Hey STEMfags. How do you handle the ethical dilemmas you face in your careers? Have you ever turned down a job over ethical qualms? Or do you just go where the money is and not ask questions?
Am an EE major, and all of my most reliable career connections are with DoD contractors. Not sure how I feel about that.
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I work at Raytheon. The only ethical dilemma I've encountered is making sure we do our work as efficiently and effectively as possible since we are ultimately funded by the tax payer (of course the government bullshit is basically the opposite of efficiency).
Reading Stirner
Morality is a spook
I don't. If there is an ethical concern, society as a whole needs to dictate that. From my day to day perspective, it makes no difference to me. I will do whatever the laws and regulations say, and I will be on equal ground to my competitors.
For instance, I work at a petrochemical facility, but my electricity is 100% wind power.
OP here. Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to vilify you for your career. Actually, you may have done business with no less than three of my family members. So, I ask this honestly: does it bother you at all that people suffer as a direct result of your work?
I'm honestly trying to figure out whether I'd be okay with that. What's your perspective?
From my perspective you're a weak faggot who needs to grow up.
>For instance, I work at a petrochemical facility, but my electricity is 100% wind power.
im not sure you understand what ethics means.. that's entirely irrelevant to OP's question
i work for a company that cures cancer, so no
how many cancers have they cured?
I look at it this way, I didn't go to school so one day I apply my knowledge and hard work to create the instruments of someone else's suffering.
To me, it doesn't matter whether or not society accepts it, my moral compass is not dictated by the will of the people. It doesn't matter if someone else can do the work, by all means let it be him who dirties his hands. I don't want my mark on this world to be a pile of dead brown people.
Here. Firstly not all of our products are designed to kill (e.g. missile defense). Of the ones that do kill, my view is that generally speaking they kill people that need killing and when they kill people that don't deserve to die, the people who misuse them are at fault. As long as we aren't selling directly to war criminals or something I have no ethical qualms.
It depends on the person as to whether you'll be okay with this line of work. No company is 100% ethical 100% of the time, so ultimately you have to draw the line at some point that you deem acceptable. Furthermore, when unethical conduct occurs, it's not as if the entire company conspired to make it happen. Oftentimes it's a corrupt executive or something to that effect as opposed to an inherently unethical culture within the company.
86%-98% of the people they have provided treatment for if patient data for brachytherapy is accurate
What if that someone will cause many more to suffer?
Guns aren't good or evil, they're just tools. The men who invented the atomic bomb are probably responsible for saving more lives than anyone else in history. Consider that for the last 200 years before the atomic bomb, the world had gone through a major war every ~20 years, each more bloody and horrible than the last, culminating in WW2 which killed approximately 60 million people. Since then we've had nothing anywhere near as destructive. Mutually Assured Destruction prevented WW3.
You tell him user
>does it bother you at all that people suffer as a direct result of your work?
>Enemies of your country
>People
You sound like a traitor user, an enemy sympathizer.
The company I work for is supposed to "safely" dispose chemicals, but instead they just add a base to make it less flammable then dump it into rivers in the shitty parts of mexico. Our legal staff thinks that at least 100 people have died as a result of drinking the polluted water, and have tied at least 10 miscarriages to it.
Ultimately I don't care because it's not my fault, I just turn a valve. I get paid and sleep easy.
>Ultimately I don't care because it's not my fault, I just turn a valve. I get paid and sleep easy.
Didn't realize you worked at a concentration camp user! Wow, you must be like 90 years old by now!
>Ultimately I don't care because it's not my fault, I just turn a valve. I get paid and sleep easy.
so you're a deontologist? fucking edgy m8
I used to play videogames. I played arma 3 for 2500 hours. People would play all day just because it was so competitive. The gamemode wasn't even fun, infact it was so competitive it was legitimately stressful at times, and about 90% of the gameplay was just driving trucks across the map (literally running virtual errands).
Sometimes you would get randomly murdered, robbed for hours of work's worth of money, the server might crash, all sorts of stupid shit. The only fun part was when you had a chance to beat the other players with such high stakes.
That's pretty much life. By aiding a DoD contractor you are just playing as a Blufor. It wouldn't be fun if it wasn't competitive and there wasn't high stakes. I'd do it for free.
And when America finally takes over the world, I will be happy for a while. Then I'll switch sides and take over the world again. When I'm dead I'll be in a hole in the ground and nothing will matter.
I work for a power company subcontractor. Every few years or so natural gas plant pipes and boilers need to be flushed out with a special proprietary chemical. The runoff is put into a truck, mixed with whatever crap the company can find, labelled as sewage and sent as far south as possible. One time they sprayed it into old foam mattresses (which are absorbent), then loaded those into a truck and dumped.
>What if that someone will cause many more to suffer?
What if he doesn't? If he did, is it my moral obligation to work for Lockheed Martin and be as unproductive as possible and to sabotage projects?
The period of peace through threat of mutually assured destruction was a period otherwise known as the Cold War, where neighbors would accuse one other of being a traitor out of paranoia and children taught to hide under tables. The period of peace we are living in today comes from increased foreign and trade relations. How did the US respond to Iran's nuclear program? How did the west respond to Russia in Crimea? Economic sanctions and threats thereof are one of the many non-militaristic tools through which peace is maintained.
Good advice. Thanks, user.
>tfw you can kill multiple holocausts worth of bacteria and no one bats an eyelid
jesus man, I guess you gotta do it.
I develop proprietary image recognition software for a research institute that is then sold to private partners.
It's annoying to me that an institute that is partially government-funded doesn't publish its software under a free license.
You could become a whistle blower and then get in an accident.
I'm a nihilist so I don't care, I think that makes it pretty easy.
Only reason I went the STEM route is because everyone said I was good at math and that seemed the best way to get a scholarship.
I have no prob killing people indirectly since I was originally gong to enlist and do it directly for cash and a unique place to sleep.
>From my perspective at
>the bottom of the gene pool
just stfu fgt pls
I used to work for a company that did operating systems for drones (UAVs). I started in 2006 when drones weren't heavily used in warfare and the company thought they'd be the next big thing for search and rescue operations. In 2008 we got military contracts for work with Predator and Reaper drones. The funniest thing is our OS was called DIOS which coincidentally is Spanish for God so it was renamed Patriot OS to avoid any bad publicity. I quit a few months after that and took a job safety ensuring commercial airport runway lights.
How I see it is working a morally dubious job is a necessary evil a lot of people have to accept, but someone with highly in demand skills doesn't have to settle for a job that requires them to deal with that shit.
>I started in 2006 when drones weren't heavily used in warfare
nigga they were using drones back in the cold war
COLD-HEARTED BASTARDS REEEEEEEEEEE
Only for surveillance. 2001 is the first time a drone was used to kill someone. That became normal procedure in the mid 2000s.
"hey dad, what did you do at work today?"
"i created a more efficient way of vaporizing dirt farmers!"
not knocking the guys that do it, but no thank you.
Edgelords are out in force today.
>nihilist
>doing shit
pick one
Nobody looking at that image?
"Guidance planes for thrust vectoring"? They're pointing at a fin. Scuds do have thrust vectoring (it uses vanes like the V2 did), but obviously the fins aren't what provide it.
"Fuel: IRFNA", "Oxidizer: UDMH"
Interstage between the fuel and oxidizer tanks?
This is pure comedy.
I would be uncomfortable designing or synthesizing an explosive. We are drilled harsh lab safety throughout our entire education, so making something that is designed to break all those rules and harm as efficiently as possible not only triggers my autism, but also bothers me. Sure, its probably going to be made whether I do it or not, but I'm not going to be the one directly or indirectly responsible. end of discussion.
The work that is actually relevant to what I actually do would probably be more important to discuss. I work in energy storage technologies, so if I produced a superior battery that yields many applications including military weaponry I wouldnt care as much. To me, its similar to saying because that company mined the ore and fashioned it into steel, they are responsible for every death our tanks cause. On that same note, if my battery was a critical component that was sought after specifically to get some hypothetical death machine running, I would feel very responsible.
At some point you are not liable for how a technology is used, its really up to you to figure out how close you are willing to get to its development before you feel uncomfortable IMO.
Kek I didn't even notice that.
My dad made a piece of software to orient satellites as they orbited around the earth. Since this was still around the age of computers being archaic bullshit it was worth quite a pretty penny. He then got a job offer from the DoD where they wanted him to make a lie detecting software "so we don't have to torture people as much". That made him leery at first but when he finally talked to another engineer he asked what was going on around here and the dude went "You gonna get married?"
"Yeah"
"You wanna have kids and go on vacations?"
"Yeah"
"If you ever want you or any of your family to ever go on a vacation stop asking questions now"
He didn't take the job.
It's not like explosives are only used for violence. They're also used extensively in mining, demolition, and emergency systems.
sure, that was a little general. If i was designing blasting caps I wouldnt have an issue. If I worked for lawrence livermoore designing DoD explosives then I would have a problem.
thats kinda fucking scary actually.
I turned down a defense job recently, but only because I had another offer come up
My attitude is that, if I can get a decent job without killing people, I'll do so, but if I have no other options, I'll do defense.
Unfortunately, in engineering, there's always the potential of work done towards a non-defense project being repurposed for defense at some point, so, from an ethical standpoint, there might not be much difference between taking a defense or commercial job.
I think it's kind of a weird thing how many people relate to soldiers like, "thank you for your service", but to people who work in defense industries like, "omg, how could you do that?".
It's all the same team, working toward the same purpose.
they would have radar seeking drones with little warheads and when russian AA would turn their radar on, the drone would dive bomb the guns
>Unfortunately, in engineering, there's always the potential of work done towards a non-defense project being repurposed for defense at some point, so, from an ethical standpoint, there might not be much difference between taking a defense or commercial job.
oh, cmon, thats like saying people who work in a gun factory are murderers, the intent makes a huge difference
soldiers are actually putting their lives on the line, spend a long time training and maintain a disciplined lifestyle, witness some fucked up shit, probably have to do some fucked up shit, and risk becoming a vegetable. they also dont get paid very much.
defense contractors get paid a lot, typically more than a non-defense job, to sit at a desk in a nice safe air conditioned office and make shit that kills people.
its like the actual players on a sports team, vs the jackass who sits in an office and decides to raise the price of a beer from $10 to $12 to make more money
Wasn't this technology developed in the cod war that never got real use?
they would make way for B-2s to come in because the russians would just blast AA into the sky basically at random.
just recently learned this a few months ago, didnt know there was that much actual shit that went down with russia
>soldiers are actually putting their lives on the line, spend a long time training and maintain a disciplined lifestyle, witness some fucked up shit, probably have to do some fucked up shit, and risk becoming a vegetable. they also dont get paid very much.
The majority of soldiers are not front-line infantry, but basically guys who do maintenance work, service work, or desk jobs at bases or camps. And they're not usually people with good prospects. Normally, people join the military because it's the best job opportunity they have, like anyone else.
Anyway, what they personally go through doesn't change the moral character of the interests they're serving.
You can't say that it's right to be a soldier, but wrong to arm your country's soldiers.
A couple of people have used the gun analogy in this thread, saying you can't blame a gun manufacturer for what people do with their products.
I think there's an interesting distinction between, say, someone who designs a hunting rifle, who knows that the vast majority of the bullets his gun will fire will be shot at deer and paper targets, and probably less than 0.01% of all rounds discharged will harm humans, versus the DoD engineer who designs anti-personnel mines, who actually sits down and works out on paper solutions to the problem of "how do we severely maim someone without actually killing them, so that their squad has to stop and arrange a med-evac?" ...Which is the actual tactical application of an anti personnel mine.
I think there's a line somewhere between the two, and even people who are comfortable crossing it are aware of it. But exactly where that line is is really subjective.
Except one is getting bullets sprayed at them being forced into a kill or be killed situation that has lasting mental effects.
The other one gets paid big $$$ to build weapons they can fire from thousands of miles away that can cause as much destruction and death as they design with the added bonus of not being in a situation where they feel they are forced into doing so.
In the 60's, protesters were throwing human shit at vets returning from Vietnam. Calling them murderers.
Interesting how times have changed. We weren't even drafting people for the second Iraq war like we were in Vietnam, but anti-soldier sentiment is unheard of these days.
>"how do we severely maim someone without actually killing them, so that their squad has to stop and arrange a med-evac?" ...Which is the actual tactical application of an anti personnel mine.
That's not the "actual tactical application" of anti-personnel mines. You don't depend on your adversary not being pragmatic enough to just put a maimed comrade out of their misery.
The main tactical application is to hinder mobility. It's like suppressing fire: you expect the adversary to respond to avoid the worst circumstances. You put down a minefield, and then they don't go through it, without first taking time to clear it. Maybe one guy steps on a mine, and that's how they learn it's there. Maybe someone sees a mine. It doesn't really matter. These mines tend to be small, cheap, easy to deploy (by aircraft or artillery), and not hidden very well. An important feature of many of them is timed self-destruct, so they won't continue to be a hazard after their tactical relevance has ended.
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A special tactical application is in irregular warfare, where your goal really is to have the mines go off, to kill and especially to demoralize the enemy. They're not deployed in minefields, but dispersed widely in places the enemy is likely to cross. These tend to be powerful, well-hidden, carefully placed, and devastating (think "bouncing betty"). You want them to be as damaging as possible, because the adversary isn't dumb, and you've got to expect a limited number of successes.
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When you actually get into it, weapon engineering is not about being a mean asshole and making the world worse. It's about all the same things as being a soldier: protecting your country, bringing your own guys home safe, avoiding collateral damage, etc. If good men turn their noses up and say it's work for bad men, then bad men will do the work cruelly and dishonestly.
>Am an EE major, and all of my most reliable career connections are with DoD contractors. Not sure how I feel about that.
Hopefully you won't be a faggot like Snowden.
Because it sounds like you don't belong in that sector.
Who gives a shit?
You're not the one pulling the trigger. The blood is on the end user's hands.
Aerofag here how do I into Raytheon I like rockets and shit
Nah fast planes are cool man look at that shit go KABOOM