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Ethics/Nonkilling/Engineering

Introduction

 * This Course is based mainly on "Nonkilling, Professional Ethics, and Engineering the Public Good", chapter prepared by Professor David Haws (Boise State University) for Toward a Nonkilling Paradigm (Honolulu: Center for Global Nonkilling, 2009). The Course is part of the Interdisciplinary Program on Nonkilling Studies at the School of Nonkilling Studies.

Taking illness to a physician, only a few centuries ago, was likely to result in the unnecessary loss of blood, if not premature death. The source of illness was occult, treatments were dangerous, and so more conservative physicians simply focused on methods that, if ineffective, were at least something less than immediately fatal. Physicians had physical contact with their patients, witnessed their suffering, and felt their loss. The concerned practitioner might draw a little blood, in a variety of ways, and thereby safely demonstrated both erudition and industry—encouraging the patient toward silence, if not health.

But because of the potential for harm, and because of their familial concern for the individual, ancient physicians chose the professional caveat: Primum Non Nocere. The potential for harm was, indeed, obvious, as well as morally compelling. And although germ theory gave physicians an important influence on society, doctors have retained the Hippocratic Oath in deference to their continued focus on the individual.

Engineers, similarly empowered with Baconian methods, address the community need for infrastructure, rather than healthy individuals. As a consequence, engineers primarily consider the potential for harm on a communal scale, and our professional constraint is to hold paramount the public safety, health, and welfare. Unfortunately, a lot of individuals can and will suffer before the public safety, health, and welfare even breaks a sweat. Further, because engineers deal primarily with an abstract social structure, rather than with individuals, engineers don’t often see the anguished faces of those they impact. Historically, engineering developed as a branch of the military, and has no explicit professional constraint against doing individual harm (killing, being the extreme manifestation).

“Civilian” engineers acknowledge a professional duty to serve the public good, but we, arguably, have an even deeper, personal duty to respect individual life. After all, the public good is not defined by consensus, and even if it were, majority rule is practically, rather than morally compelling. Most governments consist of leaders making decisions (some of which, engineers are expected to carry out) on behalf of the governed. But while even a tyrant might choose to define a public good that allows individual, human flourishing, the “public” is a social construct that doesn’t bleed. When the public good tramples on individual life—even for the greater, actual good of collective individuals—diminished life compels us to respect a remainder obligation toward those suffering a socially imposed burden. While it might be comforting, engineers can’t simply shunt the administration of social justice onto someone else: we are morally obliged by the remainder obligations generated through our work.

The line between killing and letting die is fuzzy at best, and engineers need to reexamine their willingness to let individuals suffer for the greater good generated through engineering projects. Deaths, causally associated with a particular project, might be human or nonhuman; intentional or accidental; foreseeable or unforeseeable; immediate, proximal or distal. But when an individual’s death is attributable, at least in part, to an engineering project, that individual bears a kind of ultimate, social burden that can’t be distributed back and relieved by the society in general. Increasing the balance of good overall simply isn’t enough—our engineering projects need to avoid, mitigate, or at least respectfully consider the disproportionate burden born by those who suffer and die in the aftermath.

While ahimsa (nonkilling) has seldom been the focus of engineering, even with benign projects such as the delivery of clean drinking water, this deficiency is a moral failure resulting from a paternalistic sense of professional duty that “treats” the beneficiary, and, too often, ignores the collateral individual. This doesn’t make our engineering designs bad, it simply makes them incomplete. It would be wrong for us to knowingly put forth an incomplete design; or to ignorantly put forth a design that we considered “complete” as an exercise in wishful thinking. On the other hand, if we unknowingly allow an incomplete design to progress through to realization, then we have committed an error of omission. While our motivation remains untainted, we are nevertheless obliged to correct mistakes as they come to our attention, and relieve inappropriately assigned burdens.

For example, the Golden Gate Bridge, completed in 1937, was a stunning engineering achievement, which must have been personally gratifying for the engineers involved. Realizing a greater good for thousands, the Bridge was an aesthetic, economic, and moral exemplar. The elegant lines, austere setting, and extreme attenuation (its 4200 feet was the world’s longest clear span at the time of completion) make the Bridge a globally identifiable symbol of built beauty. While the Bridge was actually constructed under budget by $1.3 million, its exquisitely optimized main cables compare tellingly with the grossly over-designed structure of its contemporary, the record-setting Empire State Building (the main cables were so finely tuned as to thwart subsequent attempts to add the second traffic deck, common on less sleekly-spectacular Bay bridges.) Finally, as has been frequently noted, Bridge construction pioneered the use of safety nets to protect exposed workers—saving 19 from assumed-fatal falls, and reducing the number of construction deaths to less than a third of what might have been expected by rule of thumb.

Yet, any engineering project interacting with individuals—even drawing nothing but awe and respect from most of us—is liable to entail some moral obligations. For this analysis, I would like to examine the Bridge, and consider those moral obligations that accrue subject to the potential for loss of life. With regard to human life, we need to consider:

 * Accidental death during construction, and in traffic (on the Bridge itself, but also due to increased regional traffic generation)
 * Intentional death through suicide, and from armed attack (on the Bridge, as a military or symbolic target of opportunity)
 * Increased mortality from economic adjustment (among economic pilgrims, as well as the marginalized and excluded)

Additionally, I think we need to consider the death of animals: e:

 * Directly as road-kill, and indirectly through displaced habitat, attributable to the increased number of vehicles, roads, and communities enabled in the North Bay counties by the Bridge’s construction)

In each of these instances, Bridge engineers missed an opportunity to lessen the potential for loss of life, failing to commit adequate resources to understand incipient problems and realize effective solutions. If there is a failure here—with the stunning engineering success of the Bridge, and by inference, perhaps, with our more yeoman engineering designs—I feel that it might be justifiably laid at the foot of our professional ethic, which avoids an explicit reference to the individual.

Accidental Loss of Human Life
Compared with the past, we seem less willing to simply accept the untimely death of a distal other. This is equally true of intentional, unintentional, and accidental death. In terms of intentional death, at least some responsible actors in our (US) government believe this, or they would not feel compelled to obscure the level of carnage now taking place in the Middle East (no one similarly placed was concerned enough to conceal our level of troop loss, an order of magnitude greater, 40 years earlier in Vietnam). As for unintentional death, the epidemic of puerperal fever recognized in Vienna by Ignaz Semmelweis, might today generate outrage, rather than a 19th Century blend of ignorant denial and helpless acceptance. Finally, the expanding scope of current safety features indicates less complacency with accidental death, if not an increased willingness to relieve the suffering of victims (still distributing relief primarily on the basis of insurance).

I can remember working construction projects where safety equipment was minimal to nonexistent, by current standards. I also remember a lot of old carpenters with missing digits, and was more-or-less amazed to discover that they lost fingers, like Civil War saw-bones, through haste and a well-sharpened hand tool, rather than the introduction of unfamiliar and obviously dangerous power equipment. The greatest dangers are often concealed—sometimes behind over-reliance on safety devices—but individual accidents derive as much from human attitudes as innately perilous operations. Danger accrues to an industry as a function of process, rather than the ultimate industrial product.

Historically, the risks of a dangerous profession were naively assumed to be inevitable, and the subject of informed consent. Dangerous jobs often entailed higher wages, and the idea was that greater compensation—compensation for risk—was also an adequate compensation for the burden of accidental loss. Payment for risk is fine, but the idea that there can be a just, monetary compensation for accidental death is ludicrous. No one, in the absence of insanity, terminal illness, unbearable pain, or the duress of an impossible situation, would volunteer to surrender a limb, let alone end his or her life, purely for the sake of monetary compensation.

Yet in the recent past, industrial accidents were considered an act of God (or a random act of chance) rather than ultimately preventable occurrences, statistically skewed to particular industries by ignorance, greed, and neglect. Workers were given the economic status of a raw material—to be used up, or replaced by raw material from another source, if prices became too dear. (If you believe this practice to occur strictly in the past, try hiring your neighbor to raise, slaughter, and clean the chicken you want to cook for dinner.) Injured long-term workers were typically dismissed with some minimal package of benefits, while short-term workers and the families of industry fatalities were left to the spotty care of external charities.

In a similar way, traffic fatalities were accepted as the simple inevitability of hurling people around at 70 MPH, surrounded by a ton of glass and metal, and oozing a few gallons of accelerant. The car I’ve owned for the last 18 years (a 1964 Plymouth Belvedere, which has never had seat belts) was built and originally purchased in 1963, the first year US traffic fatalities topped 40,000. By way of comparison, annual traffic fatalities always exceeded our troop losses in Vietnam (by more than a factor of 3, even during the year of the Tet Offensive). While traffic fatalities reached an apex of nearly 55,000 in 1972, the increasing emphasis on “safe” vehicles has reduced US traffic fatalities to mid-1960s levels. But historically, so many people died before their time, subject to accidents, infections, treatable or preventable disease, as collateral damage in wars, or subject to the vagaries of food production and famine—we just stoically accepted the fact that our life would be touched, at various points, by premature death.

We seem more active today, looking for culpability in accidental death and assigning damages. I suppose it is tempting to play a utilitarian analysis with human life. Perhaps we imagine a minimum market value in terms of some abstract utile, like dollars (e.g., how many waking hours might a relatively alert human expect to live, and how much would the reasonably competent require, as compensation, to relinquish one hour). Market force estimations, after all, form the basis of how we value a (nonpet) animal life (so much per mature pork-belly, delivered to the abattoir, depending on timely supply and the instantaneous, global yen for bacon). And, of course, market forces were also used by slave-owners, to place a value on “available” African-Americans before our Civil War. But the assignment of damages, too often, is a post hoc measure of retributive, rather than distributive justice. Since a lost human life is irredeemable, unless, possibly, in exchange for some “equivalent” human life, justice after the fact is an illusion. Engineers should do their best to design useful projects, which enhance life—not to avoid damages, but because moral behavior is morally compelling. If fatalities occur, we need to correct the immediate and responsible causes, insure that the fatality is not simply accepted as the cost of doing business, and ease the burdens of those who, in Whitman’s terms, remain, and suffer. But justice is temporally beyond our grasp. Justice demands our attention before dangers become de facto.

The Golden Gate Bridge and post-war automobile safety requirements are rightly cited as the beginning of a gentler, more responsible attitude toward the victims of fatal accidents. Innovators like Joseph Strauss and Preston Tucker were obviously unsettled by the existing, callous attitude toward accidental loss of life—and in their own ways, are at least partially responsible for leading our society away from its complacency. But Strauss and Tucker’s innovations addressed familiar accidents, and made no real attempt to consider safety problems beyond the expected (e.g., failing to account for gondolas crashing through safety nets, or lead poisoning from automobile exhaust emissions). Since many engineered works outlive their designers, we need to devote a significant portion of the design effort to considering just how each project might encounter an adjunct failure in unexpected and catastrophic ways (perhaps writing, disseminating, and critiquing imaginative reports). With the collective imagination of the engineering profession, I don’t see why we would be unable to anticipate at least some of the new forms of accidents, which inevitably follow in the wake of new technologies.

One might argue that the extreme boundaries of killing (intentional) and letting-die (accidental) encompass a well-distributed continuum of possibilities. While no single contribution to an accidental death may be necessary or sufficient, there is perhaps some culpability by simple contiguity (this seems to be the direction taken in US civil suits, assigning minimal, potential liability to caterers, for construction deaths at the sites they service). This being the case, there is a fractional aspect of killing associated with accidental death that makes our professional concern morally imperative. Perhaps accidental deaths are simply unintentional killing, as with the ignorant introduction of bacteria during childbirth in 19th Century Vienna.

Intentional Loss of Human Life
There are probably two types of intentional death one might associate with the Golden Gate Bridge—suicide, which has occurred (often) and should reasonably have been anticipate; and politically-motivated attack—blowing up the Bridge as a military objective, or as a symbol of something else, hateful, yet beyond weapon’s range. While both types of deaths are, or would be killing (you can’t really argue Secondary Effect here—that someone might want to blow up the Bridge, without intending to kill the people driving across it in their cars), they otherwise seem to be quiet different.

Suicide is certainly a killing, but the ill of a suicide’s death seems to be a function of motivation; we don’t consider willing, self-sacrificial death to be suicide or killing—even if the sacrifice achieves nothing concrete. For example, the unsuccessful hero might use his body in a vain attempt to save someone else. Comparatively, a suicide might choose to die because he thinks it would be better for his family. Both deaths are untimely, but we hold the suicide particularly culpable because we consider him inadequately informed, and think that he ought to have known better. We are less judgmental of the thwarted hero, and consider the world a better place, because of the occasional human willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice in an attempt—even if unsuccessful—to save the other. But if the suicide can’t know the state of the world in his absence, then neither can we. Further, if the culpability of accidental death exists somewhere on a continuum between killing and letting die, then, perhaps, suicide itself might not be an absolutely culpable form of killing (might retain a residual element of the accidental).

If a particular suicide were considered morally acceptable—for example, by controlling the manner, rather than the time of death, thereby avoiding a death that could be considered significantly premature—then jumping from the Bridge under the proper circumstances (no witness, no family or musing comrades left behind to wonder, and an out-going tide) might avoid censure. Under the right circumstances, the suicide would mitigate the physical aspects of a messy aftermath; and we know that the “well-tested” probability of success would be 98% (greater, if the suicide could control the angle of impact).

But if there were a morally acceptable suicide, it would be difficult to differentiate ahead of time. And for the purpose of this analysis, I will assume (along with Kant) that there is a perfect moral imperative against suicide—that suicide is a killing similar to the killing of someone other than yourself. This being the case, the engineers who designed the Golden Gate Bridge should have considered features to deter all potential suicide.

Of course, as originally configured with a pedestrian lane, the Bridge might be considered “suicide friendly.” Does the aesthetic Bay view, seen from the walkway (admittedly stunning) offset the “attractive nuisance” appeal for potential suicides? On the other hand, lazy, or less-ambulatory suicides have certainly been willing to abandon cars on the roadway. More to the point, since suicides were jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge long before the Golden Gate Bridge was envisioned, the Bridge’s popularity with West Coast suicides shouldn’t have really surprised anyone.

As of 2005 (68 years of operation) more than 1200 Golden Gate Bridge suicides have been documented (currently compiling at about one every two weeks). Importantly, there has been a continuing effort to reduce suicide attempts—through signage, alert officials (many potential suicides being thwarted by the California Highway Patrol) and with the introduction of sensors and strategically placed suicide nets. Perhaps there are additional post hoc palliatives (e.g., handing out anti-depressants at the pedestrian turn-stile), but suicide-prevention should have been incorporated into the original design. Again, as with accidental death, most people will eventually recognize a problem and potential solutions, but engineers are particularly well-trained to consider technical problems in the abstract. And a brainstorming of unimagined, destructive applications should be a part of every engineering preliminary design. If this had been accomplished in the 1930s, perhaps the Bridge suicide toll would be less.

In the aftermath of 9/11, I’m sure that there must be engineers somewhere considering the possibilities of a hostile impact loading on the Golden Gate Bridge. Because of its exposure to wind and seismic forces, the Bridge is probably well designed against the kind of lateral loads that might come from a bomb blast sufficiently small, or at some adequate remove. As a consequence, the problem might become one of keeping potential bombs far enough away from critical structural components (the two towers, the main cables, the two anchorages, the auxiliary cables, and the bridge girders, probably in that order). A military attack might provide enough warning to close the bridge and initiate countermeasures, but a stealth attack by land could use the Bridge roadway to access vulnerable features. Further, since the Bridge is an aerial, sight-seeing destination, attack from a private plane might not offer as much warning-time as a more standard, military sortie.

Without trying to second-guess terrorists in a morbid way, the Bridge’s principal weakness is probably in the material properties of the main cables—steel being particularly susceptible to heat and corrosion. While the ganged cables are statically determinant (enabling catastrophic failure at a single point) the redundant connections to the anchorage would require more points of attack, but correspondingly smaller explosions, and not all of the redundant connections would have to fail simultaneously (this type of failure analysis could be done by any of my upper-division engineering students). If engineers responsible for the Bridge are not currently thinking through potential attack scenarios, they obviously should be—in consultation with military engineers, who spend much more of their time trying to figure out how to efficiently blow things up, and how to patch battle damage.

For example, if a private plane loaded with jellied gasoline were to wrap itself around a cable support at the top of one tower, how much warning time would motorists have to vacate the Bridge? Should Highway Officials have a mechanism in place (do they?) to more-or-less instantaneously shut down the approaches (and how far away should vehicles be held)? How could fire-retardants be efficiently placed at the site of combustion, or how might the heat of combustion be safely dissipated? If the ends of the Bridge were simultaneously blocked, could we safely evacuate motorists by static lines or gondola to the respective shores? Assuming that someone with a grudge will eventually want to attack an American landmark on the west coast, should we “mis-direct” them by heavily defending the Bridge (e.g., studding the bridge with anti-aircraft drones), while posting minimal defenses, and advertising the “cultural significance” of some other, attractive target (perhaps San Simeon, from the perspective of historic continuity)? The point is that a military attack on the Golden Gate Bridge was not part of the original design, although it probably should have been (Orson Welles and military planners were certainly considering the possibility of an attack on US soil). Today, there is no excuse for ignoring military/terrorist threats. In fact, since the Oklahoma City bombing, Federal buildings are now being designed to withstand internal blast loading (fairly simple, although perhaps counter-intuitive for someone habituated to thinking in terms of gravity loads).

As a profession, we have made progress in limiting the potential for our designs to further intentional killing. Although such killing is admittedly a bad thing, a determined killing is difficult to prevent. In the end, perhaps the current moral obligation of engineers is to prevent the easy deaths, while playing for time—enlarging the window for a timely response to developing threats. However, not all projects (the Golden Gate Bridge is a notable exception) retain the attention of engineers after their completion, so an exploration of dire contingencies needs to be a significant part of the project’s initial conception.

Economic Displacement and the Loss of Human Life
In a finite world, the attraction of resources to one area will preclude their use in another. In the extreme, this polarizes wealth, and leaves behind pockets of marginalized humanity, incapable of realizing the life they desire. Such poverty is often accompanied by the loss of life—killing and otherwise—and the differential of wealth drives migration, taxing the typically minimal services available for new arrivals, and further decreasing the capacity of an abandoned homeland. In addition, indigenous inhabitants or early immigrants, if able to exercise sufficient power, will have an advantage over newcomers, and often use their advantage to exact privilege. In such an environment, the frustration of competing against unwarranted privilege might also motivate conflict resulting in the loss of life.

The history of California is rife with economic struggles between peoples and regions, and the Golden Gate Bridge was rightly seen as an economic stimulus to the North Bay counties (including Sonoma County, which is where I grew up). Under Anglo development, the location of San Francisco benefited from natural port facilities, an existing presidio/mission with support infrastructure, and access along El Camino Real to the lush, surrounding farmlands to the south, and southeast. But originally located as a potential redoubt at the end of a narrow, highly defensible peninsula, San Francisco was separated from the counties to the immediate north by the Golden Gate. As a consequence, commerce to the north was traditionally limited by the availability of ferry traffic within the Bay. North Bay counties were therefore more isolated, agrarian, and economically limited. The Golden Gate Bridge improved access, drew capital as well as wealthier inhabitants, and contributed to the gentrification of the locals (or their exodus farther inland, to less pricey chunks of real estate).

Prosperity in the North Bay counties—augmented by the Bridge—fostered an unwillingness on the part of local inhabitants to do the nasty, or toilsome bits of work. For example, while I was growing up in Santa Rosa (the early 1960s) the public schools didn’t start until the end of September. Ostensibly, this was to allow school children to aid in the harvest of local prunes and to a lesser extent, English walnuts (both of which involved retrieving product from the ground). Yet, by the time I was there, few locals availed themselves of this opportunity (I certainly didn’t, although I did work construction jobs during the summer).

Mechanized farm labor is perhaps the most traditionally dangerous, nonbelligerent occupation, and if accompanied by inadequate wages, is understandably rejected by people with other options. However, migrant farm labor (drawn from regions low on options) had been fairly well established by the time of the Great Depression. While the end of the 1960s saw a few locals—otherwise stretching time between meals on communes, such as Lou Gottlieb’s Morningstar Ranch—embark on farm labor, the region’s less desirable, agricultural jobs (as now, throughout much of the West) were typically taken by “part-year” transients from Latin America. This wasn’t a new phenomenon, and the 19th Century saw waves of Asian emigration—some, such as the Chinese, being met with extreme violence (more than one Chinese was simply killed at the end of the harvest, to avoid the cost of a meager wage). The point is that from a global perspective, the North Bay counties were already extremely wealthy. The Golden Gate Bridge enhanced this, and so is reasonably seen to contribute—admittedly, in a limited way—to the initial misery of the attracted poor.

Globally, corporations concentrate wealth and exploit the unprotected—particularly where they can operate off the radar of the obliviously empowered. If Malaysian children are working in clandestine, sweat-shop conditions to fabricate sneakers, it is at least partially because some North Bay residents—from a position of relative affluence enhanced in a small way by the Bridge—choose to buy cheap footwear. Effort placed in the Third World producing export goods for the First World, gives the rank-and-file little of value, and detracts from the labor required to produce the food they need to eat, and the other goods that might stay and enhance the local quality of life. I don’t know of an Irish Potato Famine in the works anywhere, but the potential mechanism is well understood. The Third World needs fewer “Hard Rock Café” T-shirts, and a larger percentage of its own resources—to develop local culture, and a more satisfying lifestyle. “Trickle-down” failed to work in our own (US) democracy, and it certainly won’t work where the receptacles of poverty are so much more ubiquitous and overwhelming.

The problem for engineers is that most of their projects require capital—ready capital being primarily available in the First World. Engineering projects generate economic growth, and so the rich get richer (and, in a zero-sum world, the poor get poorer). If there is a possible solution here, it might be in the kind of engineering pro bono work demonstrated by groups like Engineers Without Borders. It would be helpful if such groups received better funding, maybe by levying a surcharge on all engineering projects in the First World. This isn’t the enormous “great leap forward” it might first appear to be, since some countries (like Japan) levy a similar engineering surcharge to support things like research and development.

The contributions of the Golden Gate Bridge are admittedly minimal, in terms of global economic impact, but we aren’t justified in assuming they pass unfelt. While the motivation for economic enhancement in the First World is not death in the Third World, the lack of intention, or even ignorance of negative impact, does not absolve us of moral responsibility. Death, attributable to economic disparity is at least partially a form of killing, as opposed to letting-die. If the culpability for economic suffering is widely distributed, then the zero-sum impact of regional economic enhancement should be considered as part of the engineering analysis, at least for large, First World projects like the Golden Gate Bridge. I know of no significant attempt to account for the economic disparity associated with engineering projects, and this certainly wasn’t included in the analysis for the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Accidental Loss of Animal Life
I suppose the intentional killing of animals on the Bridge is at least possible (as unimaginable as it is, there are probably individuals who find sport in squishing small animals into the pavement). But the economic growth fostered by the Golden Gate Bridge also meant more space dedicated to human activities, with a correspondingly smaller habitat available for indigenous species. With the encroachment of humans, some species were displaced by others (wild oats, and Eucalyptus trees, for example, while alien, have done quite well in northern California). And according to a replacement utilitarian theory, 100 happy dogs are equivalent to 100 happy coyotes (although the coyotes might not agree).

Perhaps, from a moral perspective, the most significant problem generated from loss of animal life is the increase in road-kill. For the most part, people who die in traffic accidents make the decision (perhaps ill-informed) to get into a car. While it may go unspoken, it seems reasonable that drivers and passengers, who contribute to the problem of vehicles with a dangerous amount of momentum, implicitly assume a proportionate risk. Don’t we always feel worse about a pedestrian or bicyclist hit by a car, as opposed to someone similarly mutilated when two or more cars collide? However, with regard to animals, they seem simply caught in the headlights. Some die instantly, and some linger, just as with human traffic casualties—but in the absence of an implicitly accepted risk.

The prevailing attitude, with nonfarm animals, had always been that those near a road would either develop car-savvy, or would be killed. In the case of feral species, populations would normally diminish (as they might, subject to the sudden introduction of thousands of hungry predators) and the scope of suffering would naturally lessen. On the other hand, sufficiently prolific species like squirrels might simply continue at culled numbers equal to the available food supply. In either case, large, less prolific, nonscavenging populations could easily dwindle and become genetically unviable.

In the case of pets, road-kill was easy enough to replace from the roaming excess of un-neutered animals, and the new pets, if unfamiliar with the perils of traffic, were given a similarly small window to come to grips with the presence of speeding vehicles. While pet road-kill continues, I seem to see fewer mangled pets now, than in my youth. Possibly, there are fewer free-range specimens among the un-neutered, but (although this evidence is just anecdotal) perhaps we’ve become better about taking care of our most-cherished animals.

While I am currently living in a rural, mountainous part of the Great Basin, I see a lot of feral road-kill, ranging from moose, elk, and mule deer; to the magpies squished into the moose, elk, or mule deer they were feeding on. In the 25 years that I’ve been in this area, I’ve had two vehicular encounters with mule deer (one became flustered and bolted head-first into the side of my parked car; and the other was head-to-head at 65 MPH, totaling my car as well as the deer).

The point is that when I moved to this area in 1985, I was told to watch for deer when their mountain feed became depleted (November through March), and the intent of the warning was to allow me to protect my vehicle rather than migrating deer. Hunters might bemoan the occasional road-kill with a nice rack—I’ve even seen the ignoble taking of coup (like elk eye-teeth) from an otherwise mangled carcass. But, even with the massive, post-War addition of rurally-placed, “National Defense” highways, no one was taking measures to limit the time a feral animal might spend in harm’s way.

When I first arrived in the area, there were still range cattle, and a number of “cattle-crossing” signs on lightly-used state roads—although one typically saw many more deer on the road than cows. But after I’d been living in Utah for a decade or so, a newly completed section of I-40 near Jordanelle Dam was actually engineered for a deer-crossing, using cobbled terrain and fencing to channel the deer migration to a specific, well marked, and highly visible section of roadway. Such a limited application may or may not have saved any actual deer (there are still plenty of opportunities to be run down on I-80, a few miles away) but it demonstrates the inkling of an admirable attitude.

The point is that while most humans are less concerned with animal life than human life, we need to recognize that engineering projects, like the Golden Gate Bridge contribute to the death of a variety of living things—and that to a certain extent, living things—as moral patients—have a claim on us a moral agents. As engineers, we should recognize this problem, and provide proactive solutions (like engineered deer-crossings). Deer who lose their footing and fall off a cliff, may succumb to accidental death; and deer shot by hunters may be killed; but deer who crumple to the side of a road, do it from an insufficiently acknowledged, engineering neglect.

Conclusions
Death is not the problem; we are all born owing the debt of death. The problem is meaningless death, and the aspect of killing (intentional, unintentional, or partially accidental) implies that someone knowingly or ignorantly dropped the ball—denying the value of life and the meaning of death. Death is supposed to be a natural end, at least aesthetically required by our natural beginning, the declining efficiency of our biological containment, as a semi-closed system, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But nonkilling is still a significant goal for the engineering profession, and except for the possible, indirect killing related to opportunity cost (born by the Third World for engineering projects designed to economically enhance the First World) engineering as a profession has contributed to a progressive attitude respectful of life. Even with the evils of economic disparity, Engineers Without Borders, as a 21st Century organization, should certainly be seen as a positive step in the right direction. The problem is that we need to be careful to couch the requirements of nonkilling in an enabling way.

Elizabeth Anscombe (1981) made an interesting comment about pacifism between the two world wars. She held that a typical belief—professed by militant governments—was that pacifism, while noble, was beyond the reasonable expectation of existing regimes. While this categorical denial of a lofty goal is a little self-defeating (like denying hunger because there is no food in your mouth), Anscombe goes on to say that governments, thus self-absolved from nonkilling on practical grounds, took the “in-for-a-penny, in-for-a-pound” attitude. Since they could not be “noble” they felt no compunction to be “decent” (hence, neither side refrained from the indiscriminant bombing of civilian targets).

If engineers claim nonkilling as an absolute, professional goal, and if nonkilling is not within our zone of proximal development (to use Lev Vygotski’s term) then the goal of nonkilling might simply be dismissed as unobtainable. “Ought implies can;” and if the profession can’t achieve the nobility of nonkilling, at least some might feel absolved from the responsibility of maintaining a decent respect for life. To be absolved at one point, might be construed as a license to totally ignore one’s moral responsibility (certainly, one’s moral sensibility might be expected to erode).

Not too many years ago, engineering was simply a branch of the military, and I don’t think we are very close to achieving ahimsa. Both engineering and the military are currently used to enhance or exact privileged status, and neither pay adequate attention to the holes they tear in our global fabric. Racism, nationalism, religious intolerance, and entrenched privilege are recalcitrant foes—feebly opposed by our efforts in the engineering curriculum, to address the problems of a nonkilling profession. I teach a class in engineering ethics to approximately 300 students a year—and consideration here is a miniscule step—but the moral dialogue needs to include active professionals. This is not something you can force with units of continuing professional education, and a serious dialogue may have to wait for the collective will to change. Perhaps volunteer organizations, like Engineers Without Borders will become so overwhelmingly successful that the profession as a whole will desire their institutional subsumption, and be willing to abandon the limited attitudes of centuries past.

A dialogue as to the goals of ahimsa might help us to appreciate the negative impact, on isolated individuals, of our otherwise positive projects. With appropriately respectful attitudes, the private good becomes the public good, and recognizing our moral obligation to marginalized victims is an important step. Thus, engineering concern for the individual, comparable to the concern expressed by physicians, seems to be at the core of a viable professional ethic for engineers. As engineers, we must consider the needs of all individuals, along with our first inquiries into the possibilities of engineered solutions in support of the public good.

title: Ethics/Nonkilling/Engineering


text:
Ethics/Nonkilling/Economics

Introduction

 * This Course is based mainly on "Nonkilling Economics", chapter prepared by Alfredo Macías (Santiago de Compostela University) for Toward a Nonkilling Paradigm (Honolulu: Center for Global Nonkilling, 2009). The Course is part of the Interdisciplinary Program on Nonkilling Studies at the School of Nonkilling Studies.

The contemporary economic system is a modern and efficient machine that produces violence and death in most regions of our fragile planet. As Paige indicates (2009: 103-104), where he cites the Manifest of fifty three Nobel Prize laureates (Nobel prize Prize Recipients 1981: 61-63), we can and must address the situation of poverty and exclusion that a significant portion of humanity endures as a veritable “holocaust". What will future generations think when they observe the current drama of hunger and exclusion and lack of access to the most basic goods that many human beings need? Would it be legitimate to compare our indifference today with the attitude of those who looked the other way in Germany’s Nazi regime and did not stop the atrocities ?

Since the Second World War we have lived in an epoch of explosive growth of the inequality between the rich and the poor (Paige 2009: 25-31). All the international organizations concur in highlighting this obvious trend. This trend of larger and larger gaps between rich and poor has not only continued but it has become larger and more apparent in the past decades. This is in spite of the well intentioned counter-measures put in place to avoid the growing inequities. In 1990, the average North American was 38 times richer than the average Tanzanian, whereas in 2005, fifteen years later, he was 61 times richer. In 2005, the average revenue of the richest 20 per cent of the population of the world was more than 50 times the average revenue of the poorest 20 per cent. In addition, the poorest 40 percent was receiving only 5 per cent of the world’s revenues and the poorest 20 percent were receiving only 1.5 percent of world revenues. In summary, this poorest 40 percent corresponds with two billion humans who live with less than two dollars a day.

Under the conservative estimate that the 500 richest persons enumerated in Forbes magazine have revenues not greater than 5 per cent of their assets; their revenues would be higher than the revenues of 416 million of the poorest persons together. That is 500 individuals with access to wealth comparable to the total wealth of the poorest 416 million global neighbors. In Brazil, for example, the relation between the revenue of 10 per cent of the poorest population and the revenue of 10 per cent of the richest population is the following: for every 1 Brazilian real the poorest person gets the richest person gets 94 reais.

For the world taken overall, this ratio is not 1 to 94 but 1 to 103. If measureed in a more systematic way using Gini’s coefficient, the general standard of world distribution would be more unequal than in any country, except Namibia. In a scale in which 0 represents the perfect equality and 100 the total inequality, Gini's coefficient of the world is 67 (PNUD 2005). Numerous studies developed by governmental and non governmental organizations explain how the inequality and the poverty interact with violence and environmental devastation. As Gandhi warns:

A nonviolent system of government is clearly an impossibility so long as a wide gulf between the rich and hungry millions persists… A violent and bloody revolution is a certainty one day unless there is voluntary abdication of riches and power that riches give and sharing them for the common good (Collected Works 75 (1941): 158).

On the other hand, it is necessary to take into account that the economic development experienced by the western countries has been based mostly on the expansion of the military-industrial complex, which has represented a source of weapons, the tools of killing and lethality, to feed indefinitely the conflicts and the killing that is suffered in many corners of our planet (Paige 2009: 106). Even a former US President and Army General Dwight D Eisenhower warned about the expanding military industrial complex during in 1961: “We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations”.

The current economic science is thought to improve efficiency, but it is also used to justify the logic of an economic system founded on killing, on violence and in the inhibition of the most charitable and altruistic attributes of human beings. For this reason, we will try to construct alternative instruments of analyses that allow us to use economic science as an instrument of support in the search of a nonkilling society, based on the common good and equitable sharing of benefits and resources.

Following Paige’s methodology (2009: 73-91), we will look first for the anthropologic and philosophical foundations, and the historical roots, of this search. Then we will think about the alternative approaches that can allow humanity to develop a nonkilling economic system, based on cooperative actions and principles and behaviours of solidarity and commonwealth, where the community fortifies and does not disintegrate in fratricidal conflicts supported by the forces of a market rooted in underwriting violence.

To approach these questions, this chapter is divided into five parts: a review of the theoretical motives that lead us to believe that contemporary economic science is not prepared to advise on policies and to develop institutions favourable to the construction of a nonkilling society; an analysis of the anthropological, philosophical and historical foundations that allow us to shelter the hope that humanity can develop economic behaviours that allow us to advance towards a nonkilling society; a discussion of the importance of economic reciprocity as an instrument not only to avoid war,, but also to develop nonkilling societies at large; an outline of a series of alternative approaches for a nonkilling economy; and, finally, some conclusions.

To Rethink the Economy from a Nonkilling Perspective
How have humans confronted the need to satisfy their basic needs and to achieve their aspirations? With what logic have the species confronted these needs and aspirations? Which are the means and ends? The methods and goals? In all these questions, there is nothing predetermined, beyond the own positive and negative tensions of humanity. Everything is possible to solve in the field of cultural human creations. Indeed, the economic architecture and structure was designed and is owned by the species. History and the natural environment represent contexts in which to act.

Economic managent is necessary to the human species since a social dimension was developed to confront the material aspects of the existence. Economics is a human invention. It is a social construction that is substantially related to the powers and the capacities that characterize us as species. Economics refers to our symbolic capacities, among other things. Material exchange historically constitutes the objective representation, though not the point of departure, the essential principle, since this representation does not derive from a passive absorption of the reality, but it is made possible due to the active intervention of the subject that realizes the experience, knows it, feels it and thinks it. Our economic dimension thrives on the internal world of each one of us. Following this argument, all economic representations, from exchange to accumulation, are subjective and cannot rise over human conscience, as it ends up being the case with utilitarianism.

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of the Nations (1776), warns us of the importance of the material exchange as a constitutive factor of human social and economic practice. But the Scotch author emphasizes something, that later will be forgotten. The answers that are given to the material needs, as to exchange, do not constitute an external dimension of women and men, which would be imposed irremediably upon themselves. To think about this question has great theoretical and methodological importance. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) - as his colleague and friend David Hume, in his A Treatise on Human Nature (1739)-, attribute great importance to the moral sentiments in the achievement of social harmony.

Specifically, the sentiment of affection between human beings represents a seam of the western thought that did not have continuity, a point of opposite vision to the rationalist mechanical roller that will stay during the emergence and the consolidation of modernity. They differ from diverse authors of the modern Europe, including Karl Marx -in The German Ideology (1845) and specially in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845)- or, in a more contradictory way, Max Weber -in The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of the Capitalism (1905)-, which construct their methods and their theoretical approaches from inverse hypotheses. They try to explain how the external world influences the internal world of the human being.

The economic science will take as a point of departure an already distorted analysis of the objectivation of human accomplishments - the commodity in case of The Capital (1867) of Marx-, where the principal human power would be work. The economic science will ignore the diversity of routes that the humanity has taken to confront the problems of the material life, centering exclusively in those ways that begin historically with the expropriation, often violently, of the common goods (Thompson 1971) and that finish in the ravenous accumulation, which is destroying the environment and the capacity of the peoples to be materially self-supported (Wolf 1982).

Therefore, there is necessarily a labour of debunking of certain common places established by the classic elaborations of the economic science, realizing a break with the progressive visions that see the development of the material life of the human species as a series of evolutionary states, where traumatic and violent experiences – as the appearance of private property- are justified for the advances of the civilization. For economic science, the answers we would think are always in the world that surrounds us. It would be necessary to depart from the external thing, of the objective thing, which has a consequence: that is, human beings can seek to live better by means of the work, on the basis of objective laws, developed scientifically. Following this logic, the economic behaviour of individuals would represent a passive adjustment to the laws of markets, or another type of economic institutions. The only way of changing our material condition would be to rely on our own production relations reduced to their technical, legal or merely social dimensions. Historically, these changes have always been violent, and have generated violent systems of political and economic domination themselves.

From this classic perspective, our symbolic capacities would be the result of the development of our productive capacities, where the homo economicus would be only a species more evolved than the beavers, the bees or the ants. Nevertheless, unlike other species, the material human life is debatable enough so that we could diminish the productive and reproductive dimensions, leaving to the margin the creative and innovative spheres. As Fernand Braudel says, as human beings we are even capable of creating new problems. Let’s think about our forbears, but let’s think also about us: the economy is substantial to the existential human dimension, and not only a practical activity. This consideration is related to a tension with universalism, a tension to the abstraction, which ends up by denying the individual being, concrete. It is necessary to understand it and to overcome it to re-drive and to return to the humanity of what are own fruit and own faculty. The economy is a human choice, nevertheless the economic science has tried to separate this cultural invention from its creators, dedicating apparent absolute truths for the lay myth of progress, enclosing the human species in relations of cause-effect, where the material life could be explained by pure objectivity, where the economy turns out to be a natural institution, unable to be thought of out of its established forms. Indeed, the human choice would be explained by external conditions, determined mechanically by the shortage of resources, and the violent fight for appropriating them. Really, the choice is not possible; the economic behaviours cannot be conceived in these terms.

We need to overcome these theoretical hypotheses, which finally are a hypothesis of life. Social and economic relations are not determined, but they suppose another dimension of invention and projection. In this respect, the tension to the transcendence can recover a major protagonism, overcoming the limits of consciential sedimentation that are observed in the forms of original cooperation of the first human communities (Lévy-Bruhl 1927: 127-161). We have the opportunity to depart from our faculty nature and our conscience, integrating what has been separated by the modern and premodern traditions: the reason of the sentiments, the material needs of the spirit and the affect, the ideas of the emotions, the tension to the abstraction of the tension to the transcendence.

The economy cannot be thought of independent from human aptitude to think and to project towards the future the integral well-being of the species, in a harmonic and peaceful form. Indeed, the real sense of the economy could be represented by the interlacing of three anthropologic tensions: the need, the aspiration and the transcendence; which turns out to be exactly opposite to the mechanical and violent logics that the different economic theories have deployed throughout history.

Precisely, the human capacity of economic invention expresses itself in a diversity of problems and solutions. Historically, they escape to conventional economics, subject to an ethnocentric and progressive vision. It’s curious to observe how the economic science has been and is a construct of an ideology of shortage, selfishness and rationality, and simultaneously it has been turning into the defender of lethality through a system of irrational consumption based on the unlimited production of goods that, in an expansive logic, violently expropriates the material capacities of many peoples. Hereby, one has sought to annul the possibility of thinking and feeling what is necessary, which is sufficient, enclosing the human spirit in the economic logic, of the violent expropriation and the accumulation toward the benefit of a minority.

Nowadays, we are present at the awareness of the inadequacy of western thought, overlapped in the institutional and material omnipotence. This inadequacy reflects the inability of the academic western centers to be responsive when asked about the origins, the roots and the bases of existence of the killing-prone civilization, which they themselves claim. It is the consequence of the historical pretension of constructing knowledge through a reading of reality unilaterally based in economic-political terms, from the historical European evolution, unable to admit their own absolute aggressiveness and ignorance in relation to other cultures and earthly beliefs.

Actually, the toxic cloud of modernity continues to wrap everything, determining the hopes and the pleasures of life, reducing the most authentic feelings to the ridiculous, turning into values the more mechanical dimensions of human activity, without excluding lethality and the evilness. Nevertheless, there is still another way of looking at the world and looking to our future.

Human Foundations of a Nonkilling Economy
Economic science tries to convince us of the need for the State or markets to accelerate the productive performance of each person. Without them, humans would not develop a spirit favorable to efficiency and accumulation. In addition, current economic science understands that only a privileged minority can assume this coercive and lethal function, in exchange for an exclusive good. For thousands of years, political elites, cities, empires and, in general, dominant and proprietary classes exercised this function under diverse economic systems, adapting to environmental and technological conditions.

In its theoretical development, economic science starts from three theoretical premises, which are present and seemingly inalterable in time and in cultural diversity. First, the exchange of objects would be a logical derivation of the human intention to exchange. In addition, the mercantile exchange would prevail over other diverse forms of exchange, as the community reciprocity and the centralized distribution develop. Secondly, the value of change of the produced goods would turn around its utilitarian dimension, the value of use. The accomplishment of the exchange for other objects would socially certify the practical relevancy of the commodity. Thirdly, reproduction is not perceived from the point of view of human needs: as reproduction of those human beings. Reproduction will turn around the process of accumulation in the productive process itself.

To share or to exchange?
Goods are not always exchanged, sometimes they are shared and other times guarded jealously (Godelier 2000). Possibly, humanity started by sharing the most basic foods. The ritual of “insulting the meat”, when the hunter was coming to the community with the hunted animals, was a good sample of it (Lee1979). The hunted pieces were despised by the community, with a dual goal: to avoid the political prestige of the hunter while pressing this one so that he would share the food with others, avoiding the accumulation by few and conflicts inside the community. On the other hand, the sacred goods were guarded jealously, as they played a substantial part in collective identity. The original community would never exchange a sacred stone for another type of good, for example.

Therefore, in her origins, humanity designed symbolic forms to avoid the accumulation of the goods of subsistence and the exchange of the sacred goods, which did not have a reason to deny a human intention to exchange and to save as instruments of precaution. Maybe, the persons choose to use the objects to communicate, or to bee well known. The exchange of objects might even be an excuse to begin social relations. Nowadays, in the local African markets, it’s curious to observe how women do not hurry to sell their agricultural productions along the day. If they sell them rapidly, they would have to leave the market too promptly. Consequently, they would have to resign what really motivates them to come to the market: that is, to speak with the people, find out of what happens in her country or in her region, to pay attention to stories and rumors, etc. For these women, all of these relationships are more important than the profitability that they obtain from the sales.

It is possible that, with the demographic pressure on natural resources, the community reciprocity could work as a complementary mechanism. Reciprocity allows people to overcome situations of food emergencies that could cross certain segments of the population, even other communities (Johnson and Earle 2000: 133-149). Nevertheless, the ethical commitment to share was a priority, before that the moral obligation to return the donated, as Marcel Mauss (1922: 163-176) would say. “Today for you, and tomorrow for me”, would perhaps be the motivation that was behind the first forms of reciprocity. The nature of these forms would be very different from the forms that are the basis of the exchange of goods of prestige.

The anthropological evidence is helpful here. With the emergence of the goods of prestige, the changes were important. Malinowski warns us about these transformations in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), as tho other North American anthropologists in their works on the potlatch. But it’s Mauss in his Essay on the Gift (1922), who could extract from anthropological research the elements for a major social reform in the 20th century, which methodologically turns out to be interesting.

With different modalities, the political regulation of the exchange of goods of prestige in intertribal ceremonies represented a clear indicator of how the political economy was gaining space. Still the coercive lethal pressure on human collectivities had to cope with certain cautions: the chiefs had to demonstrate generosity before their communities. Nevertheless, the moral obligation became more important, and the exchange turned into the primal aspect. Later, the economy based on killing or threats to kill gained more space incorporating the goods of subsistence to a trade regulated by states (like it was the case of cereals and spices), and where the goods of prestige represented an object of accumulation and ostentation for privileged minorities. The tribute (empires, which will expand by means of war and plunder, are a good example of a political economy in full use of its coercive powers: taxes are going to be the violent instruments of political economy on the human materiality.

This debate is important today. Since its origins, humanity has demonstrated that it can overcome a perspective of coercive economy in emergency situations, as the current food African crisis teaches us. Not only can humanity overcome this perspective, but most importantly it has thought and put into practice alternatives to modern political economy. The exchange of goods, under the mercantile criteria or reciprocity - gift, is not the only alternative. We can share food and other products that exceed our needs. Yes, it may be a moral obligation, and not because we believe that the Africans should be forced to give us anything in exchange. If we will think it through well, we might come to the conclusion that to share the goods not only would help us to understand the economy as a search for common good, but possibly we all, as a commonwealth, would live much better, in peace and harmony. So which of these different experiences, to share or to exchange, or perhaps some hybrid would allow us to develop better our human intention to seek universal communion and common good?

The moral valuation of human materiality
The question of value relates to anthropological and philosophical problems. In modern times, value refers to objects. Value would symbolize the power of money to measure everthing. Nevertheless, like Mauss would say, human beings do not exchange only objects, but inextricably there is a mix: the relation of exchange between the objects would be at first a “total prestation” or “total social fact” (fait social total).

A parallel issue is that the value of the individual has turned into a fundamental worry into modern societies; this results in separating the being and the moral value, which is and what must be according to the economic system. The value would designate something different than the being. It is difficult to deduce what must be or what is: it might not travel from the facts to the values. On the contrary, a question of values would end up as a question of objective facts. Precisely, in the definition of the being (person/individual) the dimension of value has been excluded, and in consequence the being diminishes into a mere object. Therefore, the existence of intrinsic values diminishes the existence of the person.. If the values would be instrumental, they would be defined by the practical properties of the object: the human being is valued as worker who produces useful things for the market.

But, does some relation exist between the moral value and the economic value? For example, Polanyi was interested in understanding the contrast between the fixed equivalences in the exchange of objects of the archaic communities and the fluctuating price of the goods at present. This author attributed these fixed relations of change in Dahomey to the regulation established by the king, but surely the phenomenon was widely extended in other places. Byzantium would represent another spectacular case: in spite of the complicated vicissitudes of the empire, the buying power of gold remained practically stable from the 5th century up to the 11th century. In this case, the competent Byzantine bureaucracy does not explain this phenomenon by itself.

In our opinion, the explanation relates to the following appraisal of the communities: the rate of exchange between objects would not correspond exclusively with the value of use and the human work incorporated into the objects. On the contrary, it should be considered a more fundamental value, which links intrinsically the exchange with the community or social cohesion, the peace and the solidarity in the human community. Indeed, historically the utilitarian point of view has been predominant and excessive. Human beings worry about the purpose of production: why we produce objects. The knives serve to cut, but they also can be used for killing... It is not possible to deny this concern for the purpose of the economy. If we focus only on the value of use, we traverse the risk of devaluing the relations between human beings. In production, human relations would diminish to a relations between objects.

In The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century (1971), Thompson reports on the social conflicts in England during industrialization. During that historical period, the speculation on the price of the cereals began to put in danger the life of communities. When the political economy experienced enough difficulties people did not like that the logic of the market was prevailing over the interests of their community. In this respect, we think that the consolidation of capitalism represents evidence of an anthropological setback, in spite of all the contradictions. The current situation as a moral equivalence of a holocaust is reflected clearly in a significant portion of the planet. In The Great Transformation (1944), Polanyi wondered whether capitalism would represent an “evolutionary break” in human history. It would be a mistake to contemplate ancient mercantile and medieval life as a precursor phenomenon of the market in the current ways of production. But it is fair to say that the story of capital did not begin in the 16th century, but in the 18th, when the English state had a fundamental role in the process of economic system development.

The reproduction of human life
The reproduction of human life is a basic problem. We need to debate and to develop it in order to measure it. The original communities had a very different approach to the conditions of reproduction of life. Marshall Sahlins, in Tribal Economy (1976), explains how these communities were bringing toghether production and reproduction of life, as well as production and consumption. Originally, home economics linked both spheres : the production was subordinated to the peaceful reproduction of human groups. The interruption of patriarchy and male gender dominance supposed an incisive separation, a substantial and violent change in the underlying logic of the economic life, which lasts up to today.

In his Politics, Aristotle elaborated an initial theoretical model for this separation, with his famous categories: oikonomia and chrematistics. In this classic text, reproduction continues being a notion linked with the domestic space. Later, classic Western economic science linked reproduction with production (Smith 1776, Ricardo 1817). Thus when home economies reduce their functions they will start to consume and offer a workforce. Since then, the producers must be rational. They would constitute the pieces of a cold mechanism, consisting of tools and numbers. For their part, the consumers must obey the sentimental impulses. The consumption must be irrational: the more compulsive and impulsive the better. Advertising campaigns and sophisticated marketing technigues try to stimulate these reactions in the potential buyers.

But capitalism not only separates both spheres. In addition, the voracity and the violence of the process of accumulation puts in danger the reproduction of the life of millions of human beings. How is this to be addressed? Maybe, we might change our perspective and our ways of living. The reproduction of the life is not guaranteed by “productive work”. To guarantee the reproduction of life demands that people overcome the violent logic of the economy as it exists and to reject the belief that accumulation for its own sake and without end is the fundamental aim of the reproductive process.

Secondly, we must change individual and community priorities: the production of objects must be to serve reproduction and sustainability of life. Indeed, the industrial and financial powers are less important for our daily lives,even though we tend to think the opposites. We can live without big banks and big industrial consortia, though the states insist on rescuing them with massive financial aid. We must look for a rerganization of the economy based on another set of criteria based in a human tradition of cooperation, nonviolence and nonkilling. A decentralized economy with a level of accumulation that was appropriate to anticipate humanitarian emergencies can be developed. An economy based on reciprocity where the majority of people feel there is ethical behavior and fairness despite centuries of privilege for the few who hold access to the power of production. Specifically, the goal sis to develop a human economy where every economic act is taken and informed by a logic and spirit of common good and a peaceful and charitable life. A nonkilling economy.

The economy must not mean only suffering, competition, hunger, lethality and environmental depredation. Up to now, the conception of the economic life has been like that because most of humanity entrusted the organization of the materiality to the privileged minorities and to the states. Possibly, the demographic pressure on the resources advanced more rapidly than the possible community answers based in criteria of reciprocity and of human community and common good. But the human species has demonstrated that it can live otherwise, at least there have been examples that have demonstrated its potential and alternative ways of organizing the economy.

Reciprocity, Peace and Human Communion
During most of human history, exchange have not been governed by economic rationalism and the search for individual interests. On the contrary, exchange has been realized under the form of gifts “theoretically voluntary but, indeed, done and returned obligatorily” (Mauss 1922: 156-157). As a consequence of the victory of rationalism and mercantilism, of the hegemony of notions of benefit or individual interest, we face enormous difficulties when we want to analyze a phenomenon as complex as reciprocal exchanges. Daughters of positivism, slaves of their epoch, social sciences have divided the social life in dimensions, which have been named as “economy”, “politics”, “society”, etc. As a consequence, to think about the accomplishment of reciprocal exchanges implies an enormous effort to overcome the narrow limits of notions as “exchange” or “economy”. We need to envision new modes of analysis and new methods for research.

According to Mauss, the purpose behind the reciprocal exchanges is the obligation to return the received. The aim is to produce a feeling of friendship and of peace between the participants. The obligation is not based exclusively on the duty to return: indeed, nobody can reject the offered gift. The obligation to receive is based on another important argument on the original societies: the threat of war. For Mauss, “to refuse to give, like to forget to invite or to refuse to agree, is equivalent to declare war, since it is to deny the alliance and the communion” (Mauss 1922:170).

Reciprocity represents the solution to the war of all against all that so much concerned Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan (1651). Reciprocity supposes an alliance, reinforces the beginning of solidarity, represents a resource to assure peace. Reciprocal exchange, as symbol of peace, represent “the victory of the human rationality over the madness of war” (Sahlins 1972: 194). Mauss thinks similarly to Sahlins: “peoples manage to replace war, the isolation and the stagnation, for the alliance, the gift and trade, objecting the reason to the feelings and the desire of peace to the sharp reactions of this type” (Mauss 1922: 262). According to Sahlins, the suppression of war does not suppose the submission of a part in the original societies, but a mutual surrender. This has an enormous ethical importance: the reciprocal exchanges are opposed to the worship of power, lethal threat, force and war. In consequence, all original transactions are agreements of peace: the exchanges must incorporate in their material intention the relevance of effort toward common good and human communion.

The reciprocal exchanges constitute the “simpler, more direct form, of producing dependence and solidarity preserving the status of persons” (Godelier 1996:150). Things are exchanged for “the will of the individuals and/or the groups to produce (or to reproduce) between them social relations that combine the solidarity and dependence” (Godelier 1996:150). Sahlins raised an idea, which is suitable to remember: “the union put end to the state of nature but not to the nature of the man” (Sahlins 1972: 198). We understand that this idea allows the beginning of a deep reflection, not limited to the original societies. Such phrase has implications in our societies, on the ways of constructing and comprehending knowledge across the social sciences.

Nevertheless, the question of reciprocity demands a deeper analysis, since the hypotheses can be different. For example, the recognition of the existence of negative aspects in the logic of the reciprocal exchanges, as the competition for realizing the best gift between the parts, has been linked by the supposition according to which the war of all against all molds the original societies. Over time the myth of the good savage has been passed on as an explanatory opposite model, where the most negative human powers are noticed. But, if reciprocal exchanges contain implicitly the principle of superiority, of antagonistic competition, then it is also true that solidarity is an inherent element in these exchanges. The threat of permanent war has been the most used supposition to analyze the emergence of reciprocal exchanges. Sahlin’s perspective is clear: reciprocal exchanges represent the victory of human rationality over the madness of war. Nevertheless, this rationalist explanation and approach turns out to be very defensive: it is not a question of avoiding only war, but to constructing the peace.

Departing from the most negative powers of the being, seeking to overcome the conflicts, the conventional analyses on reciprocal exchanges subordinates the affective dimension to the benefit and dominance of the rational sphere. Perhaps too much attention to rationality has been used as way of overcoming the state of widespread lethality. It is possible that the crisis of our modern world relates to this phenomenon. Nonkilling is not only a merely rational question, which is solved in the political, juridical or institutional spheres. Nonkilling can be a positive inspiration that pushes humanity to look to new logics and to avod the total dominance of economic ‘rationality’ as the preeminent factor and explanation for all things. First, this human search implies a philosophical challenge, the most beautiful research: to discover and renew the best of humanity and the description of a new human nature.

Through personal development which seeks new levels of sociability and interconnectedness with others which until now may have been felt only as an acquaintance can become the impetus for major shifts in how the economic principles are developed and structures shaped. Maybe, nonkilling is a dimension where human beings can recover integrity, overcome the separation between reason and feelings. In all this, the role of culture is fundamental. Culture like human activity works on the existential and mental dimension of life. Culture needs to address a redefinition of our values and behaviors. Fed on the creative life inspired cultures of nonkilling the recrafting and improvement of the species can became an art and spectacular human accomplishment.

Is a Nonkilling Economy Possible?
In Essay on the Gift (1922), Marcel Mauss raises that reciprocal exchanges observe a course of trasformations from their more primitive manifestation, in which goods are “offered and returned”, up to their appearance in the shape of vestiges in socially more complex institutions (from the Germanic right up to the modern economies of “cold and calculating mentality”). Said differently: reciprocal exchanges would be present in every society.

This approach allows us to suppose that the moral condition is attributable to any economic organization, but this condition would not be an exterior determinant: the economy lodges itself directly in our human powers. In this respect, the economy includes an area of subjective relations. This area of subjectivity has been historically undermined by the exclusive domain of the rational. Precisely, the predominant formalism in economic science has turned to economic activity as an essentially mechanical and abstract fact.

In reality, ,the original society is a world more integrated to practical and ideological dimensions. The theory of reciprocal exchanges reveals continuity. It is not surprising that exchanges are characterized by the survival of the sacred thing in the world of objects. The sacred thing and the subjective are common foundations. The common condition of all these forms of reciprocal exchange consists of the fact that the subjective substance has not been lost. The things do not become exhausted in themselves. Indeed, the things are the subject itself, they contain and represent humanity.

In the historical tour between the moral economy of original societies and the economy of rational calculation of modern societies, the notion of community has entered a crisis. This transformation relates to the historical overcoming of the limits of kinship. Progressively, society becomes more complex. In consequence, the intersubjective relations have a smaller and then minor importance on shaping and explaining economic and social processes. Even, these limits would have a spatial translation: the most direct and less interested relations of reciprocity will take place in the immediate vicinity. Then, a basic principle emerges: the social or cultural order is instituted so much from the structures (the gifts to friends), like from the events (the friends to gifts). In consequence, the limits of the kinship and the community are historical, and they can be modified.

The kinship imposes relative and not definitive limits to this original cooperation. Maybe, the explanation resides in the fact that kinship constitutes a moral reference, probably the most relevant. So, what is morality but a recognition of the forbears? In this respect, Mauss’s offer makes sense: to restore the morality, since foundation of the subjectivity tends to be a cultural construction, even the kinship can be re-formulated.

In consequence, the capacity of humanity to develop new forms of economic organization is not determined by exogenous laws that restrict her areas of choice. The important thing would be to understand that this current conception of the economic science is a cultural product. Therefore, the challenge would be to think about forms of economic organization, of cooperative character, which were not restricted to the links of blood, kinship, marriage, chattel and property as well as geographical proximity, though they could be founded on these more basic structures. The organization of the economy would have to be thought of in a different form: not from the perspective of aggressive competition, not from the need to destroy others as way of surviving and improving oneself. On the contrary, the economic organization would have to raise on cooperative systems, capable of being enclosing and not exclusive, where the improvement of the others and each one is part of a mutual enrichment. Mutual aid, mutual benefits, mutual gains.

Thinking about the cooperative relations of original communities thousands of years ago, we might transform the hypotheses. We could give them the return, but not only. We can wonder: was the idea of cooperation of our ancestors only the instinctive response to the pressures of survival or, without denying this possibility, was it answering sentimental motivations as the need of nearness, love, comfort, peace, affection or safety? We can wonder what material needs harness humanity nowadays: what do we need more: bread or love? This is not a banal question. Maybe, the bread could be better, tastier and for all if we think it from the feelings, developing a sentimental reason for its production.

Perhaps. we can raise a more radical hypothesis: could the improvement of material conditions be possible if we were developing the most charitable sentimental powers of the species. Potentially, this hypothesis is an opportunity to start thinking about a reinvention of the economic life of humanity and about the search of a nonkilling society. This possibility depends on all of us, on the aptitude to reason in such a way that we are not accustomed, departing more consciously from the human essence, which joins us and can join us, of the good of each one and the common good.

In addition, it is important to think about the trend of modern economy toward the centralization and concentration of the wealth. In certain critical approaches, as in Marxism, an alternative to the current economic system would be the natural result of this process of concentration and of centralization. But it would be necessary to change the hands that hold the property of large companies. The central question is not really formal property, but the underlying trends toward the concentration and the centralization of capital, which then generates an organization of the economy that grants the benefit and success to those individuals with more voracious and monopolizing behaviors. Would it not be possible to construct an economy where there was prosperity for the most just persons, would we be more inclined to cooperate?

Maybe, this possibility might happen if we organize the economy stating that the central aim is not to accumulate, but to promote the well-being of all humans. Accumulation is necessary, but it is not an aim in itself. We need to accumulate goods to avoid problems of shortage of supplies or to invest in technology, but the paces of accumulation must be controlled by society. If this premise is not fulfilled, lethality will become a permanent threat, since the logic of accumulation is insatiable.

A great challenge for humanity is the technological revolution of the last several decades. The centers of research and knowledge represent institutions removed from human communities. It turns out to be difficult to imagine how human societies can control this process of technological change. Often, this process appears to us as an unavoidable advance, impossible to question. If someone dares to do it, immediately he will be accused of being an enemy of progress. Nevertheless, it is good not to forget that many of the technological advances that we enjoy have their origins in the military industry. In many cases, their development has been verified in wars and military tests, in spite of having had very harmful, even mortal effects, in the affected populations. Examples of it are the nuclear technology, computers, electronics, health technologies, etc.

On the other hand, the technological revolution is generating a wild expropriation of the traditional knowledge of many indigenous communities. For centuries, these communities have used this knowledge in a sustainable charitable form. The knowledge on the properties of herbs and medicinal plants, or certain natural resources of the soil and subsoil are a good example. The affected communities have suffered a process of expropriation of the traditional know-how. Now, the economic utilization of this knowledge goes to the benefit of large companies that have patented them, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. In these circumstances, the possibility that local communities could recover the control on the production of knowledge appears as a utopian aim. Very probably, a change in this dynamic needs to be the result of a cultural change. Perhaps one consequence of the monopolization of knowledge and information will be the necessitry of asking more deeply how our research and discovery and exploitaition of knowledge indigenous and cumulative are put to the service of the common good.

Conclusions
The current economic system is a very powerful and finely tuned machine oiled by consumption, accumulation and acquisition. Its cultural influence and its social rooting are enormous. But in spite of the lethality it generates, this power and this capacity of self-reproduction lies in the conscience of every individual.

It is true that privileged minorities have constructed aggressive instruments to force human beings to take part actively in this economic mechanism, but this participation has turned into complicity since a great part of humanity has assimilated these values of competition and hierarchy in their daily existence. Therefore, a parallelism exists between questioning the current economic system and changing our own lives.

Humanity has not always chosen the path with most destructive implications. For example, if we observe original communities, we will perceive that these human groupings were governing their exchanges with criteria of reciprocity, and not only to avoid war and killings. Arguably, these earlier societies were nonkilling societies. We can find this type of exchanges in the context of the relations of kinship and friendship. In both cases, it is not a question of how to elaborate on an ethnographic record of the economic phenomena, but to understand them with our human instincts and experiences and our sense of charity, mutual caring, kindness,and from our human moral and social nature. The construction of social relations needs to be inspired by the search for a common good. Of course the meaning of common good can change between people and must be discussed in common seeking consensus approaches. It seems that by nature every human being seeks to improve and aspires to a higher good for herself and others. Indeed, any economic activity develops from this intention.

Therefore, to construct a nonkilling economy depends first on each one of us. Certainly, there are very powerful institutional obstacles, but we must not forget that the formation of these institutions is the result of human action and inaction. We are complicit in where we are and will be responsible for where we are heading toward unless we determine to act and to change and propose new ways and new systems. To not act, to not witness is to remain complicit. If we ignore the anthropological evidence and the hope of infinite human creativity to improve, we will have permitted more of the same.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Ethics/Nonkilling/Economics


text:
Ethics/Nonkilling/Discussions

Please expand this page. For more information, please see nonkilling (Wikipedia) and Wikiversity's School of nonkilling studies.

Killjoy, killjoy revulsion and nonkilling: July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike controversy
On April 5, 2010, Wikileaks released a video "Collateral Murder" (see short version: Collateral Murder - Wikileaks - Iraq (Warning: Graphic violence; 17 mins) about the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike controversy which is shot from an Apache helicopter gunsight and shows some men in a Baghdad street. The pilots mistakenly interpret journalists' cameras for guns or a rocket-propelled grenade. The helicopters gain permission to open fire, resulting in the death of several people, including the two Reuters news staffers. The helicopter operators can be heard saying "Hahaha. I hit 'em" and wishing for the man to reach for a gun,so he has the pretext for opening fire: "All you gotta do is pick up a weapon." Minutes later, an unmarked van with several apparently unarmed men and two children inside it pulled up and the men tried to help a survivor. After this the van (and the men) were fired upon, leaving two children wounded and all the men dead. See Wikileaks' Baghadad airstrike video for more information.

One of the issues that arises for me, quite aside from "is it right?" "is it murder?" etc. is why do I get such a revolting feeling towards the apparent killjoy experienced by those involved in pulling the trigger? I also saw this revulsion in my 9-year son last night when he withdrew in protest as the rest of the family enjoyed feeding a grub to a pet frog.

What is killjoy and what is revulsion towards killjoy? And how are these feelings related to nonkilling? And what about the work in obtaining, decoding and releasing it by Wikileaks? How might it be or become a contribution towards nonkilling? You might first just want to share your reactions. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 23:49, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

My reaction to that video, when I saw it years ago, was grief. It is easy to judge and blame those pilots. But my stand is that each of us is responsible for what we, as humans, do. We will not transform this as long as we stand outside, pointing fingers and blaming, that maintains the separation and disempowerment that afflict us. The pilots were placed in a situation where the horrific and unthinkable became routine. They were trained to kill. Were they trained to care? Who is responsible for the training they receive? Hey, let's blame them. Yeah, get rid of the politicians, then everything will be fine. And so the cycle is maintained, we keep thinking the problem is them, certainly not us, i.e., the good people. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 17:02, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

title: Ethics/Nonkilling/Discussions


text: User talk:Myemarina

title: User talk:Myemarina


text: File:Maple 13 document mode.pdf

title: File:Maple 13 document mode.pdf


text:
User:Altera vista/DCG/Design criteria

'Fundamental Questions to be asked from ANY Design Project'

 Does it strengthen:

Human Attributes

 * Common Sense
 * Ethics
 * Intuition
 * Imagination
 * Memory
 * Reason

Community
 Democracy consists in favoring the whole rather than the part(s)  The core principle of democracy is the perception that the traits and needs and interests that all men share have a superior claim to those put forth by any individual, organization, institution or group.
 *  Democratic Principle

''' Are resources ethically spent, or should they be spent on more urgent needs? '''
 *  Ethics

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Can this Name of Project stand up under the scrutiny of Eisenhower's challenge?

Practical Criteria

 * Maximize direct use of natural principles
 * Is it necessary
 * can it be achieved by or through modifying existing means
 * Does it maximize the use of naturally occurring forces or principles
 * does it utilize existing components, parts, services, principles
 * can it be built/used/applied by all humans so inclined and willing to familiarize themselves with the principles
 * Is it permanent or can it adapt to changing needs/situations
 * Is it reusable/ reconfigurable in its components

title: User:Altera vista/DCG/Design criteria


text:
Talk:Evan Ratliff

This learning resource is about the development of a Wikipedia Article Evan Ratliff and about the Search for Evan Ratliff From August 15 to September 15, 2009. It's a study in the Sociology of the Internet as well as a live study of Wiki culture and other online behavior. Is that at least as clear as mud? CQ 21:11, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Learning from the Eclectic Evan
I hadn't heard of Mr. Ratliff until recently, but when I saw what he was up to, I went to work with tent, a tool being developed by the "espians" for OpenKollab and other groups. I was able to find and link a chain of references which I used to seed the Wikipedia article in a matter of minutes. Of course it was deleted within minutes because it had no copy. Since then, I have learned a lot about the eclectic Evan Ratliff and opened dialogues with all sorts of people who are following the experiment. Some are trying to find Evan (for the $5K reward) and others are helping him hide. The whole process is interesting, because it deals with trust metrics and Identity. I'm hoping others here at v: will join me in this study and its associated activities. It's loads of fun! CQ 21:43, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Linkspam
The series of edits may be linkspam by and for NewsCloud. --CQ 02:17, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Evan found in New Orleans
So Evan has been found. Now the article has to stand on merits other than the stunt, with the "experiment" and "clues" in past tense. It'll be interesting to see how long before the references are purged and refined to include only legitimate (encyclopedic) ones. CQ 01:33, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

title: Talk:Evan Ratliff


text: User talk:Sandychao

title: User talk:Sandychao


text:
Medical ethics/History

Fall 2009 Course Content
History of Medical Ethics Outline Fall 2009

History of Medical Ethics Cases Fall 2009

History of Medical Ethics lecture recording

Other Resources
Off Label Drug Marketing Should drug companies be allowed to market drugs for uses not (yet) approved by the FDA?

CIA Doctors' Use of Torture Article about CIA doctors who are charged with violating research ethics principles by helping with prisoner torture.

title: Medical ethics/History


text:
Composing educational resources/Participants

If you are joining us for the September-December 2009 course, please add your name with a link to your blog below:

 * 1) Leigh Blackall - http://leighblackall.blogspot.com
 * 2) Your name - your blog address


text:
User:Seanathome~enwikiversity

Well, he's an awesome person. Why not go to his website?

SeanPalladino.com

title: User:Seanathome~enwikiversity


text:
Literary Studies

Introduction
Through the study of selected examples of poetry, fiction, and drama, this course will introduce students to the fundamentals of the university-level literary study, and furnish them with the skills to think and write critically about literature. Students will be taught the basic concepts of genre and form in literature, and methods of literary analysis, to enable them to continue in more specialized English courses at the second year or beyond. This section of Introduction to Literary Studies will emphasize an exploration of wit and satire, beginning with English literature of the Middle Ages and ending sometime near the end of the eighteenth century.

Evaluation

 * 10% Participation Participation is counted through contributions to this course wiki. All contributions should be signed.
 * 20% Reading Questions Only the top five reading question packages submitted will be counted.
 * 40% Research Paper 1500-2000 word research paper on a pre-selected topic or, with instructor permission, a topic of a student's own choosing.
 * 30% Final Examination Open-book examination comprised of 5 passage recognition questions and 2 essay questions.

Course
{|width=100%
 * valign=top width=50%|

Syllabus and Learning Materials

 * 1) Introduction to Literary Study
 * 2) History of Literature
 * 3) Genre
 * 4) Literary Criticism
 * 5) Theories of Humour
 * 6) from The Canterbury Tales
 * 7) Introductory Notes
 * 8) The General Prologue
 * 9) The Miller's Tale
 * 10) The Country Wife
 * 11) Introductory Notes
 * 12) Prologue
 * 13) Act I
 * 14) Act II
 * 15) Act III
 * 16) Act IV
 * 17) Act V
 * 18) Epilogue
 * 19) from Gulliver's Travels
 * 20) Introductory Notes
 * 21) A Voyage to Lilliput
 * 22) A Voyage to Brobdingnag
 * 23) A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
 * 24) The Rape of the Lock
 * 25) Introductory Notes
 * 26) Canto I
 * 27) Canto II
 * 28) Canto III
 * 29) Canto IV
 * 30) Canto V
 * 31) Northanger Abbey
 * 32) Introductory Notes
 * 33) Chapter 1
 * 34) Chapter 2
 * 35) Chapter 3
 * 36) Chapter 4
 * 37) Chapter 5
 * 38) Chapter 6
 * 39) Chapter 7
 * 40) Chapter 8
 * 41) Chapter 9
 * 42) Chapter 10
 * 43) Chapter 11
 * 44) Chapter 12
 * 45) Chapter 13
 * 46) Chapter 14
 * 47) Chapter 15
 * 48) Chapter 16
 * 49) Chapter 17
 * 50) Chapter 18
 * 51) Chapter 19
 * 52) Chapter 20
 * 53) Chapter 21
 * 54) Chapter 22
 * 55) Chapter 23
 * 56) Chapter 24
 * 57) Chapter 25
 * 58) Chapter 26
 * 59) Chapter 27
 * 60) Chapter 28
 * 61) Chapter 29
 * 62) Chapter 30
 * 63) Chapter 31
 * 64) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 * 65) Introductory Notes
 * 66) Down the Rabbit Hole
 * 67) The Pool of Tears
 * 68) A Caucus-Race and A Long Tale
 * 69) The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
 * 70) Advice from a Caterpillar
 * 71) Pig and Pepper
 * 72) A Mad Tea-Party
 * 73) The Queen's Croquet-Ground
 * 74) The Mock Turtle's Story
 * 75) The Lobster-Quadrille
 * 76) Who Stole the Tarts?
 * 77) Alice's Evidence

 * valign=top width=50%|

Assignments

 * Reading Questions 1 for The Canterbury Tales
 * Reading Questions 2 for The Country Wife
 * Reading Questions 3 for Gulliver's Travels
 * Reading Questions 4 for The Rape of the Lock
 * Reading Questions 5 for Northanger Abbey
 * Reading Questions 6 for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 * Research Paper

Examination

 * Final Examination

 * }

Primary Texts
Any standard, unabridged edition of the following works will be acceptable.
 * The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
 * The Country Wife by William Wycherley
 * Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
 * The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope
 * Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
 * Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

title: Literary Studies


text:
Business finance/Provision

Provision is the amount of an expense which must be recognized however the exact amount is uncertain. The contra account for such above in GL is allowance.

title: Business finance/Provision