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Ask HN: Why is there a stigma around working in defense-related tech?

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11–15 of 15 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why is there a stigma around working in defense-related tech?

#11
post #5

> the obvious reason is that the military tends to involve killing sometimes Your wording downplays it, but killing people is the entire reason militaries exist. > People don't have similar disdain for working at advertising corps like Google and Facebook for the killings they do indirectly. A whole lot of people do. > My drone is for surveillance only—it has a self-detachment feature (SDA) that is activated when the…

My issue with my friend is: why is military work specially objectionable? I used the example of buying products that are produced by slaves. No doubt some died, yet he has no problem with that, saying it is different without actually explaining why.

Is the issue perception alone? Brand? What the industry advertises itself as? And the totality of their work doesn't matter?

Re: Ask HN: Why is there a stigma around working in defense-related tech?

#12

Defense is the sanitised version. Let's say you program code for a hellfire heat tracking missile. Now sure you can tell yourself it's only going to be used by the good guys but really you know at some point your code is going to be responsible for someone innocent getting killed. So there's probably that bit of people with morals and a conscience who have an issue with the 'defense' industry. How exactly does your d…

How many degrees of separation need to exist before your culpability drops to nearly zero? One degree? Two? Three? Someone cashing a paycheck from Facebook or Google can tout how the company is connecting people, which is like military folks saying they work in defense. I feel like almost no one working at a for-profit company can truly escape the principle of do no harm. The fact that I lean into the positive aspect…

If you make bolts in a factory and some of those bolts are used for an aeroplane, some of which may be bombers it's probably negligible. If you, like the OP, are creating a drone with the specific effect of being a weapon, then I think I'm on safe ground saying there is no separation. You are actively making the world worse.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there a stigma around working in defense-related tech?

#13
post #5

> the obvious reason is that the military tends to involve killing sometimes Your wording downplays it, but killing people is the entire reason militaries exist. > People don't have similar disdain for working at advertising corps like Google and Facebook for the killings they do indirectly. A whole lot of people do. > My drone is for surveillance only—it has a self-detachment feature (SDA) that is activated when the…

My issue with my friend is: why is military work specially objectionable? I used the example of buying products that are produced by slaves. No doubt some died, yet he has no problem with that, saying it is different without actually explaining why. Is the issue perception alone? Brand? What the industry advertises itself as? And the totality of their work doesn't matter?

I don't know anything about your friend so I can't speak to his perspective. For all I know, he's a pacifist.

A rather large difference between products that were made with slave labor and the military is that the overt, express purpose of the military is to kill people. Products made with slave labor are companies behaving badly, not companies fulfilling an express purpose.

> And the totality of their work doesn't matter?

If you find the purpose of the military objectionable, then no, that they also do some good isn't that important. Speaking generally, doing good deeds doesn't erase or forgive bad ones you have done.

It sounds to me like this is a case where you and your friend have fundamentally different moral codes with this sort of thing. It shouldn't affect your friendship. You could both just acknowledge that you have different opinions about this and let it go. Nobody agrees with anybody else about everything.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there a stigma around working in defense-related tech?

#14
They hate America, and more broadly, the west. That's really it. They never object nearly as vehemently to rogue nations like Iran or geostrategic rivals like the PRC spending money on defense as much as they do the US. Orwell noted this phenomenon in 1945:

> https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

> 5. Pacifism. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransferred.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there a stigma around working in defense-related tech?

#15
I think stigma around US MIC is there's basically 100% chance your work on hardware if it's part of the kill chain is going to end up collateral damaging (murdering) some/many civilians half way around the world. Less expeditionary countries also have heir domestic MIC, it's generally not an issue until exporting to operators also actively use hardware to unalive babies.
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