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From: taylor@hplabsc.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.comp-soc
Subject: Re: The Ethics of Work
Message-ID: <543@hplabsc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 10-Aug-86 13:05:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: hplabsc.543
Posted: Sun Aug 10 13:05:01 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 10-Aug-86 23:54:27 EDT
Reply-To: hplabs!pyramid!utzoo!henry
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Lines: 47
Approved: taylor@hplabs
Reference: <524@hplabsc.UUCP>

This article is from pyramid!utzoo!henry
 and was received on Sat Aug  9 20:38:11 1986
 

John Gilmore writes, in part:

> Lord knows Sun could (and still can) sell every computer they can build
> to commercial concerns without helping the military, but many people
> there didn't see anything wrong with it.
> ...
> My attitude comes from a moral stance I choose to take:  I don't want my
> individual efforts to further the goals of the warmakers...

There is a distinction here, which John may be aware of but didn't mention
explicitly, and it's important:  "military" is not synonymous with "warmaker".
It is fashionable to ignore the distinction, and in the case of the US or
the USSR this may be justifiable.  But it's not a universal principle.

Consider, for example, whether one would feel differently about a contract
for the Swiss military.  Switzerland's armed forces are solely, entirely,
100% defensive, devoted entirely to the objective of shredding any army
which attempts to invade Switzerland.  (They probably could, too.  Even
Hitler declined to take them on.)  It seems to me that this is reasonable
and honorable, and there is nothing wrong with assisting in it.

There clearly is room for some debate here, since some (perhaps including
John) consider violence immoral regardless of motive.  However, I suspect
that the vast majority of readers of this group would take the more moderate
stance that self-defense against unprovoked attack is legitimate.  I do
wish the US military didn't insist on calling everything they do "defense"
(remember what "DoD" stands for); it's giving the word a bad name.  Yes,
there is a moral difference (to most people, and to the laws of most
nations) between mugging someone and defending yourself against someone
attempting to mug you.

Even when dealing with the US military, there are situations where a
complete no-military-work rule seems dubious.  I remember a Usenix meeting,
back before it was called Usenix actually, when one speaker described an
interesting and useful piece of software with the proviso that it wasn't
available to the military.  One of the questions asked at the end was
"does monitoring of the Test Ban Treaty qualify for an exemption?".  The
answer was "no".  This seems a clear case of "redoubling your efforts
when you have forgotten your aims", to borrow Santayana's definition
of fanaticism.  Not everything labelled "military" is evil.

				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry