Look at Ukraine then. Ukraine exchanged their nuclear arsenal for promises of safety by Russia, Britain, and USA. Is Ukraine safe place now?
There are few different kind of morality in circulation, so I need to know about what morality we are talking.
Liberal morale is used at the West: every person life costs infinity, so we cannot exchange life of a person to save another person or even infinity of persons.
However, at war or in military, Liberal morale can't be used, because Liberal morale forbids to send soldiers to protect civilians: life of a soldier has same cost as lives of all civilians in the country. So every military in the world uses Utilitarian morale, where each life has a cost. In most countries, order of life cost is: our politics > our commandment > our civilians > other civilians > our soldiers > enemies, and goal is to minimize loses. In some countries order can be different, e.g. religious leaders can send civilians to kill other civilians or civilians can be used to protect soldiers (e.g. famous speech of V.V. Putin: «We will put our soldier behind their (Ukrainian) mothers and children. Not in front but behind. Will they shoot at them? At their own mothers and children?» https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoQXvPsBBn8 ), and so on.
So my question is: to which kind of morality you are referring when you are talking about "immorality"?
Also, all of these have been repeatedly violated by the US military or its contractors, making me more hesitant to want to help them, even under the assumption that they are necessary to protect our liberal societies from other regimes.
> such as not bombing hospitals (like what happened with that hospital in Syria a while ago)
It looks like error (one bomb hit territory near to hospital), not a precise strike. In contrasts, Russians (I will Russian-Ukraine war as example, because I know it better) are shooting civilians pretty often. I had Uber-drive with driver which served in Augustinian during USSR invasion. He told me that in Augustinian they completely destroyed nearest civilian village with all habitats when one of them was killed during mission. AFAIK, Russian army is not changed much since then.
> not killing civilians without due process in countries where there is formally no state of war (drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries)
Completely agreed. We(Ukraine) are victims of hybrid war too.
> not starting wars of aggression based on falsified intelligence (Iraq, Vietnam)
Intelligence was not falsified in case of Iraq: chemical weapons are just moved to Syria few months prior to invasion.
Not sure about Vietnam, but I know a bit about war in Vietnam from USSR side, and it not good. Not interested much in the topic.
Now YOU are falsifying intelligence.
You can't win an argument by falsifying intelligence and not being interested in topics that contradict your falsifications.
Iraq war 'waged on false intelligence': https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/09/usa.iraq2
And in case you only find Russian news interesting: How Distorted Intelligence Dragged US Into Vietnam War 53 Years Ago: https://sputniknews.com/politics/201708021056125095-us-vietn...
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/01/26/exclusive-former-top...
I newer read Russian news, because they are prepared and targeted. :-) I read memories (many of them were released uncensored shortly after fall of USSR), and I also listened to stories told us by our teachers, ex-officers of USSR army.
I agree with that. This is why I was only asking for "reasonable effort" to try to avoid this. I realize this is vague, but there are some cases that are a clear violation.
> It looks like error (one bomb hit territory near to hospital), not a precise strike.
In the incident I was referring to (but can't find a link to for some reason right now), it was a sustained attack that didn't even stop for 30 minutes after the US forces were informed that it was in fact a hospital. I'm willing to attribute that to negligence and organizational dysfunction rather than malice, but even then this indicates a lack of concern for civilians and medical infrastructure in the country.
Another case was the bombing of that infant formula factory in the first gulf war that was, as far as I remember, also claimed to be a chemical weapons site, even though the administration knew this not to be the case at the time. I don't remember many details on this though.
EDIT: Okay, seems I was mistaken about this, they didn't know this to be false, but seemingly had no strong evidence to support their claims either. Here are some other examples of US strikes on civilian targets based on very flimsy evidence though, along with details on that original hospital case I brought up:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43079.htm
> Intelligence was not falsified in case of Iraq: chemical weapons are just moved to Syria few months prior to invasion.
This is the first time I've heard this claim. Most Western media reported that there was no intelligence to support the WMD claim at the time. e.g:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/09/usa.iraq2
> Not sure about Vietnam, but I know a bit about war in Vietnam from USSR side, and it not good. Not interested much in the topic.
In this case the administration lied about the reasons for the war to the general public (this was revealed by the Pentagon Papers).
I know very little about the war in Ukraine, so I'll take your word for it. My main argument was that the US military in particular (since this is the one most relevant to Silicon Valley) has a history of this type of behavior that significantly complicates the point of military research to keep us safe.
Read this interview: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/01/26/exclusive-former-top...
SADA: Well, up to the year 2002, 2002, in summer, they were in Iraq. And after that, when Saddam realized that the inspectors are coming on the first of November and the Americans are coming, so he took the advantage of a natural disaster happened in Syria, a dam was broken. So he — he announced to the world that he is going to make an air bridge...
> My main argument was that the US military in particular (since this is the one most relevant to Silicon Valley) has a history of this type of behavior that significantly complicates the point of military research to keep us safe.
Sorry to inform you, but army sometimes shooting even their own civilians. For example, in 2001 Russians used civil plane to fly over EU border to grab some intelligence. They turned off air responder on the plane to hide that. They decided that nobody will try to shot civil passenger plane, even if it doesn't respond. Well, nobody except Russia. Russian air defense battery shot plane with their own passengers without any doubt, even without call to commandment. Then they blamed Ukraine for that. Shit happens.
Also on the list: direct-energy blinding weapons design to destroy the retina. Easily biult, but happily not a thing.
They are used by Russians against Ukrainian snipers. Few snipers are already blind at working eye.
Is my example bad for you?
In fact, those social media sites have been used to manipulate foreign militant uprisings and sway political discourses (whether in the U.S. or in other countries).
Also, people who worked on GPS technology are directly responsible for the GPS-guided missiles that have been fired into Syria and other parts of Middle East. Should those people be ashamed as well?
Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are first and foremost data-mining ad agencies that also provide social networking services. The fact that you can also use them to target terrorist is not really a by design item, much like even though you can beat someone to death with a wrench, it's primary function and the design goal behind it is to secure nuts to bolts and screws.
So yes, there is a bit of a difference when Google's tech happens to also be used by the military for image analysis from drones and when Google willingly assists and participates in such projects.
The major concern a lot of people have is that it's a very big switch in market from what they were doing to Project Maven. People who otherwise were maybe concerned, or heck, even satisfied with Google's influence on their lives and happy to participate in reCAPTCHA and pay for Google services now find their work and money being used to pay for something they disagree with.
I do not appreciate the simplification of the outcomes, as no civilized society judges in that way - we consider the motive as well as the outcome, as well as the state of mind of the person who committed the act. Likewise, there's quite a bit of a difference in US Army RnD grabbing an open source project and embedding it into drone guidance systems and Google taking a Government Contract; aside from the willingness of Google in this state, they demonstrate their complicit nature as a company via the contract and the payments; the open source project likely wasn't even aware of it until they read about it in some news article or saw snippets of their code in a Press Release/Demo.
* I realize that this is meant as a method of judging guilt (hence Guilty Mind), but the concept is the same here. The state of one's mind in making an action should be relevant.
yes, and not only for the reason you listed (although that certainly is one)
I anticipate that your response would be to cite the first second Bush Administration's claim of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Before making that response, I encourage you to familiarize what that term means under federal law (and has meant since 1994). 18 U.S.C. §§ 2332a(c)(2) and 921(a)(4).
In order for someone to believe that the claim of WMDs was a lie, they would have to believe that the Hussein regime did not possess grenades, and that the President knew it.
The only reason we know about it is improvements in communications.
Nations having people killed across borders outside of the judicial system isn't a new thing, and it isn't going away. The technology to do it is incidental, and a very minor part of defense R&D output.
Functioning communications enables war crimes just as much as or more than weapons, so why not refuse to work on computer networking research too? (one could make a million such arguments about essentially everything)
Go ahead and give an example, if you wouldn't mind?
If this was the only thing the weapons were used for, then maybe people wouldn't be upset about this kind of stuff.
The same arms will however also be used to extrajudicially assassinate people based on nothing else than their phone signal, in countries we are not at war with; they might be sold to regimes like Saudi Arabia that kills countless civilians in places like Yemen; they might be used to fight wars based on reasons the administration knows to be false; they might be used to gun down civilians by private contractors; the list goes on.
I'd not be opposed to participating in military research if the weapons were actually used "responsibly" (I know that's a somewhat subjective terms, but most of my examples are quite clearly considered immoral by most people).