As a former writer of telemarketing software it's nice to have missile guidance software developers that I can feel somewhat morally superior to. But in their defense at least missiles can be used in a non-evil way, but I'm not so sure about telemarketing software.
Technology is just a tool, ethics depends on the user.
Study history: WWII, Cold War, etc. If you play nice with dictators, you will be annihilated. We have been enjoying the benefits of freedom and democracy our ancestors fought for, without considering the costs of their sacrifices.
Extensive data and studies (ex: Zimbardo, Milgram) supports that humans have immense capacity for evil- checks and balances are there to avoid this dark side of human nature.
Missiles are there to deter evil (order), not necessarily to propagate it (chaos). So there you have it.
Zimbardo (the Stanford Prison Experiment) is a fraud. You can check Wikipedia, and even on HN there were many stories; search for "Zimbardo" or "Stanford Prison Experiment".
There's a 1918 plaque in Bath, NC that reads "Bath, originally the Indian town of Pampticough, was settled by white men about 1690 and incorporated in 1703. It is the oldest town in North Carolina."
What enabled the replacement of the original inhabitants was technology, in the form of ships, guns, and, arguably, health care. Given that events like this are some of the sources of the 'freedom and democracy our ancestors fought for', are you willing to grant that evil depends on which side you stand on? Are you willing to discuss the idea that maybe technology isn't neutral?
Shifting the moral responsibility from the human/user/corporation to the technology itself seems illogical.
Democratization might work, but isn't there a risk for the user to corrupt its intended purpose due to the inherent darkness of human nature?
Ex: Initial intents of democratizing knowledge (Google) or social networks (Facebook) both ultimately ended up corroding society with misinformation, fueled by human greed in the ad industry.
What do you say of missiles, and as extension, nuclear weapons? Do you want dictatorships to have them as well? They will ultimately, but we cannot control their use for deterrence or destruction (MAD policy).
> Shifting the moral responsibility from the human/user/corporation to the technology itself seems illogical.
Sure, it is people who make decisions, and so they have moral responsibility (at least in my model of the world and in yours.) Consider our examples; whether it's ships and guns leading to the colonization of the US, nuclear weapons leading to the threat of nuclear destruction, or TCPIP, HTTP, HTML, etc leading to the societal effects of Google and Facebook, there are unintended consequences that wouldn't be present if the technology were absent.
> Democratization might work, but isn't there a risk for the user to corrupt its intended purpose due to the inherent darkness of human nature?
> What do you say of missiles, and as extension, nuclear weapons? Do you want dictatorships to have them as well?
So, again from our examples, in your view, 'we' (the ones with the technology) are the 'good guys', and 'they' (the ones without the technology) are the 'bad guys.' Is there something besides the technology that actually makes us morally superior, or are all humans created equal? I don't see how you can have it both ways. To me, it looks like technology is the difference, making its case for neutrality suspect IMO.
>To me, it looks like technology is the difference, making its case for neutrality suspect IMO.
I'm not convinced this follows. It's seems like what the OP is saying is that technology has the ability to amplify the morals of those wielding it. That technology is the difference is exactly the point. It's amoral and when owned by the "good guys" (whatever your definition), it amplifies those morals and ethics and vice versa for the "bad guys".
In other words, it's not the technology but the morals of those who own it that is the root of good/evil. Unless your point is that a neutrality requirement is that technology must be incapable of being used for either good or ill, the neutrality claim is valid. (Personally, I prefer the term 'amoral' to neutral but I suspect the OP meant the same thing).
> It's amoral and when owned by the "good guys" (whatever your definition), it amplifies those morals and ethics and vice versa for the "bad guys".
I think my main point is that it is the technology-wielding side that prevails, independent of morality. Which means that technology has a moral impact, in reshaping what would otherwise be a fairer fight. Having won, the tech-wielders claim they are the good guys, independent of the actual morality of the situation. "Might makes right." "History is written by the victors."
Ok, I get what you’re saying now. So you’re saying that technology, by is ability to select the winners of conflict, shapes/influences the nature of society’s moral compass.
That’s an interesting systematic perspective if you can get to the view that morals/ethics are subjective and a response to social standing. Almost sounds as a Nietzche-ian perspective
> So you’re saying that technology, by is ability to select the winners of conflict, shapes/influences the nature of society’s moral compass.
Maybe more like we bend the compass to see what we want to see in it.
I'm reminded of a line from the title assassin in 'Grosse Point Blank'...
"When I left, I joined the army, and when I took the service exam my psych profile fit a certain... moral flexibility would be the only way to describe it... and I was loaned out to a CIA-sponsored program, and we sort of found each other. That's how it works."
I’m struggling to see your distinction. Are you implying the “winners” know what they are doing with technology is immoral but are willfully casting it as moral just because they are in a position to do so?
> Are you implying the “winners” know what they are doing with technology is immoral but are willfully casting it as moral just because they are in a position to do so?
Probably more the latter ('casting it as moral because they are in a position to do so') than the former ('know what they are doing')... IMO, most people, most of the time, think they're doing the right thing, from their perspective. However I'd want to leave room for the idea that they may not be weighing, or even conscious of, systemic moral and ethical factors.
I think I am more, silently, responding to your second comment,
> That’s an interesting systematic perspective if you can get to the view that morals/ethics are subjective and a response to social standing.
I tend to view morals and ethics as part of an objective Platonic (technically, Judeo-Christian) ideal. So the 'subjective' description rubs me the wrong way, though it is an accurate description of the observed effects.
The Cold War is an interesting example. We fought the Korean War relatively successfully, and we were left with the country split into a prosperous modern economy on one side and a paranoid (arguably justifiably so), insular dictatorship on the other. We lost the Vietnam War and the country is doing quite well. The Soviet Union itself fell without a direct war - ramping up spending to be able to fight a hot war was a major cause, yes, but so was the inevitable increasing spread of information.
And China now is far too powerful for us to even think about fighting a hot war against, yet if you shared the facts about it with anyone from half a century ago, they wouldn't have to think for more than a second before recognizing it as a dictatorship, a nationalist, supposedly-socialist single-party country with a cult of personality, suppression of rights in neighboring territories, and ongoing genocide. We're playing nice with them, because if we don't, we'll be annihilated.
If humans have immense capacity for evil, one of the best things we can do is limit how much damage their dark side can do. Lots of technology is great - communications technology so you can learn about the rest of the world, the ability to increase food production and provide clean water, healthcare, protection from the elements, transportation, and so forth. It's not clear to me that missiles are really the right tool.
Howitzers (retired/surplus military guns, before purpose built varities were designed) are used to clear snow accumulations and prevent catastrophic avalanches.
Charges that would be considered equivalent to land mines are used to implode buildings.
Demolition charge equivalents put out oil fires.
And any projectile or missile ever made can be fired in a purely defensive use, although that's more of a moral boundary than a benign usage per se.
These would not be qualified as missiles and have their own guidance systems. Having your rocket go and slam into a neighbouring country is not very conducive to putting satellites into space.
When talking ICBM level, the primary difference between a weapon and a peaceful satellite launcher is the little bit that sits on the tip of the rocket - the payload. Early satellites were literally launched on ICBMs, and if memory serves me right, US military still repurposes ICBMs for launching its satellites.
The platform can be repurposed ICBM but the software is dedicated, ICBMs don’t go orbital and their guidance is written for ground range and precise targeting. The inputs and decision paths would be quite different to a rocket’s.
Simply as an observation, it’s interesting that serving in the military is usually treated as honorable, but working at a defense contractor is viewed as unethical. I wonder why that is?
I think the serving in the military seen as honourable is largely due to propaganda. There are different levels to it, but it is very obvious when coming from Europe to the US, where you see "support our troops" signs very regularly.
100% this. As a Canadian it's absolutely flabbergasting everytime I go there, the sheer level of martial obsession in the US. It bleeds over into Canada to some degree, but not dramatically.
I suspect in part it comes from the country having its genesis in a war, its first president being a general, and its republic built around a president whose title is "commander in chief."
That and its economic supremacy / dominance is supported in part by its military dominance.
Also possibly due to the fact that due to being so far away from the conflict and having a huge industrial economy with hundreds of millions of people, the US came out of WWII a lot stronger and more influential than they entered it. I think that was the moment the modern US was born.
The head of this new force and later the whole country, Eisenhower, even warned us that the military-industrial complex he leveraged was starting to become too powerful: https://youtu.be/uGd-rkPoGa4
It actually changed around the turn of the century with the events of the Spanish war. That’s when the US became an imperial power, there were many against it though
The military is the US’s most effective welfare program. Propaganda or not, most of the enlisted (the beneficiaries) are (1) poor and (2) never see combat.
Nonetheless is it bad to associate welfare with honor?
Defense contracting has complex returns for its owners. On the one hand it’s a ton of fucking money for stuff that again, never sees combat. On the other hand, you have to spend that money in Alabama, not New York or Los Angeles (where rich people want to live). On the other hand, you’re spending a lot of that money in Alabama.
I sympathize with the idea that the graft and inefficiency, in this abstract sense, is unethical, at least at the same magnitude as building a missile platform. It will never be used, making it only abstractly a support of violence against innocents. Whereas some enlisted are ultimately sent out to go kill people in the Middle East — but weren’t they just the ones to lose the welfare lotto of a cushy deployment in the 9,999 other places you could be sent? Or that the drones that actually routinely perform violence at a distance are considerably cheaper than the SpaceX missile platform, so if you sought to reduce the military budget the drones would be the LAST thing that gets cut and actually violence per dollar would RISE? Anyway, the ethics are hard to boil down to some pithy one liner, it’s an immature and unjust reduction of the complexities of real politics and how we measure things.
Besides, the EU also does this. A lot of governments do.
One ethical complication in the US is that the military is effectively a jobs program for people from lower economic classes - it offers you both pay and experience straight out of high school as well as funding for a college decree, and you can turn that into a promising career. (As long as you're not physically or mentally broken by the whole experience, that is.) For many teenagers from poorer parts of the country who aren't getting into good colleges and don't see many other prospects, the military is one of their best options. And, at least in the last few decades, there was a pretty decent chance you wouldn't see combat at all.
(A side effect here: the military finds it harder to recruit in places which have good job markets and higher minimum wages, because their value proposition isn't as strong in comparison, and the risk of moral injury and regular old injury weighs against that choice. Here's an article about it, from a right-leaning news site no less: https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/02/us-army-recruiting-proble...)
While "just following orders" isn't a defense for war crimes, I think there's a lot of sympathy for people who enlist and follow the rules of war, and we don't see them as morally culpable for making the wars happen (or giving the military the ability to engage in war). Most of them would prefer to finish their agreed term of service and go back home.
Meanwhile, defense contractors profit specifically from military engagements ("Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired...") and have more of an incentive to see wars happen, and they generally employ people who can find equivalent jobs and careers outside of defense, so if you're the sort of person who finds the military-industrial complex unethical, it makes a lot more sense to pin it on the industrial part of that complex.
Yep. In fact, it feels to me as if you are softening things up quite a bit: sure, glorifying the military is something that every country (read as "government") tries to do, but I don't really know any modern example other than USA, where people actually buy this bullshit. Which is kinda surreal, because, let's be honest: there is absolutely nothing honourable about [strike]serving[/strike] working in the military. It's not even about being a murderer (which everyone working in the military definitely is), it's about signing up (explicitly giving the oath) to follow the orders of other murderers. So it's literally just selling any your moral principles for a quite handsome compensation (in the case of USA, anyway).
No, I'm not judging, maybe I would do it myself. I'm just refusing to pretend there's is anything honourable about that.
Soldiers of fortune were historically frowned upon to peer pressure people to fight for 'honor' rather than pay. The same is true today. You can read ancient greek texts griping about dishonorable mercenaries.
It's easier to convince families to send their young sons and daughters to the military when you tell them they are "heroes" and "patriots" for doing so. It's the same reason we called nurses and grocery store clerks "heroes" during the pandemic lock downs.
As another post stated, there's some baggage associated with the idea of uniformed "service".
There are many people who forego more lucrative careers (in a monetary sense) as a private contractor because of the idea of service. In other words, they feel they are serving a higher purpose in the military and would be selling out to go to a defense contractor. Ironically, these careers in the military are the ones with the largest retention incentives due to this very reason.
"Mercenary" is ambiguous, though. A mercenary is often defined as an entity who does any job for any buyer in the world, if the price is right. A defense contractor generally only engages in deals with certain entities. Mercenaries are more like NSO Group and HackingTeam.
A mercenary is simply a soldier for hire. They can still be choosy who they do business with. I'd say a group like Blackwater is a proper mercenary organization rather than Northrup Grumman, however.
They can be choosy, but I'd say they're definitionally considered less choosy than contractors. You'll probably never see Northrop Grumman building missiles on contract for Assad, but you may very well see NSO Group writing surveillance software for him, for example.
Countries have long had laws about what sort of business mercenaries in or from that country are allowed to accept. That doesn't make mercenaries in or from that country 'not mercenaries.'
I think there are still too many other differences to consider Northrop/Raytheon/Lockheed mercenaries. They're the core of the US military-industrial complex, but I still think they're effectively an arm of the US military and are much closer to contractors than mercenaries.
A company like Blackwater is much closer to actual mercenaries - they're trying to build their own private, independent military-industrial complex, in a sense, by selling their services to existing complexes.
If your point is that some self-described 'defense contractors' are arms merchants rather than mercenaries, then I agree. 'Defense contractor' is still a euphemism in that case however.
For this matter, Department of Defense is also a euphemism. It used to have the more honest name Department of War until that was changed in the late 1940s.
When defense contractors make too much money on contracts, it's called profiteering.
If the difference between criminal and lawful is just a matter of profit margins, I suspect it's hard for people think of you as being dirty, and the only question is how dirty.
My guess is that some people view defense contractors as being responsible for lobbying/corruption that encourages more wars in order to earn profit (they're the corrupting part of the military-industrial complex). I don't know to what extent this actually occurs though.
The military is mostly reacting to the executive branch and doesn't have the same perceived corrupting influence.
Does anyone know how much money/effort is going into achieving this? Might be interesting to compare such insane investments into destructive stuff vs investments in fighting poverty and such.
Investments unfortunately don't work that way, just because you have an opportunity to build a Tech company or a fancier weapon doesn't mean you have an opportunity to reduce poverty.
( although if you're financing hundreds of fancy weapon systems you may be irrationally diverting funds from productive ventures like healthcare. )
I get that part. What I don't get is : they have so much money for weaponry but not for healthcare for veterans? A huge percentage of homeless population is veterans btw.
This is an extreme example on how we are at risk for creating the very systems they use to put people at risk. There's no "ey, i'm one of the good guys, i'm on the right side", one day you wake up just to find yourself as the target.
My dad used to work on personal carriers during the Vietnam war. In 67 FMC sent him with a group of other engineer to Vietnam to figure out why the M113 wasn't performing as well as advertised. Short answer when you hit a M113 with a tank rocket it turns into an oven.
My dad came home and quit.
Since then I've been kinda aware that a lot of engineers work is on the balance is a net negative. Especially true in the US and getting worse.
For me the thorny ethical issue is not so much working on directly evil stuff like missile targeting software for the military but software that has both military and civilian use. For example, consider a company that develops and RTOS that is used in both cars and missiles, where does that stand morally? Even the most benign technology can be used for evil so it's worth asking the question to what culpability individual bear for who their company sells their software to. In the case of SpaceX, I’m sure much of the code is the same between the military and the NASA use cases.
I've asked myself this question about even more abstracted/lower-level things, like - is it good to improve Kubernetes, knowing that this makes things better for big businesses and the military (cf. https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...) and not really directly for individual people?
While it's tempting to say that there's no moral dimension this far out, I think that's not quite true - there is a moral dimension to making technology work more smoothly. It increases the ability of anyone with some power to do things at scale. On the one hand, it gives ability for anyone with tiny amounts of power to make use of it (consider the effect of, say, typewriters in the Soviet Union, or even farther back, the printing press in the hands of Luther's supporters). On the other hand, it absolutely increases the ability of people with massive amounts of power to use that power more efficiently (like the "war cloud"). My own view here is that, for those of us whose day job is in improving infrastructure / technical leverage, this increases how important it is for us as members of society to make sure that power is distributed equitably and justly. Since it's indirect, we don't have to advocate for this through what we choose to be directly employed on (the way we would if we were literally working on missile targeting software), and it's often difficult to do so, but we should advocate for this through how we engage with the political process (broadly defined) in the rest of our lives.
There's also a question of what sort of improvements you make to it. Security improvements are generally a thing you can feel good about: people with small amounts of power are much more likely to have security flaws exploited than to use security flaws offensively, so even if there's an argument that hardening some software makes it harder to attack evil businesses or evil governments, it also has the much more practical effect of making it harder for those entities to attack dissidents' personal devices. And similarly for what you choose to do: working on Signal helps the low-power individual much more than working on SELinux, even though both are conceivably dual-use.
Not because I agree with the thought behind it. I think national defence is a necessity. I'd have no problems writing the software. But because the coder had the guts to put his money where his mouth is, and leave the job.
I respect that. About a million times more than keyboard SJW who type a lot but change not at all.
I don't agree with this mentality. If you are helping a dictator or authoritarian regime, sure. I think it is in the wrong side of the story.
But helping out the US in developing high-precission weapons does the opposite.
1. It might save lifes, as the alternative is dumb carpet bombing. As we know during WW2, carpet bombing killed mostly civilians and destroyed cities.
2. Most weapons that the US has, are there for deterrence, and not necessary meant to be used, and in the long run hopefully they are never used.
3. The US is the better greater power by a long stretch. I know it gets a lot of flak here, but while it has done many mistakes, the US has done more good that usually gets forgotten.
The alternative is China (in the Pacific) or Russian hegemony in half of Europe. I am talking as someone born in a former communist country. And almost all former communist countries in Europe are staunch US supporters/allies as they have lived first hand communism, and experienced its rotten system.
In my opinion your defense of US is completely unacceptable and wrong but i don't want to start a discussion about that: i want you to consider that in general, it's better to spend energy, focus, money and any other constructive effort in creating something that helps people instead of something that kills people, even if you consider those people bad ones.
It's better to spend efforts in education and culture instead of spending more on police defense. It's better to spend efforts in negotiations and ways to sign peace treaties instead of making wars. It's better to spend efforts in making chirurgical items instead of spending efforts in making weapons.
you kinda need some people to be making missiles in order for everyone else to have the luxury of being able to spend their efforts on education and culture. do you know of any countries without missiles? exactly.
Yes, during the Pearl Harbor attack. This was 75-80 years ago, on the time scale of civilizations, quite a short time. Not to mention that the US is within range of the ICBMs of various authoritarian regimes.
I mean, arguably Hawaii at the time was US soil in a looser sense of the word. It only became a state in 1959. It had/has a significant Japanese population, and presumably Japan saw invasion there (wrongly, for sure) as some kind of anti-colonial action.
If everyone that is good had this mindset then the world would be ruled by the most vicious and authoritarian. The axis powers would've won WW2. Clearly some people need to work on weapons and history has shown that it can deliver net good in the world (allies victory in WW2 for example). A dose of pragmatism is sorely needed.
Hitler started WW2 because he thought the other countries wouldn't fight or were incapable of fighting. His comment about invading the Soviet Union: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."
The way to make peace is to make sure it is not worthwhile for someone else to attack you.
Hitler success among germans is due to the high burden WWI winners imposed on germany. Other countries may have relieved pressure on germany and maybe Hitler may have been stopped before he became something among germans.
Don't give people a reason to litigate and they won't fight.
Try to consider that countries where there is a common level of wealth and welfare, have lower rates of criminality (i.e. Norway).
Have you ever thought how much money has been spent in "defense" (ironically any country had and has a "defense" ministry, even those countries who attack) during human history? Can you imagine what could have been done if that money had gone into peace research?
I know that when a war has been started then you have to fight but you can try to prevent it. So instead of working on missiles control system it's better if you work on diplomacy and software that provides wealth and knowledge to the people.
Remember: this world could be heaven if we want it to be. Do what you want to do to make it heaven or hell.
It's prevented if you're stronger than the other guy. I can't think of a single example in history of a country starting a war against a much more powerful opponent that was willing to use that power.
Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because they thought the US would be unwilling to fight a Pacific war with them. Hitler declared war on the US believing the US wouldn't fight. The Confederacy didn't believe the Union would fight, or if they did, was a match for the Confederacy.
> Do what you want to do to make it heaven or hell.
The US is a heaven by pretty much any historical measure. Military spending is 3-4% of GDP, a small price to pay to prevent war.
>I can't think of a single example in history of a country starting a war against a much more powerful opponent that was willing to use that power.
The Taliban supporting Sept. 11th attacks is an example, although you can argue that it doesn't count because many did not view their government as "legitimate". There's at least some who believe drawing major powers into protracted wars is exactly the point of the offensive.
I don’t think that’s accurate. Bin Laden’s strategy was to bait the US into protracted wars that would lead to economic stress and eventually cause the US to leave the Islamic world.
Hitler started that way cause he wanted more space for Germans and also world domination.
Eventually, Hitler happened to lose that war with even negotiation being impossible. Generally, Hitler said something is pretty bad argument for anything, as that man said a lot of bullshit in his life.
As i have cousins that are survivor of genocide and ethnic cleansing, which the US prevented in the late 90s by the use of such weapons, i completely disagree with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War
American weapons are currently being supplied to a genocidal war effort in Yemen and supplying weapons to Turkey which is continuing their genocidal efforts against the Kurdish people.
I'm trying to focus on active genocide campaigns that the US is supporting with weapons, not the two genocides that were instigated in part by Facebook. Let me know if I'm missing any.
I don't necessarily disagree with your points, though I might debate most of them. #2 however strikes me as pretty darn optimistic. Recent history suggests that the US doesn't have much hesitation about using their weapons.
Very few of the US’s weapons have been used. They have the capacity to blow up the whole world many times over, and end up attacking a minuscule portion of the population.
The US, USSR, China, Japan, and Germany are all the superpowers from the past century, and they all got in some wars with each other, sometimes via client states. In the recent decades after Germany and Japan exited the scene, the wars have been relatively small.
The U.S. selling weapons to Saudi Arabia doesn't harm U.S. interests in any way, but it's profitable and benefits the weapons industry, which is good from a self-defense perspective.
Oh, I'm fairly sure U.S. support of the Saudi royal family is already biting people in the ass... and the beginnings of the end of that support are already happening.
You don't think that's balanced by the US selling weapons to several dozen of the freest nations on the planet, liberal democracies with the best human rights records?
Do you know why the US is the world's biggest arms dealer? Mostly because all of those free, liberal democracies buy very expensive weapons from the US and have the most affluent economies (thus they can afford US aircraft that cost tens of millions of dollars).
In a typical year, 3/4 or more of all US weapons sales go to human rights protecting liberal democracies. Across five years to 2017, 18% of US weapons sales went to Saudi Arabia (12.4% went to Taiwan and Australia by comparison).
Should the US stop selling weapons to Taiwan, so China's annexation is really easy? Should the US stop selling weapons to Australia, so China can be even less worried as they try to intimidate Australia and control Asia?
Does it take all of those liberal democracies to offset Saudi Arabia, or is it one to one? How does the subjective moral scale work exactly? Does it accumulate over time, such that the US has a billion year credit for protecting and aiding Europe and Asia before and after WW2? How many credits is keeping democratic Taiwan apart from China for this long worth? Does the US get a trillion moral credits for being the only nation that is willing to stand up to China militarily re Taiwan? How about South Korea, does one South Korea for 70 years off-set one Saudi Arabia?
So many fascinating questions and that's just scratching the surface.
Actually no, that premise is completely wrong. Either you are a beacon of democracy and say you value human rights and that prevents you from supporting regimes like Saudi Arabia or you sell to whomever you like to because it's in your economic interest, but then don't pretend you're producing weapons for moral reasons.
It's worth pointing out that carpet bombing in WWII was not some accident of primitive technology and inability to perform precise targeting.
It was deliberate strategy from the UK and the USA, with the goal to demoralize and punish German & Japanese civilians. Mass civilian death and the total destruction of whole cities was the result. Napalm, for example was specifically developed to create building fires that would spread quickly and not be easily extinguished.
The sheer horror of it is not spoken much of in the west, where the crimes against humanity that Nazi Germany performed are rightly highlighted. But as a person with an ex-pat German father who grew up in the rubble, and a grandfather who helped reconstruct post-WWII Mainz, I was always made acutely aware of it.
Frankly, it makes me cringe every rememberance day when I hear my Canadian friends talk about their heroic grandparents, etc. who flew Lancaster bombers during WWII. My Opa did something far more heroic which was to spend the bulk of the war in an American POW camp, not fighting anybody -- and learning English in the process.
Carpet bombing can be seen as a rational response to the V2 rocket which was indiscriminate of it's targeting of Londoners. War is often a case of responding in kind.
If the Germans had had the capability of bombing London they would have (but couldn't thanks to radar). This was not a small conflict but an existential fight for existence between two groups of countries.
I have a hard time judging the decision to carpet bomb during WWII harshly given the circumstances. Note that both sides had nerve agents that were not deployed because neither wanted that escalation.
There are definitely events, and even wars, where the US has committed atrocities but I don't think carpet bombing during WWII is a good example of it.
Germany did bomb the crap out of London and other cities - the blitz in London, destroyed Coventry, and the “Baedeker blitz” Which had limited military justification
Sorry but these efforts are completely pale in comparison to what was done to the cities of the German industrial heartland in the last year of the war. I have seen pictures of Mainz (my grandparent's home) where there's not a single building left fully standing in the entire downtown core.
That's not to say the Germans wouldn't have tried, if they could have. But they were tied up in the east doing very awful things there. The Russians unfortunately bore the brunt of total Nazi savagery.
I think it's important to remember that history gets written by the winners and that your opinion might have been very different if you would have grown up under Pinochet in Chile or the Somoza family in Nicaragua.
Moreover, while I concede that the US entering some wars has been good, that does not guarantee that it will continue like that, so if you are developing missile guiding systems you should always reflect on that they might be used for evil. You could even say that many of the Russian scientists were probably thinking they were working on defending against evil.
I recommend on reading up on the history of South America. It might be eye opening, pretty much every country had at some point a military dictatorship/junta killing their people, established with the help of the CIA. The USA has the clear "good guys" is by far not so straight forward. That is not to say that Russia or China are.
And then we could argue the whole premise of "we have to do it because the others are doing it" which can be used to justify everything.
No, it is ethical to have weapons because it's a bulwark and disincentive against countries with even more tyrannical objectives. This is not to defend the extent to which weapons systems are being invested in. But they need to be invested in. The race is not optional.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. From a practical perspective, China and Russia's possession of nuclear weapons has been a sufficient deterrent to US or NATO action for nearly a century. By contrast, The advent of smarter bombs, stealth technology, and drones has largely freed the US from the negative consequences of large scale bombing campaigns and ground invasions.
The result has been 3 decades of near continuous warfare in countries of little strategic threat to US interests. As a peer competitor to the US, do you fear a smarter drone or an ICBM?
If the US had not used the atomic bomb Japan would have been split with the Russians just like Germany. It was arguably, speaking realpolitik, the lesser of two evils.
(Also, what does "hypocrite" mean, in your view? I'm used to it meaning "one who denounces behavior in others while engaging in the same behavior themselves," which doesn't seem to apply here, I think, since the person in question ceased engaging the behavior he denounces, and as you point out, we have no record of him denouncing anyone else doing it.)
[Warning: the following comment of mine likely doesn't take the full context of the conversation into account, and much of what it says is likely not particularly applicable to the situation at hand.]
Maybe one can't completely avoid politics, but there are reasonable senses in which the word "politics" is used, such that, in those senses, one can avoid politics to some non-negligible degree.
If there is a discussion of one topic which people don't really tend to get upset about much, and then someone makes a big stretch to connect it to some other topic which has a lot of rather heated partisan controversy around it, the person who made the stretch to make the connection is doing the opposite of what might reasonably be called "avoiding politics". Not to say that anything like that happened in any of the relevant cases at hand, just to give an example that I think demonstrates why the concept of "avoiding politics in some sense to some degree" is a sensible concept.
