alt Hacker News> it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds.
(spoiler alert)
Wasn't this one of the plot points of the Val Kilmer movie Real Genius? They had to trick the students into creating a weapon by siloing them off from each other and having them build individual but related components? How far we've fallen! Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess...
Replies
Also in Good Will Hunting, when Will (Matt Damon) delivers a scathing job rejection to the NSA.
1997. The War on Terror has a lot to answer for.
If you are waiting until undergraduate level to take ethics, it's far too late to matter anyways.
Doubly so for "business ethics" classes which became à la mode in the post-Enron era. They attempt to teach fundamental ethics, when at most it should be a very thin layer on top of a well founded internal moral framework and well-accepted ethical standards inculcated from day 1 of kindergarten.
Morals are taught 0-9 [0], Ethics perhaps slightly later as it requires more complex thought processes.
[0] https://familiesforlife.sg/pages/fflparticle/Young-Children-...
Many prominent tech and science leaders have been disparaging philosophy for decades now. Not surprising that in the absence of any serious ethical thought, “make money = good” is the default position.
To be fair, it wasn't like lockheed and raytheon and all the rest of the modern human killing machine companies have ever been hurting for engineering talent. Likewise for oil and gas.
If you are tricked into doing that it is not your fault. But the moment you realise you need to to a choice.
Same with Ender's Game. They are playing war games but they're actually real. He sacrifices his units and commits genocide (xenocide) at the same time. Something he probably wouldn't have done had he known.
> Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess...
Edit:
Oops, missed pazimzadeh's comment. I'll leave mine because I say more
Most of the pranks in Real Genius were actual pranks done at Caltech in the 1970s. The McDonald's prank, for example.
I don't recall Caltech having any ethics classes. Caltech did have an honor system, however, which was surprisingly effective.
also relevant to Ender's Game, which came out 8 months before Real Genius
"Why do you wear that toy on your head?" "Because if I wear it anywhere else it chafes"
"A laser is a beam of coherent light." "Does that mean it talks?"
"Your stutter has improved." "I've been giving myself shock treatment." "Up the voltage."
"In the immortal words of Socrates, who said, 'I drank what?'"
"Is there anything I can do for you? Or...more to the point... to you?"
"Can you drive a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?" "...not right now." "A girl's got to have her standards."
"What are you looking at? You're laborers, you're supposed to be laboring! That's what you get for not having an education!"
-- I'm sure I could remember more if I thought about it for a bit. That movie made quite an impression on young me.
The most unethical people I know have taken ethics classes and signal that they did it.
God bless you for referencing that film.
You still take ethics. The only difference is political views. It’s very easy to be consistent from an ethical perspective if you are convinced of a government’s particular powers.
The government has a monopoly on violence. Whether you want to enhance it or not all comes down to your political alignment, not ethics.
Reminds me of the story of someone's woman working for a research lab to improve the computer-controlled automatic emergency landings of planes with total power failure.
... or so she was told.
She was unknowingly designing glide-bomb avionics.
>I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people.
>But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.
Caleb Hearth: "Don't Get Distracted" https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted