I make and sell soap. The soap contains an ingredient that anyone can use to make bombs. Some people buy my soap only for that purpose. I know because they literally tell me how they use my soap. I can remove that ingredient but I would loose a lot of sales.
The police finds my soap in the lab of someone who blew up a building. Some people died. Was it my fault, knowing how it was being used? Did I do anything illegal? Unethical? Immoral?
Interesting thought experiment, but no, I don't think it's llegal/unethical/immoral to sell that soap. But in practice this sort of business will change their formula to avoid bad press and regulation.
Having done some internet things (email stuff) that have been abused by others I always felt obligated to make the abuse as hard as possible once I found out about it.
I am not sure about the legal standpoint, but from a moral one I would have felt bad running the business knowing it's regularly abused to harm others and I am not doing anything against it.
> I can remove that ingredient but I would loose a lot of sales.
Or: I can remove that ingredient but it goes against my principle of not accepting constraints.
> Some people died. Was it my fault, knowing how it was being used? Did I do anything illegal? Unethical? Immoral?
Jail is for people that don't accept constraints outlined by democratic society.
This is a nonsense argument.
The manhattan project was very intentionally an attempt to create a WMD, it wasn’t a side-effect of something else. You don’t have a point here.