Abstract
This book is about weapons research (hereafter and throughout WR), and so we need to know what it is. To that end we also need to know what a weapon is, so I begin with some general remarks about weapons and about how we might define and characterise them. Here I also comment briefly on the history of weapons development. In the last two sections of the chapter I introduce the moral dimension of WR, explain why it is wrong and state the case against WR in general terms: WR is prima facie wrong, it is wrong ‘in the first case’ and hence requires justification. A number of issues are raised in stating the case against weapons research that need to be more fully addressed and elaborated in later chapters, such as the fact that people, like weapons designers, who provide the means to harm are required to justify themselves, as are people who actually harm. However, the fact that harming is morally wrong requires no argument. Thus this opening chapter falls into two sections, the first is about weapons and the second states the case against weapons research.
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Notes
- 1.
We would also need to include the physical characteristics of chemical and biological weapons, and even that would not give us a full list of the mechanisms through which weapons work. Also, note that this sort of description is neutral in the sense that it does not say what the thing described is used for, and for this reason it is not adequate.
- 2.
Including chemical and biological weapons. I will have little to say about these, not because they are minor or unimportant, but simply because their use has been very limited.
- 3.
These two distinctions are not quite co-extensive: for instance, a taser that works on contact is not a projectile weapon yet does not simply magnify the strength of the user. Such exceptions are not important.
- 4.
A soldier armed with a projectile weapon will be able to engage one equipped with a non-projectile weapon before the latter can bring his arms to bear, and thus have a better chance of winning the fight. A relatively unskilled soldier armed with a throwing spear may win a contest against a highly skilled swordsman. A peasant with a longbow, cheap to make though hard to use, may kill an armoured knight, a very expensive unit on the early modern battlefield, with just one arrow. As to artillery, a cannonball, a charge of grape or canister shot, or shell can kill many soldiers at once, whereas non-projectile weapons allow only for the engagement of one enemy at a time.
- 5.
Weapons are artefacts, objects made with some purpose or function in mind, and like any other artefact (with the possible exception of ‘cultural artefacts’ which will not be discussed further), they are evaluated in terms of how well they fulfil their function. The ‘dimensions’ mentioned here can be thought of as criteria, or perhaps better, as classes of criteria, that the artefacts are to be judged by. Engineers refer to success criteria as specifications of conditions that the artefacts in question need to satisfy. These are normally considered to be ‘situational’, which means that they are variable with the context and needs of the designers: for instance, what counts as success with respect to the accuracy of a rifle at one time and place will not necessarily count as success at another time and place.
- 6.
And more generally, the form and content of the prevailing military organisation should be receptive. A strand of the much discussed, and much criticised, thesis that there was a military revolution in the sixteenth century is that the structure of armies began to change radically at that time, partly as a response to new weapons like the musket. For example, the Dutch commander Maurice of Nassau changed both the size of his infantry formations and the way they were deployed in battle which began to compensate for the slow rate of fire of the musket. He also introduced drill. These reforms were in part a response to experience of fighting the Spanish, who until that time were the main innovators of infantry formations and tactics. Whether this amounted to part of a revolution in military affairs remains contentious, but it shows how the status quo needs to adapt and change to new technology.
- 7.
The first projectile weapons were not, however, gunpowder weapons; they were spears, slings, bows and stone and arrow firing artillery. I shall have something more to say about the latter. Gunpowder weapons were not invented in Europe, but were taken up there shortly after they were introduced from the East, for reasons we will consider later.
- 8.
As a rule of thumb, it would seem that the arquebusier would need to have a better than 50% chance of at least disabling his enemy for him to be worth his place on the battlefield, though this discounts the relations between the arquebusier and the other elements of the army, and the tactics made possible by exploiting these relations.
- 9.
The mitrailleuse was said to be first machine gun – a gun similar to the better-known Gatling, with 37 revolving barrels. Nevertheless, von Bredow’s death ride saved a Prussian Corps from rout, Wawro 205: 156. However, Prince Friedrich Karl, the Kaiser’s son and one of the commanders of the Prussian army in the Franco-Prussian War, was still conducting full cavalry exercises as late as 1881, see Brose (2001: 7).
- 10.
- 11.
Although I will be adopting the evolutionary view of technology that has come be associated with him, I think this consideration shows that George Basalla overstates the importance of practical or hands-on knowledge of artefacts in the era of mass production when he writes “Although much of modern technology can be gleaned from the pages of books, articles, monographs, and patents, the artefacts must be studied at first hand, oral information gathered from persons conversant with the new technology, and the innovations adapted to the recipient economy and culture” (Basalla 1988: 83). I agree with last part, about adaptation of the prevailing economy and culture, and I agree that first hand knowledge will usually be helpful, but I don’t agree that it is always necessary. For instance, with very few exceptions indeed, there was no transfer of personnel between the nuclear bomb projects after 1945, certainly not between the US and Soviet thermonuclear projects. As for the latter’s atomic bomb project, a case has been made that this was actually hindered by espionage because the Soviets thought they should mimic the US design when their original was slightly better.
- 12.
- 13.
So I am using “weapons research” in a wide sense. In what follows most of my examples will be of bona fide weapons – guns, bombs, missiles and the like – and not ancillary elements.
- 14.
This is in line with most modern views about the nature of technology: technology is knowledge of technique, of how to do something, in this case, make a weapon.
- 15.
See my The Responsible Scientist, Forge (2008). The account given there of pure and applied science, of the realist interpretation of technology and much else about science, technology and morality is the point of departure of the present book. I will give brief summaries of the main positions, where appropriate, in what follows.
- 16.
Put another way, although artefacts are natural objects, their origins are artificial, and this distinguishes then from ‘natural’ natural objects.
- 17.
I first used this definition in 2004, see Forge (2004: 534), and have employed it on a number of occasions since.
- 18.
What I have to say about weapons research may be relevant to dual-use, but the present project is sufficiently large without exploring all of its further implications.
- 19.
The main aim of the first part of Forge (2008) was to develop a wide view of backward-looking responsibility, that is to say, giving an account of what is for an agent to be responsible for an outcome. The focus was on the scientist as an agent and the idea of the wide view was to maximise the attribution of responsibility. To that end I maintained that an agent can be responsible for more than what she intends. The same account can be applied here, and so it is possible for an agent to be responsible for doing WR even if this is not what she intends. Again, my purpose here is not to engage is some deep analytic exercise that will give a precise and highly nuanced definition of weapons research; it is with its overall moral implications.
- 20.
This is certainly to take a wide, perhaps unreasonably wide, view of the matter, as it would gather all the craft traditions that have been employed in weapons research under the heading of scientific method. But again, there is no special thesis about science and the scientific method and its role in weapons research that I want to uphold here.
- 21.
A way of determining who can be responsible for an outcome of some kind which I have developed elsewhere is to determine the full set of what I call causal roles, which are, essentially, the full set of tasks that need to be undertaken to produce the outcome, see Forge (2008: 81).
- 22.
This is one of the two main claims of The Responsible Scientist.
- 23.
Unless we think of those who have, or control, large amounts of finance having some kind of noblesse oblige. To make sure the point here is clear: no one should harm or provide the means to harm, financiers included. However, I’m not aware that this demand weighs more heavily on those with money than on everyone else.
- 24.
Artefacts are usually understood as things. There can be designs for processes as well, and indeed WR can certainly aim to design processes. In what follows, I will use “artefact” in a wide (and unconventional) sense to cover both objects of design.
- 25.
In this sense, designs are contextual: unless the right skills and resources are available, the design cannot be realised. One might then speak of the specifications counterfactually: were there the available resources, this would have been a set of instructions for this artefact.
- 26.
We can distinguish two types of knowledge: knowing that and knowing how. One knows that something is the case or is true, and hence what one knows in this sense are true statements or propositions, while knowing how is being able to perform some more or less complex task. It is possible to know how to do something without being able to record what one does as a set of instructions that others can follow; such skills are sometimes said to be implicit or tacit. Some weapons designers have employed craft skills, which are passed on by apprenticeship rather than by explicit instructions. Coming up with the right skills in this sense, does however, count, as WR, even though it is very different from modern WR. Contemporary WR cuts across the distinction between knowing that and knowing how: its aim is to come up with sets of instructions, statements, that allow others to do certain things, to make certain artefacts. What is essential about WR is that the ‘knowing how’ skills are transmissible, from one person to another.
- 27.
I note that the distinction between design and the thing designed can be thought of as an instance of the type-token distinction.
- 28.
This kind of distinction is familiar to philosophers who distinguish statements and propositions, items of knowledge, from the sentences and other forms of linguistic representation that express them. I note that Grabacz is right when he says that the design is not the sum of all the engineering specifications.
- 29.
The first question is about ‘exemplification’ and the second about ‘optimality’.
- 30.
Digital technology, however, represents a huge advance or analogue forms of reproduction, as regards accuracy of translation.
- 31.
There is a detailed account of the design of the plutonium bomb in Forge (2008), Chapter 2.
- 32.
Other relevant parameters concern the cross sections, essentially probabilities, for fission and capture by the nuclei of the fissile material, and the number of neutrons liberated per fission event.
- 33.
There is more that could be said about how this works in practice. Thus, prototypes are usually built and tested and their performance might lead to revisions of the design. Moreover, problems or suggestions may arise at the manufacturing stage and feed back into the design process. Thus there is not, in practice, a sharp boundary between R&D and production, with each having their exclusive tasks. Insofar as an activity that take place in a weapons production unit leads to changes in design, I classify that as WR.
- 34.
As I have argued elsewhere, what defines this research as applied is not its ‘content’ but the context in which it is carried on. Much of the preliminary research done on the bomb project would have counted as pure or basic research had it been done out of curiosity and not in the context of weapons research.
- 35.
In a discussion of the idea of design space, Stankiewicz distinguished four ‘design regimes’, which are the craft, engineering, architectural and research regime, respectively. The first is characterised by poor standardisation and high unit cost, by gradual development and little differentiation between design and production activities, and transmission occurring by apprenticeship. By contrast, engineering design is normally accompanied by industrial production techniques distinct from design activities, so there is much greater standardisation. Design is typically represented symbolically. The third category will not interest us here, but the fourth will. In the research regime, new design elements are discovered by scientific research, natural science as distinct from engineering science. For all this see Stankiewicz (2000), especially 237–240. The development of nuclear weapons took place under the research regime.
- 36.
According to the theory of responsibility in Forge (2008), if the curious disassembler either foresees that someone else will make use of his work to re-create the rifle’s design, or if he should have foreseen that this will be the case, then in fact he is doing WR. Again it is the context of the work and the intentions of the workers that, in the first place, determines the nature of the activity.
- 37.
Different versions of the evolution view have different implications for the rate and nature of change.
- 38.
Armstrong (1989) is a good introduction. Armstrong follows Aristotle and holds, against Plato, that there are no uninstantiated universals. A design that was never implemented would have this status. It would still count as an item of knowledge, and something that was the product of intelligent activity, but it would not qualify as a universal until it was instantiated.
- 39.
And this view cannot be the whole story. Artefacts are natural objects and hence have the same sorts of properties as naturally-occurring natural objects, but they are also designed by agents and would not exist but for the intervention of agency. This suggests that classifying designs as universals cannot be the whole story, and some reference to agency needs to be included in an ontology of design. And more can be done by way of elaborating the ontology. For instance, there can be higher-order universals, universals whose instances are themselves universals. We could make use of these to group together designs of the same kind, such as “is a design of a rifle”, which is instantiated by “is a Mauser”, “is a Chassepot”, and so forth. Such higher-order universals could have a role to play in the elaboration of the evolution view of technology as it will be applied to weapons development.
- 40.
S’s motivation could be cited as a justification for what she does – for instance that it is a good job and she needs to feed her large family, that she is a patriot and wants her country to be strong, etc. It is also possible for this to enter into the characterisation of how she represents what she does to herself, namely she sees that her action is one that “makes her country strong”.
- 41.
After he was convinced that the radio and newspaper reports of the dropping of the atomic bombs were not a hoax, Werner Heisenberg was able to correct his previous mistakes about the process, and was able to give a lecture on the subject to his colleagues who were interned in England on August 15, 1945. If someone has exploded a nuclear weapon, then nuclear physics must allow for that to be possible, and hence it must be possible to understand why the weapons works. It did not take Heisenberg very long to do so, see Rose (1998: 217–219).
- 42.
Events that are unforeseeable are such that agents who play some causal role in bringing them about have no responsibility for any harms that take place as a result. This is simply because an unforeseeable event is one that no one can foresee.
- 43.
Verbeek discusses cyborgs, humans enhanced by machine parts or radical biochemical inputs, but that is science fiction.
- 44.
The suggestion is sometimes made that these are now so hard to foresee that a line has been crossed and consequentialism has been shown to be unacceptable. However, what alternative could there be? If the consequences of t are unknowable, then does this mean that t should not be introduced? If t involves essentially a new way of harming, then indeed it should not be implemented. But I maintain that has always been true: it is not something new.
- 45.
There are some special cases: thus research into weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was declared to be illegal by the international community after the first Iraq war.
- 46.
In the modern argot, one is entitled to ‘disrespect’ such people, or ‘diss’ them.
- 47.
I refer the interested reader to Wallace’s book or to a quick gloss in Forge (2008: 92–93).
- 48.
My account does not depend on what kind of sanctions are placed on those whose behaviour is judged morally wrong. The best possible case against WR from the present perspective would establish that all such activity is morally wrong. This is a reason not ever to engage in WR. How exactly we should treat those who nevertheless persist is beyond the scope of this book.
- 49.
According to the prescriptivist theory of metaethics, terms like “morally wrong” are veiled prescriptions about conduct, in this case prohibitions. The prescriptivist will thus see 2 and 3 as equivalent. It is not necessary here to debate these issues at the metaethical level.
- 50.
For instance, Just War Theory claims that fighting some wars is just, so conceivably in those circumstances, WR is justified.
- 51.
It will not be necessary here to spend a great deal of time discussing who counts as moral agents and who counts as moral subjects. All moral agents, as far as we know, are fully-rational human persons – certainly, weapons researchers will fall into this category. There are differences of opinion as to where to draw the line about who qualifies as a moral subject. I accept Jeremy Bentham’s view that all those who can suffer are to be protected by morality, perhaps in proportion to how much they can suffer.
- 52.
See Gert (2004: 151) and McMahan (2002): vii for explicit statements of this view point. One might be tempted to hold that breaking a moral rule is always and necessarily wrong in and of itself, but this looks as if it implies that no one should ever do so, and that looks to be an endorsement of an absolutist stance.
- 53.
Thus, according to negative utilitarianism, a moral rule is one for which widespread violations lead to harmful consequences.
- 54.
I give a definitive statement of this proposition in Chap. 4, where I call it the Unknowability Thesis, or UT. To formulate UT in the most general manner, it is necessary to wait until we can incorporate the upshot of the evolution view of technology.
- 55.
The movie “Mars Attacks” was rather like this, with the ‘weapon’ being the music of Hank Williams – my thanks to Sarah Graham for the example!
- 56.
The notion of an impartial rational person and what such an individual understands as a justified violation of a moral rule is discussed in depth in Chap. 6.
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Forge, J. (2013). Weapons, Weapons Research and the Case Against Weapons Research. In: Designed to Kill: The Case Against Weapons Research. Research Ethics Forum, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5736-3_2
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