Ethics

At about the second year into my education in an English school system, I was still afraid of public speaking and had no idea what the culture accepts and rejects as a norm. Back then; I took a philosophy class in which we have to convince the class that our team’s position on a topic is the right one. If you ask me why in the world I did that, I can only come up with “the ignorance of my own inability to speak proper Engrish” as the answer.

Being the competitive person that I was, I went ahead and researched arguments for the two topics assigned: animal rights and weapons development. The focus was on winning animal rights, as it’ll make us look like a winner so we don’t have to put as much of an effort in the second topic. I basically shocked the class into complete silence with my lack of sensitivty and inability to judge the audience’s preferences. I argued that “Cows don’t feel the pain, that we are just imagining their pain based on their physical reactions? How about a robotic cow that behaves the same way?â€? Even unperceptive as I was back then, I could feel that I’ve crossed the insanity line from the class’s point of view. (Or maybe it was my incomprehensible Engrish)

I sat through the next debate like a deflated balloon and listened to my teammates argue about military weapons development. I was with the belief that I’d never take a job as a weapons developer. That you can just walk away and have a free conscience.

The reality of wishful thinking and philosophy can be so far away from the gray truth. Facial recognition technology combined with object recognition and 2D-3D mapping. I wondered what the true objective of these systems are when you burn away all the NDAs and look at the core of it. Even if you have all the clearance, each project is separated into small parts and contracted out to individual civilian companies that signed more NDAs. And if you know what it is, you have to pretend that you don’t. It’s the same bullshit with judicial “on the record and off the record” crap. All in place to ease our conscious.

In the reality, a country drops a bomb on enemy soldiers, everyone in that country contributed to it. Who do you think fed your soldiers? Sure, let’s live in the ignorance that they need those weapon to blow up cows, cows don’t feel pains like we do.