To Lessen War

My heart is racing because I don't know how honest I should be. I don't know how much of myself I should put out here. The sharing of ideas on the internet is sensational. It is one big game of telephone. Things that travel are things that get scandalous attention, I know that. And regardless of platform, the internet is almost designed for us to take things out of context. By saying anything meant to provoke people's thoughts, you may provoke one person's ire, and that is all that it takes to rally the ire of many. This process does not regard the truth. Here is a great TED talk about it. I tried taking my own posts out of context and I got the following: " But what is the worst that could happen to me if I fail? Maybe I die young, or I can't make it through graduate school" - Doesn't want graduate school enough. Not confident? "curiously learning with little regard for what a good person it makes me, or how much impact I will have....

I am nobody. No-one will remember me. I will not make a huge difference. This is a huge relief. Since I got to graduate school, I have been motivated by the desire to become somebody. To be a great researcher, to make an impact, to be known as someone who can challenge the militaristic and narrow-minded thinking that produces harmful engineering design. I think this can also be expressed as fear of dying, if the most final death happens the last time someone speaks your name. Like a pharaoh, I would like to truly become someone recognizable. In the heat of my desire to become someone, the fears of a fall from grace hound me. I imagine failing out of graduate school, or worse, getting a Ph.D. and not being able to make an impact once I graduate. I imagine the bridge to becoming somebody is burning, and so I try to run quickly across it. But what is the worst that could happen to me if I fail? Maybe I die young, or I can't make it through graduate school and I become a high schoo...

Organ donation as a transhumanist technology can complicate our ethics. Take this somewhat classic utilitarian dilemma : A doctor has several patients who will die if they don't receive organ donations. Perhaps one needs replacement kidneys, another needs a replacement heart, or whatever. Now supplies of these organs have come short, and there are no spare organs. There are, however, a number of healthy people available who could be suitable donors, except that they are unwilling to sacrifice themselves to save the others. The number of people required to supply the organs is less than the number of lives can be saved by carrying out the transplants and, in this situation, it is suggested, utilitarianism supports killing some people to save the lives of those in need of replacement organs, since the harm of killing a few is supposed to be less than the harm of many dying. This does not always follow, depending on who is killed and who is saved by the organ donation, but someti...

New research done by Dr. Hollie Nyseth Brehm at The Ohio State University focuses on war criminals of the Rwandan genocide, and shows that overwhelmingly the criminals attempted to appeal to the goodness of their character when they were being tried. From a broader sociological perspective, this research fits into a larger picture - these criminals fail to recognize themselves as "bad" people. They were capable of justifying even murder, capable of considering themselves good people at the same time as recognizing that they had participated in the genocide. What if this is the rule? I cannot easily regulate this thinking and behavior to Rwandan genocide criminals. Maybe the potential to justify even these abhorrent crimes is present in anyone? In fact, I find this very relevant to the current state of American race relations and the concept of white innocence. I won't get more into that with this post, and it will probably be a while before I read Ta-Nehisi Coates new...

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...