Earlier this week, Marketplace ran a story about Michael Osinski. You probably haven’t heard of Osinski, but he plays a role in the financial crisis of 2008. Osinksi wrote software that made it easier for banks to package loans into a trade-able security. These “mortgage-backed securities” played a major role in the collapse of the financial sector ten years ago.

It’s not fair to say that Osinski is responsible for the Great Recession. But it is fair to say he did not give sufficient consideration to how his software might be (mis)used. He told Marketplace’s Eliza Mills:

Most people realized that we wrote a good piece of software that we sold in the marketplace. How people use that software is … you know, you really can’t control that.

Osinski is right that he couldn’t control how people used the software he wrote. Whenever we release software to the world, it will get used how the user wants to use it — even if the license prohibits certain fields of endeavor. This could be innocuous misuse, the way graduate students design conference posters in PowerPoint or businesspeople use Excel for all conceivable tasks. But it could also be malicious misuse, the way Russian troll farms use social media to spread false news or sew discord.

So when we design software, we must consider how actual users — both benevolent and malign — will use it. To the degree we can, we should mitigate against abuse or at least provide users a way to defend themselves from it. We are long past the point where we can pretend technology is amoral.

In a vacuum, technological tools are amoral. But we don’t use technology in a vacuum. The moment we put it to use, it becomes a multiplier for both good and evil. If we want to make the world a better place, we cannot pretend it will happen on its own.