Hacker News Reader

Comment by zibby8 | Hacker News Reader

But there are other cases where peoples’ lives were saved by such machines. E.g. billions of dollars in weaponry has been supplied to Ukraine to defend the country from invasion. Was that immoral too?

View on HN

Right now I'm not actually arguing against militaries existing or anyone making or controlling military equipment. It's consistent to consider them a gruesome and shameful necessity, rather than to take joy in their prowess and ingenuity which is a bit the norm in the US.

I don't know, it's kinda cool seeing technology pushed to it's limits. I would never join the military and opposed my country's participation in most recent wars but I just like the tech, airplanes in particular.

I know but come on. "They're just so cool though" isn't a very solid defense of finding entertainment in large scale death-dealing machinery. Like truly think of yourself in the shoes of someone who for example had a child killed by one of these things. What would you think about someone "just liking the tech" with no thought given to the intended or actual use?

The problem with your argument is that you’re only looking at the negatives. If you believe that weapons can only be used to kill children, then, yes, your view makes sense. If you’ve been adversely affected by weaponry, you likely hate weapons with every fiber of your being. However, there are others who have used weapons to defend themselves against unjust aggression and those people may view weapons favorably. And finally, there are most people who have never been directly impacted by the machines of war. Those people probably fall around a neutral opinion of weapons. Some may skew towards a positive opinion, some, like yourself, skew negative, but overall largely neutral. Given this sentiment distribution, I don’t think you can make a judgment on whether or not it is immoral to like reading about weaponry.

I'm not trying to make a generalizable philosophical argument about all weapons though. I'm specifically challenging the free pass that american military machines get in techie circles merely because they are technologically sophisticated.

Our tolerance for misery just because something is impressive is a bad thing about us and we should strive to be better than that.

It's complicated... Consider this: I think Ukrainians would be very happy if we'd give them a bunch of fighter jets. Even though they've been on the receiving end of these I'm sure they'd be happy to get some right now.

These machines are not really for dealing death, even though that is what they do. They are just as capable at preventing innocents being killed. They are mainly intended as a defensive tool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com