My good friend Flavio - blogger, occasional Twitterer (@dionisoo) [edit: Flavio is no longer on Twitter following Musk's apparently gleeful trashing of his platform's moderation team and efforts], fellow trombonist and overall interesting and interested chap - recently delved into the ethics of the West’s - and historically Russophile Italy’s in particular - response to Putin’s moves to, umm, apparently save Ukraine from itself and to enfold it “back” into the loving arms of Mother Russia - or invasion, the simpler and more honest term for it.
One point, as expressed by ethicist Vito Mancuso, that Flavio picked up on was that peace, whilst massively preferable to war, contains within itself the potential for war: peace requires deterrence, that ability - and appearance of ability - of a state to defend itself at what will clearly be a great cost to the aggressor. As such, peace can be considered to be less a mere absence of war, but rather a state in which that potential to battle has to be actively maintained, like nature’s poisons and armour that are justifiably costly to the being that develops them.
This maintenance is also directed inwards, against the threat of elements that society (or, in the case of autocrats and dictators, that they) cannot tolerate. Here, the potential for “violence” is held by the state in the form of police and the judiciary - as envisaged by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan. In its positive cases, such a threat of peace enables society and industry to grow and develop, rather than being permanently nibbled and gnawed away by gangs and greed (the difference between Mexican and US American border towns can be glaring).
In each of these cases, the potential includes the technologies of war, and, as technology’s custodians, the role engineers play in maintaining that potential.
Where there is technology, there are engineers
As the Russian hostilities started, and the Ukrainian defence kicked into acton, and as reports came in of Russian tanks and other armoured equipment suffering significant losses during that initial phase, it occurred to me that there will be weapons engineers on both sides studying failures for as much information as they can get to learn from and further develop their products.
Russian tank designers will be thinking along the lines of: “how do we improve the survivability of our tanks against Javelin and NLAW battlefield weapons? How do we do that without making them ever more heavy, slow, unmanoevreable, inefficient? Are there damage types that we could have prevented with a different design? Are there new materials and alloys we could use to toughen up the armour plating?”
Equally, there will be western weapons engineers thinking about the misses, the hits that didn’t result in the destruction of the target, the misfires, the jams and balancing these against the portability of these systems - improving them whilst making them lighter and both easier and, perhaps paradoxically for a killing tool, safer to use.
Are engineers at war?
The point highlighted by Flavio, that peace contains within itself the potential for war, made me consider the fact that, even whilst developing and improving weapons, those engineers are still typically working in peace. They have entered this morally and ethically murky world of weapons development, and now inhabit it as any engineer would: working on difficult and engrossing problems to find the most appropriate solutions to them, with all that this entails - reading and understanding requirements, the generation of hypotheses and models, the testing, the iteration, the improvements and validation, accompanied as always by the documentation, the management of parts libraries, the drafting and release of specifications and drawings for the next generation of products.
This is not all treated without consideration of the human. Just as automotive engineers have to consider the safety of the occupants of their products, military drivers and operators need to arrive at the battlefield in as fresh a condition as possible, need to be able to operate such machines under the most stressful conditions imaginable, and survive to fight again. But I can well imagine that such weapons engineers see failure not in terms of blood and the death of individuals (other than, presumably, ensuring that the interior of a military vehicle remains operational even as one of its occupants bleeds to death), but in mechanical terms, in technological terms - in short, in terms of ensuring that the machine that they have designed meets specifications and requirements - and meets the cost targets.
Equally, the engineers of missiles and artillery rounds will focus on effectiveness and precision, on blast radii and the transmission of explosive energy in the most appropriate way, rather than considering what happens when such a munition hits an occupied maternity hospital - the hospital is not specified; the engineer’s targets are the specifications.
The case can be made that “our” engineers are in virtual battle against “theirs” - but this is also normal competition, just in a particular market sector.
Engineering for war, for peace
Returning to Mancuso’s point, then, I guess that the engineers themselves, assuming that they are not working under duress or coercion, most likely understand their role in society as contributing to the strengthening of their state or that of their allies, and don’t feel at all as if they are at war. They have their day jobs and families to go home to. They don’t need to worry too much about where their products are sold, although plenty of aggressor nations have bought their weapons from western companies - those are aspects that their sales and marketing colleagues, along with politicians, concern themselves with. The engineers can be distracted from ethical concerns by the need to make their products more affordable whilst retaining the “effectiveness” required of them.
Defending the defensible
However, there must be a part of them that wonders how best to answer their daughters' questions about what they do at work. I have it in my automotive industry; I’m sure others in the packaging and extractive industries have it to: all of these careers can be justified, but we need to be aware of the downsides of what we do, of the industries we work in - or of industry at all, if we take things to the extremes.
The discussion brings me back to an episode when I was doing the recruitment rounds in my final year at university. I attended an assessment day (actually an afternoon and the next morning) at Lucas Aerospace, a British supplier of electronics and flight controls: I knew they were a supplier to Airbus and Boeing, and I went into the interview with my civil aerospace blinkers on. The assessment went well, I felt, as did the interview itself, until one of the interviewers asked me: “how would you feel about working on military projects?” I genuinely hadn’t prepared for that question, and I felt it appropriate to show it - I told them straight out that I hadn’t expected that question. I then said that I would prefer not to have to work on such projects, and was sure that they had enough civil aviation projects to keep me occupied. They seemed happy with my answer, and the one who asked the question admitted that he had felt somewhat uncomfortable at working on the servo system for a helicopter pilot’s helmet guidance system for the main machine gun: the pilot would merely need to look at the target for the gun to follow his gaze and fire.
For sure, that sort of system, those semi-automated gun systems and the helicopters that carry them, can be used to defend the freedom of the country that makes them. But the whole murky world of arms exports would make me feel extremely uncomfortable with (not quite) knowing where those killing systems would end up, and in whose hands. And - well, the whole thing about killing, full stop.
In the end, the interview and assessment were moot, as Lucas Aerospace was bought by the American conglomerate TRW that summer, and they could no longer offer any jobs until recruitment was redefined. So I ended up in the automotive industry (itself not the fluffiest and magic unicorniest of industries…)
Post post: An unethical (OK - non-ethical) blog
I decided early on that I would prefer to focus on the philosophical aspects of engineering, rather than attempting to enter the ethical realm at the same time. This is not to denigrate the ethical aspects of how engineering leads to improvements in so many destructive-productive aspects of life as mining, transportation, building - and war. There’s just too much for me to learn and absorb in philosophy alone, to reflect upon and to translate into words and phrases that others might want to read, for me to try and spread myself ever more thinly into ethics.
So, from here, it’s back to thinking about the philosophy of engineering - though there's no doubt we'll stumble once more into crossing paths with the ethical.
