Today, many in the computer science and engineering sectors describe themselves as “mission-driven,” that is, compelled not merely by a desire to accumulate wealth but also by a commitment to build capabilities that are meant to advance some greater purpose. Whether through enhancing our ability to connect and communicate, speeding up a manufacturing process, or creating innovative medical devices and health-promoting applications, at least some portion of the technology workforce sees their work as driving toward a qualitatively better world for humanity.¹

Naturally, the most common holistic vision for such a world includes an absence of violent conflict, which might lead one to categorize any technological development in the military space as antithetical to that mission. Building advanced targeting systems surely cannot be classed in the same moral domain as developing rideshare apps, connecting people to better health care options, and improving office efficiency – can it? 

We argue that such military work absolutely does align with Silicon Valley’s mission-focused philosophy when you view technology in the context of its fundamental role in enabling humanity to achieve its core goal of a well-lived, good life.

Aristotle tells us that the driving purpose of human beings is to achieve our eudaimonia – that is, to flourish and to live well.² One of the great philosophical debates, persisting to this day, is actually determining what constitutes this well-lived life. Resolving that question is beyond the scope of this essay, so for the purposes of this discussion we will take as a given Aristotle’s argument that every action of a rational human is meant to move them closer to some eudaimonic vision. Or, more succinctly, the basic, driving objective of existence is to live a good life.³ We can conclude that any well-meaning, rational technologist is also driven by a desire to advance this objective. 

And indeed, the story of technological adaptation seems to bear this out: throughout history, we see humanity create tools, institutions, and ideas that better enable individuals to pursue their disparate ends (whether that be for the betterment of just themselves, their communities, or even perhaps for humanity writ large). Even the most cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) could easily be viewed as merely the next step in a pursuit that started millennia ago with the invention of the simplest machines.

Since those earliest days, technological innovation has made a twofold contribution to human flourishing: it enables efficiencies that give people the time to pursue a broader panoply of individual desires that might define the “good life,” and also contributes to the creation and maintenance of a secure and stable society in which human beings can live that life. It is the pursuit of these goals that should unite technological innovation across the commercial, civil, and military contexts.

The contention that military and non-military pursuits represent diametrically opposite moral endeavors drives much of the current debate over the role of the tech sector in engaging with the defense industrial base.⁴ Such a view is far too simplistic, however. It assumes that war cannot directly or indirectly enable the “good life,” and therefore any pursuit even tangentially related to the conduct of war must be summarily rejected.

While war is tragic, we should also acknowledge that there is an entire line of well-accepted moral thought defining the concept of a “Just War” – the idea that there can be a moral justification for war and that the conduct of war can be carried out in a moral way.⁵ Broadly speaking, the “Just War” theory suggests that war can be justified as the defense of the rights of the citizens of a self-determined sovereign nation to live their best lives as they choose.

If we accept this logic, then we can view both military and non-military pursuits as part of the same fundamental human project: creating the time and space to live a good, flourishing life. If we consider technological development through this single, unifying lens, we hope that our best and brightest technical minds will feel more comfortable pursuing this type of endeavor while shifting the vital moral debates toward a more nuanced discussion around how to properly engage in warfare.

Time

Alone in the wilderness with little capacity to do more than hunt or forage and seek shelter from the elements, humanity’s earliest pursuit of eudaimonic happiness was at best marked by very simple pleasures and the relief of not being torn apart by wolves or warring clans. Most of us would likely agree that a flourishing, happy life should entail more than this minimal hand-to-mouth existence. Fortunately, over time, primitive humans learned to develop tools to gain some level of mastery over nature and themselves, which in turn allowed them to consider more deeply what defines a truly flourishing life. 

Starting with basic machines like the wheel and the lever, technological development has been a driving force in giving human beings an essential ingredient to achieving their eudaimonia: time. From their earliest days, technology-driven efficiencies have decreased the amount of time that humans need to devote to their most basic needs, thereby allowing us to broaden our conception of the pursuits that might define a flourishing life. One of the most persistent historical trends in human history has been technology’s role in making tedious, repetitive, and arduous tasks either entirely unnecessary or requiring less effort. 

In the home, the invention of modern appliances has freed many from spending most of their time farming, doing household chores, and cooking. In the industrial space, technological changes have contributed to making work safer, more comfortable, and more efficient. In the modern office, the adoption of computer technologies allows employees to devote more of their time to higher skill tasks that generate more value and may even be more enjoyable (or at least, less tedious) to perform. This reshuffling of duties enhances an individual’s ability to flourish in the workplace.

Thus, technology has allowed humans to move further and further from those basic tasks that are required to sustain life, allowing them to devote more of our time to pursuing higher-order goals. Now, individuals can pursue objectives beyond simply eking out a living, such as leisure, sport, commerce and invention, which allows us to broaden what it means to truly flourish.

Space

Having sufficient time to pursue eudaimonic happiness is only a part of the infrastructure necessary to live a good life. A person also needs a level of personal autonomy – that is, a “space” in which they can freely make life choices that move them toward their eudaimonia. This space is created by societal structures that provide stability and security.

Humans have long recognized that by banding together and cooperating with each other they can make their lives a little easier, first by sharing burdens and ultimately by developing specialized skills and roles that support different needs of the community. Over time, humans developed societal structures that facilitated this cooperation and specialization. Money, for example, became a means of exchange for goods and labor that is far more efficient than rolling around wheels of cheese or other goods to trade. With each new societal innovation, more and more members of those communities found themselves having to devote less effort to not dying, thereby allowing them to cultivate other aspects of their lives. 

These societal structures are built by humans who are driven to live flourishing lives, so it therefore must logically follow that these structures must be intended to advance that objective. Whether they are the best means for doing so is, of course, up for debate. A healthy society includes mechanisms for altering or even discarding those structures when and if they fail to facilitate, or perhaps even actively hinder, our eudaimonia. Hence the importance of the Enlightenment commitment to self-determination: the idea that social structures must be built and maintained by people who share some common understanding of the vision of the good life that they wish to pursue.

If having this societal “space” is crucial to enabling the achievement of the whole point of our existence, then the critical importance of protecting that space – even through force, if necessary – should be readily apparent. No rational person would argue that killing other human beings is itself a defining aspect of a flourishing life: we could all envision a world where everyone is free to achieve their eudaimonia without anyone having to die. However, in our less-than-ideal world, threats to a society’s ability to govern those structures necessary to give individuals the space they need to live their best lives sometimes must be repelled with lethal force. Technological support for military work, therefore, does not necessarily run counter to the driving force behind the rest of what we do, but in fact directly aligns with it when its objective is to help create and preserve the social systems which we need to thrive.

When Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz famously defined war as “a continuation of politics by other means,” he in many ways diminished this ultimate act of violence to a mere instrument of grubby Machiavellian machinations, a game played by politicians with human lives.⁶ So, it is perhaps not surprising that those who view technology as the key to creating a better world might look askance at devoting our best minds to building a more effective military. While we certainly acknowledge that history is replete with examples of this sort of callous war-mongering, we also note that other wars have been undertaken to liberate people and preserve the fundamental freedoms essential for basic human flourishing. Investment in defense, therefore, can be about protecting of our ability to live contented, fulfilling, and happy lives. The development of technology for military work thus in turn can fit within the much larger context of aiding humanity’s universal goal of living “the good life.”

This is not to suggest that technologists should unquestioningly devote themselves to the military industrial machine. Innovations in modern warfare have always raised ethical challenges as humanity grapples with realizing the (perhaps oxymoronic) ambition of “civilized” warfare. The incorporation of AI into combat operations, for example, promises to create a litany of novel ethical questions that will task us for decades to come.

Those questions should be met head-on not just by political and military leaders but also by a generation of mission-driven, ethical technologists who take some level of responsibility for how their technology is used. But these technologists should not be bogged down with the question of whether work in the military space is per se immoral. Instead, they should start from the premise that military technology can serve an important moral purpose, and then try to determine how to achieve that purpose in a moral way.

A Unified Approach

This piece is our attempt to articulate the connection between technology and eudaimonia – and to encourage the founders, builders, and tech advocates of the world to explicitly make this case in their appeals to the next generation of engineers. The ambition to live well and create a world in which others can flourish can be an effective motivation for technologists seeking a worthwhile mission-driven career. The work that they do should be evaluated against that standard: am I helping myself and others live well?

Work in the military space should fall under that same framework. Too often, those technologists advocating for more engagement with defense lean on concepts of duty and patriotism, which, while not per se problematic motivations, are less likely to appeal to a younger generation. But where appeals to patriotism may fail, appeals to a desire to build a world in which we all can thrive may not.

This unified view of technological development for the creation of time and the protection of space for achieving eudaimonia is particularly relevant in the era of AI. On the one hand, AI could be viewed as just the next step forward in a process of technological development. On the other hand, it does have the capacity to fundamentally shift society in such a way as to substantially redefine what it means to live a flourishing life. If the purpose of technology is to help us reach the goal of the “good life” then what should we do when the technology itself might move the goalposts?

The potential effect on AI on human flourishing could be substantial – or even catastrophic. Some suggest that it will pose an existential risk to society itself.⁷ Some less apocalyptic predictions are that it will replace the artists and the creatives and leave only manual labor for us to do.⁸ Or perhaps AI will allow for such widespread monitoring and tracking that it will impede our freedom.⁹ Military applications of AI could increase the speed and lethality of operations while desensitizing us to the actual human costs by shifting responsibility to a machine decision-maker.¹⁰ 

If the mission of those building AI is to promote human flourishing, and they imbue AI with this same mission, then we hope these possibilities will become less likely. The AI alignment problem is the idea that as AI becomes more complex and powerful it may become increasingly difficult to ensure that the outcomes it drives align with the best interests of humanity, and, more practically, how to align a powerful AI to any goal. Thought experiments such as the paper clip maximizer (in which an AI solely tasked with manufacturing paperclips is effectively willing to consume the world in its relentless pursuit of this objective) offer illustrations of why a poorly formed utility function can lead to very repugnant outcomes.¹¹

If, however, AI itself constructed with the underlying parameter that the purpose of AI, like any technology, is to promote the individual human pursuit of eudaimonia, then a correction term is built in. There are of course some caveats to this: not every person wants the same things, and often one’s pursuit of a good life will conflict with someone else’s. Additionally, the question of how to practically implement such a correction term to address the alignment problem, remains. But by optimizing for a society’s ability to pursue individual ends we will at least land in the ballpark of optimality, and can leave the pursuit of individual eudaimonia to each individual.

Conclusion

For those deeply steeped in philosophy who came across this piece because they have a persistent search filter set up for the word “eudaimonia,” we acknowledge quite candidly that this argument is about a mile wide and an inch deep. We absolutely are vastly oversimplifying the concept of eudaimonia and its role in shaping our lives and the societies in which we live, and we are giving short shrift to the millennia of debate over these ideas and their place in our lives. To this charge, we can only plead guilty – this is not a rich discussion of philosophy. But it is not meant to be, nor is this argument aimed at the philosophy community. It is aimed at the computer scientists and engineers who every day must grapple with decisions that raise complex moral questions.

Perhaps in large part due to the utter impenetrability of much philosophical writing, we would wager that a substantial proportion of the world has never heard the term eudaimonia. Certainly, in our experience working in this field, we have found that a significant number of newly graduated computer science and engineering students have had – at best – a very rudimentary education in moral philosophy and even then have likely retained very little of it. This is not to say that they are incapable of making choices between right or wrong – they must do so all the time, and each will apply consciously or unconsciously some moral framework in making those decisions. But they are unlikely to have thought deeply about how these individual decisions all connect to a larger whole – that doing good is not an end in itself but rather a means to the end of a well-lived life.

It is to them that we address this article. We hope it encourages them to explore this concept further as they ask the fundamental questions: “Why am I building what I am building? How will it shape the world for me, my community, my country, and humanity as a whole? Will it allow us all to live better, happy lives?”

If we want to harness the talents of this next generation, then we need to do a better job of helping them answer these questions by articulating a more universally appealing framework linking commercial, civil, and military technological innovation to one mission: helping us all to flourish.

1. See e.g., Eva Kaplan-Leiserson, “Engineering a Difference,” National Society of Professional Engineers, May 2028.  ↩︎
2. The Ethics Center, “Ethics Explainer: Eudaimonia,” August 4, 2016.   ↩︎
3. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). ↩︎
4. See e.g., Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “‘The Business of War’: Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon,” New York Times, April 4, 2018. ↩︎
5. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977). ↩︎
6. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). ↩︎
7. Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2025). ↩︎
8. Elijah Clark, “The End Of Originality: Is AI Replacing Real Artists?” Forbes, December 23, 2023. ↩︎
9. Jay Stanley, “Machine Surveillance is Being Super-Charged by Large AI Models,” ACLU News & Commentary, March 21, 2025. ↩︎
10. Erica Harper, “Will AI fundamentally alter how wars are initiated, fought and concluded?” Humanitarian Law & Policy, September 26, 2024. ↩︎
11. Nick Bostrom, “Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence,” self-published, 2003. ↩︎