Ethics Query on Military Work
Response to an Ethics Query on Military Work
What follows is a personal view, representing my own thinking about the issue you raised. Other conscientious engineers may hold different views about the morality of doing military work. Such views depend on one's general philosophy and values system as well as on one's judgments about human behavior and one's appraisal of the likelihoods of various events. I don't mean to imply that all such views are equally valid, but only that the differences are outside the scope of engineering ethics. So ethical engineers may, and do, disagree about these matters.
When a nation is engaged in or preparing for war, ALL work performed contributes in some way to the pursuit of that war. Not only is all engineering work applicable in a broad sense to the waging of war, but so is essentially every other human occupation. Comedians and musicians are used to entertain troops. Food raised by farmers feeds both soldiers and those who are manufacturing weapons. So, if you want to avoid contributing in any way to war, you had better devote some effort to the preservation of peace.
A less extreme view would be to consider the degree to which any particular activity is likely to have military applications, how horrendous you consider those applications to be, and the extent to which the beneficial non-military applications balance out the uses you don't like. For example, a new medicine that is very effective against malaria would indeed be of value to the military. But it would be reasonable to argue that its general benefit to humanity would far outweigh the fact that it might facilitate military operations in tropical areas. The point here is that one might rank various technological achievements from those that are almost entirely in the military realm (say nuclear tipped missiles), to those whose peacetime applications are clearly and overwhelmingly predominant (e.g., an efficient wind turbine).
Those who are not absolute pacifists might also want to consider the point that military equipment might sometimes be used to promote peace. For example, at this moment, Australian soldiers in armored vehicles are trying, under UN auspices, to protect people in East Timor. It is also the case that some products originally developed for the military have resulted in related products that most people believe are very beneficial
One might also feel that some non-military technology products are harmful to humanity. Consider, for example, the proliferation in the US of heavy so-called "sports utility" vehicles that consume excessive amounts of fuel, pollute the air, contribute to global warming, and are a menace to those driving lighter, less polluting vehicles.
In general, with respect to these problems, I would like to see engineers make every effort to apply their technical skills only on projects that, to the best of their abilities, appear to be in accordance with their own moral codes. As in all human activities, there will always be some uncertainty here as matters sometimes take turns that one did not anticipate. Sometimes, since engineers seldom have much control over future uses of their work, what seemed at the outset to be an obviously benign project is later applied in ways that the engineer is very unhappy with. For this reason, it is important that engineers, as professionals, do their bit to inform the public about technological issues that they are knowledgeable about, and that they participate as citizens in the democratic process.
References
- You can find a range of views on technology and the military in, Mitcham and Siekevitz, "Ethical Issues Associated with Scientific and Technological Research for the Military", Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol 577.
- I have discussed issues of this type in my book, Controlling Technology: Ethics and the Responsible Engineer, 2nd Edition, Wiley, 1994. Stephen H. Unger.