I think your analogy misses the point that a core scope of engineering is reducing cost. Firing a weapon in a crowded area is not a scope of anybody, bar terrorists. If Bob would be a humanitarian terrorist, him firing the gun in a crowded area and not hitting anyone would be a great outcome for him, even if he didn't hit anybody just by chance.
Suppose Bob fires a gun into a crowded area and happens not to hit anyone. I didn't hurt anyone! It's my right as a consequentialist!"
Bob still goes to prison.
Beyond that, engineering is about using a principled approach, by definition. Throwing something together ad-hoc and finding that it happens to work, is not what is meant by 'engineering'.
But we don't hold the gun-industry accountable for mass-shootings. Maybe we should. But situation is a little bit similar here. The engineer created the gun. He didn't use the software to shoot people. Or maybe he did. The question is did he personally benefit from the change made more than his usual salary?
Or think about people who build bridges. They just follow the orders they get from higher ups. Bridge collapses. The higher-ups should be held accountable not the workers. The question I think is did the engineer here just follow orders? Perhaps he understood very little about finance, only about programming.
I'm saying people shouldn't actively engineer things that will hurt people. If every engineer refused to build weapons, there would be no weapons. GPS would exist without the army. If someone is putting GPS into a homing missile system, then they're actively building something to harm someone else.
That's what engineering is about: creating value efficiently without causing inadvertent damage. When I have to risk lives in order to create value, I simply choose not to. Instead, I just create value without risking lives. Engineering. Quality. Cost/Benefit. Benefit/Risk. Not just slapping together metal and plastic while wearing an iron ring. None of these titles granted by men. Just physics, electricity, and my mind.
It is precisely because I am less likely to kill people that I am a better engineer. Picking your battles is part of fighting.
This made me think of the joke "mechanical engineers build weapons and civil engineers build targets" in the context of ethics - of course it's a lot more than that in practice
If you're advocating for a change in how engineers are trained it should be on the grounds that the impact of an engineer becoming a terrorist is that much worse than a non engineer becoming a terrorist, not on the grounds that terrorists in general are really bad.
> Engineers who design things to kill other people. What the actual fuck.
The popular rationalizations are "it will help save lives of armed services" or "prevent the big terrorist attack". Ther are dozens of reasons people make up to convince themselves and others that it's ok.
Judgement as to whether their reasons hold up to the light of day are left as an exercise to reader.
And an ethical engineer would design those weapons so that they don't blow up in a soldier's magazine or a submarine missile tube.
It's about adhering to a code of ethics, not undertaking some Hippocratic oath. In most places that code is actually a concrete document, which can be used as grounds to discipline/prosecute/regulate you, should you breach it.
I'm not pulling this stuff out of my ass, and I'm not sure why people seem to want to discredit my thesis that engineers are/should be ethically bound to not endanger the public good.
Nice straw man. Profit margins have nothing to do with the fact that the money is being spent to develop tools to kill humans instead of helping them. Not all engineering jobs are equal.
Working for an arms contractor is something I would never do because I don't want to make things that kill people, however if someone else thinks that the military is a necessary institution for public safety those engineers can also proudly tell their grandchildren 30 years from now what they did and why it was ethically justified to do so without resorting to "I had a mortgage".
When you just shrug and say "tragedy of the commons, I suppose" knowingly screwing people over in ways you wouldn't want to be treated yourself, then laugh all the way to the bank you're a part of the problem and the reason why some people feel the need of a defense force in the first place.
There's quite a bit of overrepresentation of engineers in terrorist groups. Simply being a scientist or engineer doesn't make you a good addition to a country, which are more than just profitable economic zones.
If a bridge collapses it's the /engineer/ that's held accountable. Engineers sign off on things. They are accoutable to the product that they build and those that use their product. This guy calls himself a software engineer, so he should accept all the responsibility and accountability that goes with that title.
Your gun analogy is not fair and it does not translate well to the actual situation at hand. A gun engineer is not responsible for all the deaths the weapon causes. But said engineer will be very much accountable if the weapon blows up in the wielder's hands during normal use (even though practically this might not be the case due to liability disclaimers and all that).
We have case studies where deaths were caused by shit software, where the engineer of that wrote the software is clearly the accountable one.
This is also why most defense companies are run almost entirely by engineers. Even though they're not required to be, they organize themselves that way to ensure a culture of design excellence. It's better to fail to deliver a product than to deliver a product that will kill people.
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