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I don't believe it is unethical to work on weapons technology any more than I believe it is unethical to be member of the armed forces. We live in a world with bad actors, so some amount of work on defense is necessary for survival.

However, I also believe you are responsible for the consequences of the technology you create. If you decide to work on smart bombs and because of a bad government those end up killing innocent civilians, some of that blood is on your hands. If you're willing to accept the risk of that, I respect your choice.

Personally, I would rather avoid that by not working on that category of technology at all. It's not the kind of mark I want to leave on the world. I do appreciate that I only have the luxury of this choice because I live in a country where others do choose to work on defense so that I can be protected.




It seems to me that your second paragraph directly and immediately contradicts your first.

I don’t think both of those can be true simultaneously, unless you somehow consider “having blood on your hands” to be ethical.


The "if" is significant. If you work on weapons that turn out to be used to stop legitimately bad actors with minimal collateral damage, then your hands are as clean as anyone's can be in war.

I don't generally believe in black and white, so I'm making no claims that anything is 100% ethical, 100% unethical, 100% blood on your hands, etc. I think it's possible for good people to work on weapons and still sleep soundly at night. I also think it's possible for good people to work on weapons and end up regretting the consequences of that choice.


If you're working on weapon systems that will be used to attack, say, Nazi Germany, and you know or expect that they will also kill innocent civilians, then you are de-facto endorsing that murdering[0] innocent civilians is worth it to stop Nazi Germany, which is a resonable, if debatable, position.

If you're working on weapon systems that (you know or expect) will be just be directly used for murdering[1] innocent civilians, then you're endorsing murdering innocent civilians.

If you don't know where on that scale things are, then you're reasoning under uncertainty, and your ethics are going to have to deal with that.

0: technically most of those would actually be manslaughter, going by the usual definitions, but a: not all, b: that's not a verb.

1: nope, just murder


> However, I also believe you are responsible for the consequences of the technology you create.

I agree with this to an extent, but at the same time, technologies you develop can go well beyond what you intended them to be. Do you think Ritchie knew C would be used the way it is today? It is used in UAVs, smart missiles, and more. Building faster algorithms also means faster weapons. Everyone working at SpaceX is directly or indirectly working on missile technology. You can do this with practically any technology, even as simple as building a better screw. Building materials that are stronger, lighter, and cheaper reduce the prices of homes, but it also has applications in war. Studying diseases and vaccines directly impacts biological warfare research.

It is easy to say you're responsible when you're working on things like smart bombs. But it isn't easy if you're researching fertilizer. The thing that arguably has saved the most lives yet how many lives have bombs and bullets taken?

> Personally, I would rather avoid that by not working on that category of technology at all.

So what I'm saying is you're working on that tech, just how removed are you? I also don't think there's a cognitive dissonance. You can be pro putting nitrogen in soil and anti explosive nitrates. But saying the two aren't related is naive.


It's easy to extend this further.

Engaging in any kind of commerce (i.e. beyond growing food for yourself and your family) means paying taxes, which means funding governments and armies.



Going even further, those researchers are at ORNL, which is a DOE lab. (ORNL itself isn't a weapons lab, but other DOE labs are)




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