apply to a lot of weapons.
There are many technologies where the line between ethical and not-so-much is fuzzy but you hardly have to go to WMDs to get there.
Some of us choose not to design weapons. It isn't theoretical.
Actually it is in a way. This strategy only works because you are protected by other engineers who design the weapons that protect you, whether you approve of those weapons or not.
There is nothing wrong with your moral choice but lets face facts. Pacifists can only exits in absolute isolation or where they are protected by friendly non-pacifists. In the real world there will be unfriendly non-pacifists who will subjugate, enslave or kill you. Regrettably this is the way some humans are wired.
In the book "Guns, germs, and steel" a warlike group of pacific islanders are mentioned. A subgroup colonizes a new island, loses contact with the original group and in isolation becomes pacifist. When contact is reestablished the subgroup is enslaved. This was done to blood relatives separated by only a small amount of time (in generational terms) with a common culture, language and religion.
I think George Orwell summed it up thusly: People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. In other words don't sit around in a nice 1st world country and pretend it got that way by accident.
Anyone producing nerve gas, or antipersonnel cluster munitions, or weaponized biological agents designed to actually be used (as opposed for research into how to counteract them) should definitely feel bad about what they're doing. These things have no other purpose than to be immorally used against people.
Immorally?
Why is nerve gas immoral? Compared to, say, being burned alive when a round lights up your gas tank? Turned into bite-sized chunks by artillery? Dying slowly and painfully from a small calibre wound to the gut?
I'm calling bullshit, because this notion that some weapons are "bad" is bullshit. Either a death is a death, or you've got some ulterior motive up for discussion.