Ethics and military engineering operations

摘要

Imagine the following three-variable Venn diagram: One circle represents the field of applied and professional ethics, a second circle represents military operations, and the third circle represents the practice of engineering, particularly construction projects. We can, without much difficulty, picture what the overlapping areas between any two circles refer to: engineering ethics, military ethics and military engineering. What I would like to address in this paper is the area common to all three circles: is there room for a unique field of ethics called “military engineering ethics”? I contend that there is, and in this presentation I propose to sketch out why and what that might look like.