2013 EngineeringandWarMilitarismEthi

• (Blue et al., 2013) ⇒ Ethan Blue, Michael Levine, and Dean Nieusma. (2013). “Engineering and War: Militarism, Ethics, Institutions, Alternatives." Morgan \& Claypool Publishers. doi:10.2200/S00548ED1V01Y201311ETS020

Subject Headings: Engineering, Engineer.

Cited By

• http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Engineering+and+War%3A+Militarism%2C+Ethics%2C+Institutions%2C+Alternatives%22+2013

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Abstract

This book investigates the close connections between engineering and war, broadly understood, and the conceptual and structural barriers that face those who would seek to loosen those connections. It shows how military institutions and interests have long influenced engineering education, research, and practice and how they continue to shape the field in the present. The book also provides a generalized framework for responding to these influences useful to students and scholars of engineering, as well as reflective practitioners. The analysis draws on philosophy, history, critical theory, and technology studies to understand the connections between engineering and war and how they shape our very understandings of what engineering is and what it might be. After providing a review of diverse dimensions of engineering itself, the analysis shifts to different dimensions of the connections between engineering and war. First, it considers the ethics of war generally and then explores questions of integrity for engineering practitioners facing career decisions relating to war. Next, it considers the historical rise of the military-industrial-academic complex, especially from World War II to the present. Finally, it considers a range of responses to the militarization of engineering from those who seek to unsettle the status quo. Only by confronting the ethical, historical, and political consequences of engineering for warfare, this book argues, can engineering be sensibly reimagined.

CHAPTER 1 The Close Alignment of Engineering and Warfare

Military values and goals have long played a significant role in shaping engineering, and that influence remains today even though it is often hidden. This book explores the nature of that influence, focusing on its subtler structural dimensions as well as important ethical implications that arise from such structures. The structural dimensions of influence we will explore span individual values, disciplinary problem-solving protocols and assumptions, organizational missions, and even entire national research enterprises. These structures are patterns of social arrangement that repeat across diverse domains and often impact people, as individuals and as actors embedded within larger organizations, in ways that escape their awareness.

We will focus our attention throughout this book on two such structures: the conceptual and institutional frameworks that direct much engineering activity toward the purposes of warfare even when many of the engineers participating in this activity never explicitly decide to pursue careers advancing warfare technologies. Conceptual frameworks are the mental models people use to determine the possible, reasonable, and preferred courses of action in any given situation. In a way, they are filters we use to make sense of complex circumstances or environments in order to coordinate our actions with those of others. Institutional frameworks, on the other hand, are the logics and rules that operate at the level of social systems — from economic incentive structures to formalized political procedures to informal social norms.

Using these tools, we investigate how military interests and values have become insinuated into engineering in ways that go far beyond individual engineers choosing careers to advance warfare technologies. But those who choose such careers are part of our story, too

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1.2 WHAT IS ENGINEERING?

Many books on the topic of engineering start with definitions, as does this one. But our purpose in reviewing definitions of engineering is less to formulate the “correct” definition and more to identify a range of definitions as well as the various dimensions of engineering that those definitions convey. Before looking at some of the specific characteristics of engineering that facilitate its alignment with militarism, we will show how different definitions of engineering enable different types of analysis into the nature of engineering.

The term “engineer” dates from the 14th century and explicitly ties engineering to warfare:

Engineer (origin): Middle English (denoting a designer and constructor of fortifications and weapons; formerly also as ingineer). (O.E.D.)

...early 14c., "constructor of military engines," from O.Fr. engigneor… sense of "inventor, designer" is recorded from early 15c.; civil sense, in ref. to public works, is recorded from c.1600 (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/engineer)

Insofar as one understands “engineering” to entail the design and making of technology, it can be connected to military purposes even earlier. Egyptian, Mayan, Greek, Roman, Aztec, and other ancient civilizations were built, in no small part, upon technologies of fortification and weaponry. Surely, the history of technologies of warfare is even older, likely dating from the very beginnings of civilization, or at least from the time human or even pre-human species began to make and use tools of any sort.

In contemporary definitions of engineering, direct connections to technologies of warfare have been lost. What remains in these definitions illustrates the widely varying terrain of what “engineering” is understood to be. While some common definitions may seem reasonable as far as they go, they often hide as much as they explain. For example, consider this historical but frequently used definition:

Engineering is the application of science to the common purpose of life.

Here we see two widely identified facets of engineering. Its method is the application of science, and its domain of application, in contemporary language, is everyday life. Both of these seem reasonable enough. Engineers do, in fact, apply scientific principles to address problems of everyday life. Yet this definition hardly seems sufficient to capture how engineers are distinct from many other professionals — applied scientists, doctors, organizational theorists, or even market researchers.

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1.3 ENGINEERING'S SURPRISING SILENCE ON WARFARE

Given the kinds of close, substantial, and pervasive connections between engineering and the military identified in our opening, one might expect considerable attention paid to questions of warfare within engineering, or at least within engineering educational settings. This is generally not the case. As Vesilind avers, “The effect of military research at engineering schools has largely been ignored by the disciplines that study engineering and engineering education…[despite its key role in] the greatest single decision engineers have to make — whether or not to work in the armaments industry” (Vesilind, 2010, 151). It is debatable whether such a broad claim is analytically justifiable, but clearly Vesilind believes the decision deserves considerably more attention than it is given at present, not least because the relationship between engineering and warfare goes largely unaddressed within engineering education.

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CHAPTER 2 - The Ethics of War

We now shift our attention from a focus on engineering to a focus on war. This chapter elaborates why engineers and engineering educators ought to engage questions of warfare, and then provides some theoretical underpinnings for thinking about war. We begin by highlighting some of the ethical responsibilities faced specifically by engineers, building our analysis upon Paul Taylor’s definition of ethics:

Ethics may be defined as philosophical inquiry into the nature and grounds of morality. The term "morality" is here used as a general name for moral judgments, standards, and rules of conduct. These include not only the actual judgments, standards, and rules to be found in the moral codes of existing societies, but also what may be called ideal judgments, standards, and rules: those which can be justified on rational grounds. Indeed, one of the chief goals of ethics is to see if rational grounds can be given in support of any moral judgments, standards, and rules, and if so, to specify what those grounds are. (Taylor, 1974)

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Normative Ethics

Normative ethical theories try to tell us what is morally right to do and why. Such theories can be employed in an attempt to explain whether or not a particular war is morally justified and why. Different normative theories will always give different accounts of why some action is morally justified even when they agree, as they often do, that the action is justified. That is what makes them different theories. Three such normative ethnical theories are consequentialist, deontological, and virtue theories.

• Consequentialist theories claim that the moral rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by the consequences — good or bad — of that action. J. S. Mill’s Utilitarianism, for example, claims that an action is good if it produces the greatest good (defined as pleasure) for the greatest number.
• Deontological theories, such as those of Immanuel Kant, claim that an action is morally right no matter what its consequences, so long as it accords with some specified and inviolable ethical principles that the theory then goes on to elaborate.
• Virtue theory does not attempt to tell us, strictly speaking, what it is morally right, but focuses instead on the nature of good character and virtue. A virtuous person will tend to do the morally right thing, all things considered.

Chapter 3 - Engineering Integrity

3.1 What Is Integrity?

3.1.1 Integrity As Self-Integration

3.1.2 Integrity As Maintenance of Identity

3.1.3 Integrity As Standing for Something

3.1.4 Integrity As Moral Purpose

3.1.5 Integrity As a Virtue

3.2 Integrity and Social Structure

3.2.1 Structures of Alienation

Chapter 4 - Historical Entwinements: From Colonial Conflicts to Cold War

4.2 The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

4.2.1 Long Histories, Global Histories

4.3 Social History of the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

4.3.1 From Military Technologies to Socio-Economic Practices

4.3.2 From Socio-Economic Practices to Technoscientific Research

4.3.3 Big Social Science

Chapter 5 - Historical Entwinements - Post-Cold War

5.1"Soft Kill" Weapons Research

5.1.1 The Rise of Non-Lethal Weaponry

5.1.2 Civilian Crowd Control

5.2 Non-Lethal Weapons Research Comes of Age

5.2.1 Second-Generation Soft-Kill Weaponry

5.4 DARPA's Spiral of Innovation

5.4.1 Military Technology Proliferation

5.4.2 Contemporary Military Research Funding

Chapter 6 - Responding to Militarism in Engineering

6.1 Historic Responses: Anti-War Engineers

6.1.1 Anti-Militarism Reform Efforts

6.1.2 Humanitarian Reform Efforts

6.2 Ethical Challenges of Contemporary Warfare

6.2.1 The Hidden Violence of Depersonalized War

6.2.2 The Blurring of Military Targets

6.3 Contemporary Responses to Engineering and War

6.3.1 Engineering for Peace and Justice

6.3.2 Engineering for Sustainable Community Development

Conclusion: Facing the Entwinement of Engineering and War

This book has explored three different avenues for engineers and engineering students to think through their careers with a rich sense of integrity and of history, as well as an open understanding of what the future can bring. Investigating engineering and warfare brings into focus complex and challenging issues, some of which may be well beyond the scope of traditional approaches to engineering education and practice. But we hope that these tools from the humanities and the social sciences — history, philosophy, critical theory, and technology studies — can be wedded to engineering pedagogies and practices in a way that helps engineers throughout their professional lives. The connections between engineering and warfare have changed over time, in relation to the goals of states and private firms as well as in relation to more progressive social movements. States’ primary political goals, traditionally, were to acquire new territories and access to new markets. This was based around the concept of imperial expansion in which dominant (usually European) powers would conquer and then control colonial possessions in the global South, installing friendly regimes and extracting resources and wealth to put into the metropolitan coffers. The means of that acquisition was through weaponry that could kill, maim, or destroy opponents. Those weapons employed physical, kinetic force, and, primarily, the application of Newtonian physics to human bodies. This period saw the technology-driven intensification of the application of force via the development of the industrial and later the chemical revolutions. The period ended, for the most part, with decolonization movements in the middle years of the 20th century, though its principal weapons have hardly disappeared and remain in much use.

As we have seen, the Second World War was a turning point in world history. New military technologies — from radio to radar and nuclear weaponry — took hold and helped determined the war’s outcome. Because of the astounding technological sophistication of these devices, university- based researchers and private funders played key roles in weapons development. This relationship was enormously profitable for many businesses and for many academics; it was also a tremendously effective way to develop weapons of unprecedented power. Moreover, it helped give rise to what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower — a proponent of this collaboration for most of his adult life — would famously call the military-industrial complex. …

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Engineers work at the interface of the human and the technical, revealing the porousness of the line between them. As individuals, as a collective, as a social movement, engineers will play a crucial role in making the world that is to come.

Regardless of one’s definition of engineering, the question of what engineers do will remains of vital importance. Engineering is an eminently social practice with profound ramifications on social life, but always within historical and geopolitical contexts that influence the possibilities of human action. Engineers are called upon to make difficult decisions not just about technical solutions, but about the nature of political life and social conflict, about the ethics of warfare and its increasingly tangled lines of accountability and responsibility. As our understandings of biological, sociological, and technological systems transform and intertwine, we believe that, perhaps as never before, engineers should be equipped with an understanding of the historical, political, and ethical consequences of the work they do and the lives they lead.

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2013 EngineeringandWarMilitarismEthi	Ethan Blue Michael Levine Dean Nieusma			Engineering and War: Militarism, Ethics, Institutions, Alternatives				10.2200/S00548ED1V01Y201311ETS020		2013