[bee_rider]

Contributors to open source projects aren’t asking the question “should the thing be done,” they are asking the question “should I do the thing.” I think lots of people fall into the general bucket of “sure, the military is necessary for a country, but I don’t personally want to work on it.”

It is a weird sort of diffused understanding of responsibility (we all pay taxes and our representatives vote on whether or not we’ll do war, after all), but I think it is not that uncommon. Lots of people don’t seem to want to be unusually personally responsible for military applications, compared to their peers, I guess?

[saulrh]

If you want this in formal terms: "pulling the trigger" and "living with yourself after pulling the trigger" are both skills that some people have and other people don't, those skills exist on a continuum of both directness and effectiveness, and comparative advantage applies all the way down at the level of individuals and their personal skillsets. Even if you support your polity's military aims your polity's military aims may be better accomplished if you aggressively refuse to work on military projects, thereby allowing yourself to contribute more effectively in other areas and freeing others up where they can contribute to military projects more effectively than you could. That's one of the things that tax dollars amortize over, if you're looking at it from high enough up.

[bee_rider]

That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Somebody could think about maximizing the effectiveness of society at doing war, while admitting that their competitive advantage doesn’t lay in directly doing violence. I don’t think I’ve seen that before, and I don’t think it is how most of the people who come to the conclusion that they’d rather not contribute directly to the military come to that conclusion. But it is an interesting line of thought.

I think most people just feel differently about things they do directly, than they do about things they indirectly contribute to through taxes or just existing in the economy, and don’t put a ton of thought into it.