To Lessen War

Justice and mercy can fall on a spectrum when considering ethical systems. Justice is a key principle of ethics and is present in the    principlism    that I mentioned in a previous post. But, as is recognized in principlism,  justice comes in many forms. Distributive justice is about people receiving a fair amount of something, whether it be resources, the opportunity for resources, attention, etc. Procedural justice is about a fair process being used for determining outcomes. Also known as fair play. Restorative justice is about restoring things to a fair state, putting things back as they were. Retributive justice is about punishment, administering fair repercussions for someone who acts unfairly. And even amongst any of these, "fair" also has to be defined in order to have any practical definition of justice. Even though justice is a key aspect of ethical systems, there are some models, like Kidder's model for ethical decision-mak...

Humility is one antidote to unethical engineering. I've been watching Death Note. Not the shitty Netflix movie, but the original anime, which is very thought-provoking. I was going to write a post about the effects of The Market on work and human suffering, and whether or not capitalism was ethical, but writing this blog post allows me to rationalize watching TV as "research". The story of Death Note focuses on a young genius, Light Yagami, who comes into possession of a notebook that can kill anyone whose name is written in it, as long as the killer also has the victim's face. Very quickly Light adopts the alter ego, Kira, and begins killing any criminal he can, literally writing for hours at a time. His intent is to act as a god that scrubs the earth of all those who do not belong, and to usher in a new world. Kira gains an international following, and also the attention of a mysterious super detective batman figure, L, who labels him a serial killer. I won...

Relativism is a useful tool for understanding ethics, it has a limit, and at that limit are more steadfast and general truths. My friend (let's call him Q) and I had a conversation about "Engineering Ethics and the Public", a class taught by Marc Edwards that we are currently involved/enrolled in. The conversation was specifically about how the ethics class is taught. Q has more experience with ethics and he is skeptical of and surprised by the specific attention paid to one's "personal morality" in the discussions of ethics that occur in the class. "Ethics is conceptual", he claims, and without attention to ethical frameworks, the class may quickly devolve into ethnocentrism. A simple example: In a country where vaccinations are culturally/religiously prohibited, we may have the personally derived ethical impetus to vaccinate and protect people from illness, but we are not necessarily in the right. Following our personal ethics and choosin...