Plato was always talking about mathematics being the language of God, mathematics explaining the heavens, mathematics being central to philosophy, etc. What he got wrong was assuming that something seductively appealing and simple from a mathematical PoV should be assumed to explain the world, rather than actually incorporating empirical evidence to test his models. Whence the Platonic model of the planets, etc.
Jim, there have been quite a few interesting "why working for Raytheon is moral" arguments here - a good argument is what I asked for, not a contradiction of an unexpressed opinion, so I'm glad!
The good arguments express a need for defence research and discuss in what context it is appropriate. They elaborate on the decision-making process surrounding military engagement without entirely absolving the manufacturers when they suckle at the teat of government. They highlight the difference between research (esp. reconnaissance tools) to win a war and research to cause harm. These ruminations can all be applied to Raytheon to help answer the question initially posed.
We are in disagreement, as it were, on whether th'assembly would trammel up the consequence. This last fulmination is ample demonstration that you haven't yet spotted this; the discussion has stalled.
Nevertheless, cheers for the brief chat. The thread as a whole has been interesting for me.
I apologise, I guess I didn't realise that the last example was designed to catch me out by implicit reference to the pain-causing as opposed to any other transmitter.
Oh, and the solution to the problem of policeman beating down protesters is for policemen to stop beating down protesters. Not pain rays.
Modern day Iraq (prior to Saddam's ouster) is primarily dominated by Sunnis. The southern portion of Iraq, which includes Basra, is historically a predominantly Shiite area - So yes, culturally, politically, religiously
The cultural, political and religious similarities between Sunni and Shia Arabs in the Middle East are rather clearer than between either and Brits/Americans:-).
Looking in more detail, the Shiite population in Basra city and province has varied radically over the past few decades. And what do you expect, when the West supplies and supports a man for his hatred of Shia Iran? Saddam hanged al-Sadr, outlawed membership of al-Dawa, exiled about 200k Shiites in the '80s and early '90s, and assassinated thouasnds more following the first Gulf War. 500k Madan marsh Arabs responsible for guerrilla operations against Baath were tackled by draining 90% of swamps. The post-Saddam backlash brought Shiite population in Basra back up to 60% by 2005.
We re-engineered Kuwait; we re-engineered Iraq even later. To "where does it end?" the answer is "quite recently".
I would not call it "immoral" for a Canadian unit to accidentally kill American non-combatants, as much as I would mourn the loss of those civilians.
When it has been established that war is just, yes, there is no argument that accidental killing of a non-combatant can be "immoral". The question then becomes, "What is reasonable care to avoid this accidental killing?" I would argue that the bottleneck is tactical and strategic, and technology should be applied toward intelligence-gathering (or, if I'm wearing my tinfoil, I'd argue that existing intelligence technology should be provided to ground forces). This is how you execute a war with minimal casualties - not by wasting money on a missile which hits the wrong target for the wrong reasons even more accurately than the last one didn't quite.
do not have any "personal power" over the military, but they are still being used on my behalf
I'm not sure if I'm about to engage in a semantic game, but let us say that they should be being used on your behalf, but aren't. And haven't been for a while. If this is true, it doesn't matter whether the legal framework of your government is such that they should be operating on your behalf; and it doesn't matter that every service member promises to operate to protect you. What matters is that if they're not.
As such, they are no better than a bunch of pirates which you're forced to pay for by the local laird. I too could promise that I'll protect you, even make a public oath to the effect, then do nothing but leech off you and make life worse for you: does this make me any better than someone who has openly admitted that he's going to leech off you and make life worse for you?
So, respect a military working on your behalf, perhaps, from general down to infantryman. But one which merely claims to? The military must never state that it is "only following orders". So what if it is emphasised at all levels that it must only either follow legitimate orders or do nothing?
OK, end of semantic game.
Each case must be taken individually, and evaluated on its merits
But with some underlying principles to limit where war may even be considered, no? Without restraint, eventually war will be abused for any possible interest, declared in terms of an unwinnable war on an undefinable enemy. Which may be what's happening.
It's possible to do very immoral *things* while attempting to achieve a legitimately moral end
I'm not sure that it is. If you decide that the end is so important as to outweigh the harm caused by the means then the whole act is moral. It's like killing the wife and daughters of the Generalissimo because they happen to be sat next
They already had religions. Why one over the others?
As usual, it's more complex than "Muslims tried to take over the world".
So brief, often uttered, and very wrong: Muslims converted by the sword.
Very brief and somewhat misleading: Arabs took over a part of the world significant from a trading PoV, and Arabs happened to be Muslim. Trade influenced the remainder.
Less brief: The early caliphs had no interest in converting the conquered. Indeed, in some areas relation with an Arab tribe was necessary for formal conversion. But over a century later, i.e. after 750 AD, voluntary conversions became apparent for a multitude of reasons: loss of former infrastructure; trading favours (including tax breaks); political multiculturalism: i.e. give the natives a say and they'll take an interest in what you have to offer; etc.
Recall that Islam makes a vague effort to define the status of non-Muslims - although this has latterly been used to criticise Islam, it then ensured that non-Muslims received a degree of protection and respect, with specific fairly tolerant (by the standards of sharia) laws to handle their status. Islam has this big thing about "innovation", i.e. changing the religion to suit the whim of the times, and one of the ways this stuck was in respecting the dhimmi in a way that the Crusader didn't accept the heathen. It might have been convenient to use the excuse of using force to save the otherwise damned, but this wasn't how Islam spread.
This was domination by Arabs, not imposition of Islam. You'll be hard-pressed to find evidence in the literature of mass forced conversions, and there is no evidence that even a sizeable minority was forced to convert.
That's essentially the same question as asking how people could have the moral dysfunction necessary to work for boeing (they make the apache helicopter, you know).
It's not asking anything about "moral dysfunction" at all, but everyone in this thread seems to be replying as if I'm implying they should feel some sort of guilt. I want to know why employees consider it moral, in the same way any decision process has an element of morality.
But, yes, why can't I ask the same question of a Boeing employee? Boeing's civilian output is much more significant than Raytheon's, but they take even more money from the US taxpayer to develop weaponry, so it seems a fair question.
Just because he says true X doesn't means he's making a true Scotsman fallacy
He's correctly showing your flawed comprehension of history.
"Because the world is not black and white"? That's merely rephrasing part of the question. I could even have phrased it, "Can you give me a more considered answer than the black/white `because I'm worth it! (and you're not)' or `it's us or them!' to `why do you work at Raytheon?'?"
The stuff about civilian applications for military research is true, and many military developments are interesting from a straight tech PoV, but that doesn't justify anything.
The US won't die tomorrow just because, say, good minds refuse to develop military tech which hasn't even been proven necessary for defensive (or any) war until voters, politicians, military and contractors bash it out and decide to establish some principles for just[tm] war. In the US this might be war for self-defence rather than entangling alliances and special interests. Seriously, why is the US citizenry in a permanent state of panic?
I'm not convinced by your argument that a conquering country is always more evil than the conquered. Even if I consider myself moral, that doesn't mean I consider my country moral. The conquerors may be more aligned with my sense of morality. Hell, I might be a capitalist dreamer in North Korea, waiting for America to roll in...
modern Iraq is primarily a result of that same process
Geographically, to a good extent. If it had remained so in every other way that matters, America wouldn't have a problem.
but you can't say "Kuwait was historically governed by Basra" without also conceding that modern day Iraq, which encompassed modern day Basra, had very little resemblance to the Basra that used to govern Kuwait.
In what sense? Culturally? Politically? Religiously? Geographically? In terms of the mutual trading, navigation and security opportunities their cooperation provided? Kuwait can be identified as British-American in the same way South Africa identified itself as white, and Iraqi (or, indeed, simply Arabic) in the same way South Africa was black.
The moral basis for British/American fighting in Kuwait the '90s was it's valuable from a strategic and resource PoV that we keep control of a territory we occupied and have effectively never departed from.
Because there are practical limits to the size and amount of money you can spend on your military without running the rest of your country into the ground.
And given the current level of debt, is it moral to pay Raytheon for random crap?
Because it would be immoral to force someone to give their life in defense of something they have not volunteered to serve.
But civilians in enemy territory haven't volunteered to serve for or against you. Why is defence of your interests worth their peaceful citizens' lives but not your criminals' lives?
Because a war that wants to have a claim at being "justifiable" should make serious (reasonable) attempts to limit the deaths of non-combatants and limit collateral damage.
Yes. Except when it is considered moral to act in self-interest, and it is judged in the interest of the invading military to kill non-combatants.
Because they are *my* military. I - through my lawfully elected government -
Why so possessive? It's a representative democratic republic. Just because you get a limited say every few years in a broad decision-making process doesn't mean you have some special personal power over your military. If you're prepared to stand up and be counted personally for your military and politicians' behaviour then I'd at least have some understanding for why you're calling them "my military", but you're not - you're complaining instead about "voters" and "politicians".
am asking them to put their lives in grave danger on my behalf
This assumes that you respect people according as what they might do for you for pay and with the most extensive support any soldier on this earth could dream of.
smart bombs, camera-equipped drones, night vision advancements, laser-guided and satellite-guided cruise missiles - all of this is aimed at *precision* - being able to strike *exactly* at the target you wish to, while minimizing damage to surrounding people & infrastructure.
Even assuming that all wars using such weaponry were fought with the aim of being over as quickly and painlessly as possible, what evidence do you have that the weapons manufacturers' sales brochures are true? That the bottleneck is lack of precision in weaponry justifying investment in weapons research?
I would say that a legitimate, justifiable, moral war could be fought on any of these grounds.
I think pretty much any reason for waging war could come under the categories I listed. IOW, all wars are moral if you are broad enough with your categorisation of what is moral. This is really why I asked the question in the first place a few hours ago - to get people thinking in more than soundbites and trying to establish the detailed reason for their decisions.
in deciding to work for a company involved in military research and development you have to consider the nation that the military is attached to.
If your moral framework cares about the wider impact of your actions, absolutely. The argument isn't "America is like Nazi Germany", but "don't make a justification which could be applied equally to Nazi Germany unless you see no moral difference between promoting America and promoting Nazi Germany".
So, a Raytheon employee who cares about the wider impact of his actions must ask: "does the American military tend to act morally or immorally?" Again, it depends what that individual defines as moral. To von Braun, for example, military might may have an overriding moral imperative, and he would apply his skills to any nation which saught to increase its military might.
I'm not going to say that the world would be a better place if the US just dropped all arms.
Yes, but why are so many people in this thread speaking as if the alternative to "it is moral to work at Raytheon" is "the US should disarm completely and unilaterally"?
In any of these cases, there's nothing inherently moral or immoral about working for somebody else.
No voluntary human action, i.e. action by some human as a result of his conscious decision, omits morality. It makes no sense to say "well, I didn't think it right to do X, but I chose to do it anyway" - the very fact that you chose to do it implies that you concluded it right to do.
It may be that your moral code allows you to conclude "an act is always moral if you get paid well" - in which case working for Raytheon is moral if you get paid well. But that's still just a conclusion and reveals little about what assumptions brought you to that decision.
Again, this is different from suggesting that choosing who you work for (when you have that choice) is amoral, which contradicts the very fact that you have made a choice.
OK, I shall engage in a "mutual defence treaty" whereby I employ a gaggle of hired guns and anyone who wants my protection in the City simply pays me a set amount of their income per year.
They also promise to defend me, of course. But I'm the one with the guns and they're the ones with the income I'm getting a cut of, so it's fairly clear which way things are likely to work.
IOW, it depends entirely on the nature of the treaty. No entangling alliances, that sort of stuff.
No, I'm suggesting that every voluntary act performed by a human is somehow justified by their system of morality. Choosing to work at Raytheon is just one of those acts.
In assuming that I'm mindlessly demonising Raytheon employees just because I question them and want to understand them, you're tilting at windmills.
As, you would want me to say, are Raytheon's clients;-).
I'm not disagreeing that war is sometimes necessary if your aim is to prevent even greater human suffering.
I would question the nature of involvement in Kosovo and Kuwait. 20th century Kuwait, like Israel, is an artificial construction of British retreat designed to maintain regional resource and military control. Historically governed from Basra with a degree of autonomy, it was defended by Britain from the Ottoman Empire having gained total control of Iraq. Yet when that Empire fell and Britain took the baton, it held on to both but kept them governed separately. Blah independence, Blah naval control of Persian gulf, blah oil, you know the rest. We used our might to separate the two because it was in our interest, then we used our might to keep them separate - perhaps this is moral, but it's not a question without contention.
To briefly reinforce some of your points:
I consider it my absolute moral imperative to provide those young men and women with the best weapons and defensive tools my mind can create for them
For them.
That means it is moral to develop new weapons in the service of that aim
In the service of that aim.
Yes, we can go on into arguments that governments will sometimes misuse their military, and that governments will sometimes involve us in conflicts that are NOT justifiable and moral.
But what if our Western governments are currently almost exclusively involving themselves in offensive wars for the protection of special interests? What if it's not the pathological exception, but the norm? Do you then argue, "Well, it's still moral, because while all these weapons of effective destruction are mostly being used to kill immorally, they could also be used to kill morally"?
using nothing but a pistol and a folding knife because we've "abandoned defense research" is immoral.
False dichotomy. Are you quite sure that Raytheon is producing weaponry which is appropriate for quick, effective and minimally cruel destruction of an offensive force, rather than weaponry optimised for effective long-term oppression? You don't just research how best to kill, you research how best to kill in a particular context.
"sorry, we don't have any A-10's available to provide close air support because we've abandoned defense research and engaged in arms limitation treaties, looks like your toast kids"
Why not just double funding to the military? Why not require criminals to act as human shields? Why not pre-emptively nuke every country which looks at you wrongly, just to ensure that all American and British soldiers' lives are kept intact?
Military volunteers should be aware of the risks, and should be aware that military management is a resource allocation and diplomacy problem as much as it is a problem of technological development. Military volunteers should be aware that one option is to simply nuke Iraq and Afghanistan and start again from scratch, and that this might reduce the chance that they're gunned down by the enemy. But this would not be appropriate from a diplomatic or humanitarian point of view.
Finally, I do find it difficult to understand why people have such a respect for the lives of their own military vs the lives of civilians in an enemy country. Is the aim of war to defend our country against invaders (so why Kosovo?)? To defend peaceful traders against tyrants? To reduce human suffering? To protect our interests home and abroad?
If you develop something with the primary purpose of oppressing or kill offensively, and which is known to be commissioned to oppresss or kill offensively, and which is being commissioned by an entity which makes a habit of oppressing or killing offensively, then you certainly assume a degree of moral responsibility. For you are knowingly a link in the chain of people who must say "yes" for the development to be made and the people to be oppressed/killed offensively. That you are not the one with the arbitrary Presidente name badge is entirely irrelevant - absolute authority is a human fiction and cooperation is the reality.
If you create something which is unforeseeably later used to oppress or kill offensively, and which was not designed for the purpose of oppressing or killing offensively, then it does not seem feasible to argue that you assume moral responsibility.
(None of this is intended as a demonstration that oppressing or killing offensively is necessarily immoral. That's another question. What's fallacious is the "not my department" get-out-of-jail-free card which technologists like to wave.)
My only implication is that people who work at Raytheon have made a justification that is is moral, kinda the opposite of what you're suggesting. I want to understand what the justification is.
I can't imply that it is morally wrong unless I assume a set of moral principles, which I have not done. All I can do from the PoV of establishing correctness is understand the moral principles someone presents to me and establish whether "it is moral to work at Raytheon" follows.
Haha, from resistance to IPv6 to BT's WBC/UBC wholesale pipe pricing scheme to Apple turning W3C into his charioteer, the last 10 years of the Internet's development has been little more than content and hardware providers trying so hard to take away the notion that Internet is a network of networks of connected peers.
Because people with a true sense of history understand that
Yes, every true Scotsman agrees with you.
many of these technologies trickle down to civilian use, and make America, and its allies, a more comfortable place to live.
Without some/.er making another wrong "reductio ad Hitlerum" accusation, I ask: so what? It's possible to use cruel experimentation to find out all sorts of information which eventually has positive applications, but that alone doesn't justify it. Why not omit the intermediate step?
Boeing and Lockheed Martin manufacture just almost as much commercial air equipment as they do military equipment.
Does this mean they must develop military equipment in order to develop civilian equipment? Can you think of other ways of funding and performing research and development?
I asked the question precisely because I've seen that there are so many defence contractors, but at the same time I know it's a casual, generalist and fairly anonymous environment.
I'm surprised you read anger into the asking of a question. I do hope I am doing nothing to promote aggression.
Anytime I post anything related to intelligence or military operations
Why is working for Raytheon (or any other defense contractor) implied to be an *immoral* choice?
That wasn't implied in the question at all. I was hoping to understand why Raytheon employees consider it moral. I want to do that by understanding what their system of morality is and then learning how they used it to make the conclusion that working at Raytheon is moral.
I can't imply that working at Raytheon is immoral without forcing a system of morality on you, but I'm not doing that - I want to know what yours is.
Is it just that you don't bother thinking through the consequences of trying to live in a dangerous world without any means for defending yourself?
You might want to read the thread. In "working for Raytheon" vs "no means for defending yourself" you have a trivially false dichotomy.
How about drawing the line somewhere you might consider manageable? Or, if you're not sure what you can manage, try somewhere almost arbitrary. Then adjust over time to accommodate your life without becoming totally uncaring.
I am reminded (frequently) of the story about the boy throwing washed up sea creatures back into the sea. An old man approaches him and mockingly remarks, "You'll never save them all, you know."
"Yes," he replies, "But I've saved that one. And that one. And that one."
The world doesn't run because it's full of superheroes destroying villains, though the worst people try to paint it that way because it causes others to lose hope and become uncaring and cynical. The world runs because enough people are fairly balanced.
It makes the argument vacuous, and inadequate as a justification.
In Nazi Germany there were people who did not particulary like hitler or the war doing military research (disclaimer: my grandfather was one of them).
In Nazi Germany it was far more difficult to stand up and refuse to do particular work on moral grounds. It's true that you will do a lot of things when you fear for your life, right down to Sonderkommando duty - but still other Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, political dissidents and other deviants[tm] remained faithful to their principles to the moment a gun/gas chamber was presented to them. But none of us have been forced to make that sort of choice, and I'm not going to insult your grandfather by claiming he was weak not to have chosen another path.
Anyway, that's really not a problem in the US and the UK. We're still so damn lucky.
Either because they feared Stalin more than Hitler
I wonder whether this could be mapped to today's environment. Does a Raytheon employee work there out of fear? Because he fears, say... the Taliban? North Korea? What does he think they're going to do to his nation? Or does he fear what will happen to his country in quality of life terms if it no longer has the military power to exploit other continents?
Those people were generally nither racist not fascist (and the US came to employ quite a few of them after the war. Remember Wernher von Braun?)
I think I linked to Lehrer on von Braun somewhere in this thread;-). I'm not quite sure that von Braun was "neither racist nor fascist" - he wasn't exactly moving to Israel or Africa, and if you're a leading technologist believing in domination by the strong, of course you'll spearhead technology wherever's strongest.
Slashdot Mirror
Plato was always talking about mathematics being the language of God, mathematics explaining the heavens, mathematics being central to philosophy, etc. What he got wrong was assuming that something seductively appealing and simple from a mathematical PoV should be assumed to explain the world, rather than actually incorporating empirical evidence to test his models. Whence the Platonic model of the planets, etc.
Jim, there have been quite a few interesting "why working for Raytheon is moral" arguments here - a good argument is what I asked for, not a contradiction of an unexpressed opinion, so I'm glad!
The good arguments express a need for defence research and discuss in what context it is appropriate. They elaborate on the decision-making process surrounding military engagement without entirely absolving the manufacturers when they suckle at the teat of government. They highlight the difference between research (esp. reconnaissance tools) to win a war and research to cause harm. These ruminations can all be applied to Raytheon to help answer the question initially posed.
The less sophisticated arguments say something like what you painted as a strawman.
We are in disagreement, as it were, on whether th'assembly would trammel up the consequence. This last fulmination is ample demonstration that you haven't yet spotted this; the discussion has stalled.
Nevertheless, cheers for the brief chat. The thread as a whole has been interesting for me.
I apologise, I guess I didn't realise that the last example was designed to catch me out by implicit reference to the pain-causing as opposed to any other transmitter.
Oh, and the solution to the problem of policeman beating down protesters is for policemen to stop beating down protesters. Not pain rays.
that's a pretty straightforward description of such.
Yes, precisely! That is what is traditional and appropriate for governments to offer to residents within their country.
Modern day Iraq (prior to Saddam's ouster) is primarily dominated by Sunnis. The southern portion of Iraq, which includes Basra, is historically a predominantly Shiite area - So yes, culturally, politically, religiously
The cultural, political and religious similarities between Sunni and Shia Arabs in the Middle East are rather clearer than between either and Brits/Americans :-).
Looking in more detail, the Shiite population in Basra city and province has varied radically over the past few decades. And what do you expect, when the West supplies and supports a man for his hatred of Shia Iran? Saddam hanged al-Sadr, outlawed membership of al-Dawa, exiled about 200k Shiites in the '80s and early '90s, and assassinated thouasnds more following the first Gulf War. 500k Madan marsh Arabs responsible for guerrilla operations against Baath were tackled by draining 90% of swamps. The post-Saddam backlash brought Shiite population in Basra back up to 60% by 2005.
We re-engineered Kuwait; we re-engineered Iraq even later. To "where does it end?" the answer is "quite recently".
I would not call it "immoral" for a Canadian unit to accidentally kill American non-combatants, as much as I would mourn the loss of those civilians.
When it has been established that war is just, yes, there is no argument that accidental killing of a non-combatant can be "immoral". The question then becomes, "What is reasonable care to avoid this accidental killing?" I would argue that the bottleneck is tactical and strategic, and technology should be applied toward intelligence-gathering (or, if I'm wearing my tinfoil, I'd argue that existing intelligence technology should be provided to ground forces). This is how you execute a war with minimal casualties - not by wasting money on a missile which hits the wrong target for the wrong reasons even more accurately than the last one didn't quite.
do not have any "personal power" over the military, but they are still being used on my behalf
I'm not sure if I'm about to engage in a semantic game, but let us say that they should be being used on your behalf, but aren't. And haven't been for a while. If this is true, it doesn't matter whether the legal framework of your government is such that they should be operating on your behalf; and it doesn't matter that every service member promises to operate to protect you. What matters is that if they're not.
As such, they are no better than a bunch of pirates which you're forced to pay for by the local laird. I too could promise that I'll protect you, even make a public oath to the effect, then do nothing but leech off you and make life worse for you: does this make me any better than someone who has openly admitted that he's going to leech off you and make life worse for you?
So, respect a military working on your behalf, perhaps, from general down to infantryman. But one which merely claims to? The military must never state that it is "only following orders". So what if it is emphasised at all levels that it must only either follow legitimate orders or do nothing?
OK, end of semantic game.
Each case must be taken individually, and evaluated on its merits
But with some underlying principles to limit where war may even be considered, no? Without restraint, eventually war will be abused for any possible interest, declared in terms of an unwinnable war on an undefinable enemy. Which may be what's happening.
It's possible to do very immoral *things* while attempting to achieve a legitimately moral end
I'm not sure that it is. If you decide that the end is so important as to outweigh the harm caused by the means then the whole act is moral. It's like killing the wife and daughters of the Generalissimo because they happen to be sat next
Islam has this big thing about "innovation",
For "about" read "against" :-).
They already had religions. Why one over the others?
As usual, it's more complex than "Muslims tried to take over the world".
So brief, often uttered, and very wrong: Muslims converted by the sword.
Very brief and somewhat misleading: Arabs took over a part of the world significant from a trading PoV, and Arabs happened to be Muslim. Trade influenced the remainder.
Less brief: The early caliphs had no interest in converting the conquered. Indeed, in some areas relation with an Arab tribe was necessary for formal conversion. But over a century later, i.e. after 750 AD, voluntary conversions became apparent for a multitude of reasons: loss of former infrastructure; trading favours (including tax breaks); political multiculturalism: i.e. give the natives a say and they'll take an interest in what you have to offer; etc.
Recall that Islam makes a vague effort to define the status of non-Muslims - although this has latterly been used to criticise Islam, it then ensured that non-Muslims received a degree of protection and respect, with specific fairly tolerant (by the standards of sharia) laws to handle their status. Islam has this big thing about "innovation", i.e. changing the religion to suit the whim of the times, and one of the ways this stuck was in respecting the dhimmi in a way that the Crusader didn't accept the heathen. It might have been convenient to use the excuse of using force to save the otherwise damned, but this wasn't how Islam spread.
This was domination by Arabs, not imposition of Islam. You'll be hard-pressed to find evidence in the literature of mass forced conversions, and there is no evidence that even a sizeable minority was forced to convert.
That's essentially the same question as asking how people could have the moral dysfunction necessary to work for boeing (they make the apache helicopter, you know).
It's not asking anything about "moral dysfunction" at all, but everyone in this thread seems to be replying as if I'm implying they should feel some sort of guilt. I want to know why employees consider it moral, in the same way any decision process has an element of morality.
But, yes, why can't I ask the same question of a Boeing employee? Boeing's civilian output is much more significant than Raytheon's, but they take even more money from the US taxpayer to develop weaponry, so it seems a fair question.
Just because he says true X doesn't means he's making a true Scotsman fallacy
He's correctly showing your flawed comprehension of history.
"Because the world is not black and white"? That's merely rephrasing part of the question. I could even have phrased it, "Can you give me a more considered answer than the black/white `because I'm worth it! (and you're not)' or `it's us or them!' to `why do you work at Raytheon?'?"
The stuff about civilian applications for military research is true, and many military developments are interesting from a straight tech PoV, but that doesn't justify anything.
The US won't die tomorrow just because, say, good minds refuse to develop military tech which hasn't even been proven necessary for defensive (or any) war until voters, politicians, military and contractors bash it out and decide to establish some principles for just[tm] war. In the US this might be war for self-defence rather than entangling alliances and special interests. Seriously, why is the US citizenry in a permanent state of panic?
I'm not convinced by your argument that a conquering country is always more evil than the conquered. Even if I consider myself moral, that doesn't mean I consider my country moral. The conquerors may be more aligned with my sense of morality. Hell, I might be a capitalist dreamer in North Korea, waiting for America to roll in...
modern Iraq is primarily a result of that same process
Geographically, to a good extent. If it had remained so in every other way that matters, America wouldn't have a problem.
but you can't say "Kuwait was historically governed by Basra" without also conceding that modern day Iraq, which encompassed modern day Basra, had very little resemblance to the Basra that used to govern Kuwait.
In what sense? Culturally? Politically? Religiously? Geographically? In terms of the mutual trading, navigation and security opportunities their cooperation provided? Kuwait can be identified as British-American in the same way South Africa identified itself as white, and Iraqi (or, indeed, simply Arabic) in the same way South Africa was black.
The moral basis for British/American fighting in Kuwait the '90s was it's valuable from a strategic and resource PoV that we keep control of a territory we occupied and have effectively never departed from.
Because there are practical limits to the size and amount of money you can spend on your military without running the rest of your country into the ground.
And given the current level of debt, is it moral to pay Raytheon for random crap?
Because it would be immoral to force someone to give their life in defense of something they have not volunteered to serve.
But civilians in enemy territory haven't volunteered to serve for or against you. Why is defence of your interests worth their peaceful citizens' lives but not your criminals' lives?
Because a war that wants to have a claim at being "justifiable" should make serious (reasonable) attempts to limit the deaths of non-combatants and limit collateral damage.
Yes. Except when it is considered moral to act in self-interest, and it is judged in the interest of the invading military to kill non-combatants.
Because they are *my* military. I - through my lawfully elected government -
Why so possessive? It's a representative democratic republic. Just because you get a limited say every few years in a broad decision-making process doesn't mean you have some special personal power over your military. If you're prepared to stand up and be counted personally for your military and politicians' behaviour then I'd at least have some understanding for why you're calling them "my military", but you're not - you're complaining instead about "voters" and "politicians".
am asking them to put their lives in grave danger on my behalf
This assumes that you respect people according as what they might do for you for pay and with the most extensive support any soldier on this earth could dream of.
smart bombs, camera-equipped drones, night vision advancements, laser-guided and satellite-guided cruise missiles - all of this is aimed at *precision* - being able to strike *exactly* at the target you wish to, while minimizing damage to surrounding people & infrastructure.
Even assuming that all wars using such weaponry were fought with the aim of being over as quickly and painlessly as possible, what evidence do you have that the weapons manufacturers' sales brochures are true? That the bottleneck is lack of precision in weaponry justifying investment in weapons research?
I would say that a legitimate, justifiable, moral war could be fought on any of these grounds.
I think pretty much any reason for waging war could come under the categories I listed. IOW, all wars are moral if you are broad enough with your categorisation of what is moral. This is really why I asked the question in the first place a few hours ago - to get people thinking in more than soundbites and trying to establish the detailed reason for their decisions.
but this is not the "fault" of the weaponry, it
in deciding to work for a company involved in military research and development you have to consider the nation that the military is attached to.
If your moral framework cares about the wider impact of your actions, absolutely. The argument isn't "America is like Nazi Germany", but "don't make a justification which could be applied equally to Nazi Germany unless you see no moral difference between promoting America and promoting Nazi Germany".
So, a Raytheon employee who cares about the wider impact of his actions must ask: "does the American military tend to act morally or immorally?" Again, it depends what that individual defines as moral. To von Braun, for example, military might may have an overriding moral imperative, and he would apply his skills to any nation which saught to increase its military might.
I'm not going to say that the world would be a better place if the US just dropped all arms.
Yes, but why are so many people in this thread speaking as if the alternative to "it is moral to work at Raytheon" is "the US should disarm completely and unilaterally"?
In any of these cases, there's nothing inherently moral or immoral about working for somebody else.
No voluntary human action, i.e. action by some human as a result of his conscious decision, omits morality. It makes no sense to say "well, I didn't think it right to do X, but I chose to do it anyway" - the very fact that you chose to do it implies that you concluded it right to do.
It may be that your moral code allows you to conclude "an act is always moral if you get paid well" - in which case working for Raytheon is moral if you get paid well. But that's still just a conclusion and reveals little about what assumptions brought you to that decision.
Again, this is different from suggesting that choosing who you work for (when you have that choice) is amoral, which contradicts the very fact that you have made a choice.
OK, I shall engage in a "mutual defence treaty" whereby I employ a gaggle of hired guns and anyone who wants my protection in the City simply pays me a set amount of their income per year.
They also promise to defend me, of course. But I'm the one with the guns and they're the ones with the income I'm getting a cut of, so it's fairly clear which way things are likely to work.
IOW, it depends entirely on the nature of the treaty. No entangling alliances, that sort of stuff.
No, I'm suggesting that every voluntary act performed by a human is somehow justified by their system of morality. Choosing to work at Raytheon is just one of those acts.
In assuming that I'm mindlessly demonising Raytheon employees just because I question them and want to understand them, you're tilting at windmills.
As, you would want me to say, are Raytheon's clients ;-).
I'm not disagreeing that war is sometimes necessary if your aim is to prevent even greater human suffering.
I would question the nature of involvement in Kosovo and Kuwait. 20th century Kuwait, like Israel, is an artificial construction of British retreat designed to maintain regional resource and military control. Historically governed from Basra with a degree of autonomy, it was defended by Britain from the Ottoman Empire having gained total control of Iraq. Yet when that Empire fell and Britain took the baton, it held on to both but kept them governed separately. Blah independence, Blah naval control of Persian gulf, blah oil, you know the rest. We used our might to separate the two because it was in our interest, then we used our might to keep them separate - perhaps this is moral, but it's not a question without contention.
To briefly reinforce some of your points:
I consider it my absolute moral imperative to provide those young men and women with the best weapons and defensive tools my mind can create for them
For them.
That means it is moral to develop new weapons in the service of that aim
In the service of that aim.
Yes, we can go on into arguments that governments will sometimes misuse their military, and that governments will sometimes involve us in conflicts that are NOT justifiable and moral.
But what if our Western governments are currently almost exclusively involving themselves in offensive wars for the protection of special interests? What if it's not the pathological exception, but the norm? Do you then argue, "Well, it's still moral, because while all these weapons of effective destruction are mostly being used to kill immorally, they could also be used to kill morally"?
using nothing but a pistol and a folding knife because we've "abandoned defense research" is immoral.
False dichotomy. Are you quite sure that Raytheon is producing weaponry which is appropriate for quick, effective and minimally cruel destruction of an offensive force, rather than weaponry optimised for effective long-term oppression? You don't just research how best to kill, you research how best to kill in a particular context.
"sorry, we don't have any A-10's available to provide close air support because we've abandoned defense research and engaged in arms limitation treaties, looks like your toast kids"
Why not just double funding to the military? Why not require criminals to act as human shields? Why not pre-emptively nuke every country which looks at you wrongly, just to ensure that all American and British soldiers' lives are kept intact?
Military volunteers should be aware of the risks, and should be aware that military management is a resource allocation and diplomacy problem as much as it is a problem of technological development. Military volunteers should be aware that one option is to simply nuke Iraq and Afghanistan and start again from scratch, and that this might reduce the chance that they're gunned down by the enemy. But this would not be appropriate from a diplomatic or humanitarian point of view.
Finally, I do find it difficult to understand why people have such a respect for the lives of their own military vs the lives of civilians in an enemy country. Is the aim of war to defend our country against invaders (so why Kosovo?)? To defend peaceful traders against tyrants? To reduce human suffering? To protect our interests home and abroad?
That's a lot of straw men for a Sunday afternoon.
If you develop something with the primary purpose of oppressing or kill offensively, and which is known to be commissioned to oppresss or kill offensively, and which is being commissioned by an entity which makes a habit of oppressing or killing offensively, then you certainly assume a degree of moral responsibility. For you are knowingly a link in the chain of people who must say "yes" for the development to be made and the people to be oppressed/killed offensively. That you are not the one with the arbitrary Presidente name badge is entirely irrelevant - absolute authority is a human fiction and cooperation is the reality.
If you create something which is unforeseeably later used to oppress or kill offensively, and which was not designed for the purpose of oppressing or killing offensively, then it does not seem feasible to argue that you assume moral responsibility.
(None of this is intended as a demonstration that oppressing or killing offensively is necessarily immoral. That's another question. What's fallacious is the "not my department" get-out-of-jail-free card which technologists like to wave.)
My only implication is that people who work at Raytheon have made a justification that is is moral, kinda the opposite of what you're suggesting. I want to understand what the justification is.
I can't imply that it is morally wrong unless I assume a set of moral principles, which I have not done. All I can do from the PoV of establishing correctness is understand the moral principles someone presents to me and establish whether "it is moral to work at Raytheon" follows.
Haha, from resistance to IPv6 to BT's WBC/UBC wholesale pipe pricing scheme to Apple turning W3C into his charioteer, the last 10 years of the Internet's development has been little more than content and hardware providers trying so hard to take away the notion that Internet is a network of networks of connected peers.
Because people with a true sense of history understand that
Yes, every true Scotsman agrees with you.
many of these technologies trickle down to civilian use, and make America, and its allies, a more comfortable place to live.
Without some /.er making another wrong "reductio ad Hitlerum" accusation, I ask: so what? It's possible to use cruel experimentation to find out all sorts of information which eventually has positive applications, but that alone doesn't justify it. Why not omit the intermediate step?
Boeing and Lockheed Martin manufacture just almost as much commercial air equipment as they do military equipment.
Does this mean they must develop military equipment in order to develop civilian equipment? Can you think of other ways of funding and performing research and development?
I asked the question precisely because I've seen that there are so many defence contractors, but at the same time I know it's a casual, generalist and fairly anonymous environment.
I'm surprised you read anger into the asking of a question. I do hope I am doing nothing to promote aggression.
Anytime I post anything related to intelligence or military operations
Hmm.
Why is working for Raytheon (or any other defense contractor) implied to be an *immoral* choice?
That wasn't implied in the question at all. I was hoping to understand why Raytheon employees consider it moral. I want to do that by understanding what their system of morality is and then learning how they used it to make the conclusion that working at Raytheon is moral.
I can't imply that working at Raytheon is immoral without forcing a system of morality on you, but I'm not doing that - I want to know what yours is.
Is it just that you don't bother thinking through the consequences of trying to live in a dangerous world without any means for defending yourself?
You might want to read the thread. In "working for Raytheon" vs "no means for defending yourself" you have a trivially false dichotomy.
Thanks for making the effort to explain.
How about drawing the line somewhere you might consider manageable? Or, if you're not sure what you can manage, try somewhere almost arbitrary. Then adjust over time to accommodate your life without becoming totally uncaring.
I am reminded (frequently) of the story about the boy throwing washed up sea creatures back into the sea. An old man approaches him and mockingly remarks, "You'll never save them all, you know."
"Yes," he replies, "But I've saved that one. And that one. And that one."
The world doesn't run because it's full of superheroes destroying villains, though the worst people try to paint it that way because it causes others to lose hope and become uncaring and cynical. The world runs because enough people are fairly balanced.
However, that does not make the argument false.
It makes the argument vacuous, and inadequate as a justification.
In Nazi Germany there were people who did not particulary like hitler or the war doing military research (disclaimer: my grandfather was one of them).
In Nazi Germany it was far more difficult to stand up and refuse to do particular work on moral grounds. It's true that you will do a lot of things when you fear for your life, right down to Sonderkommando duty - but still other Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, political dissidents and other deviants[tm] remained faithful to their principles to the moment a gun/gas chamber was presented to them. But none of us have been forced to make that sort of choice, and I'm not going to insult your grandfather by claiming he was weak not to have chosen another path.
Anyway, that's really not a problem in the US and the UK. We're still so damn lucky.
Either because they feared Stalin more than Hitler
I wonder whether this could be mapped to today's environment. Does a Raytheon employee work there out of fear? Because he fears, say... the Taliban? North Korea? What does he think they're going to do to his nation? Or does he fear what will happen to his country in quality of life terms if it no longer has the military power to exploit other continents?
Those people were generally nither racist not fascist (and the US came to employ quite a few of them after the war. Remember Wernher von Braun?)
I think I linked to Lehrer on von Braun somewhere in this thread ;-). I'm not quite sure that von Braun was "neither racist nor fascist" - he wasn't exactly moving to Israel or Africa, and if you're a leading technologist believing in domination by the strong, of course you'll spearhead technology wherever's strongest.