Google’s Secret China Project Sparks Fury Among Workers

I think this ignores the rest of my comment. Not sure I agree that trade deals and search engines work the same way.

You could also say that the United States is an imperialist devil that kills innocents in the middle east with drones, and that Google should exit the US in protest and move to Europe. But that doesn't seem like a great argument.

I think you have it backwards - Google will perfect it’s censorship offering in China then actively resell it to other governments

Just because it's realpolitik does not mean it's not ethical.

I actually do not think A is the proper argument here.

Google providing a restricted search service is not doing a "bad thing." It will be a product that helps people find what they are looking for, which is a good thing.

At the same time, they are restricted from sharing certain information, a restriction that is applied blanketly to all of China's citizenry.

Imagine that there exists a prison wherein any prisoner can escape by simply knowing the escape passphrase.

One of the jobs in this prison is to walk around providing water to the prisoners, keeping them alive. Everyone in the prison is prevented from speaking the escape phrase, punishable by death.

You are a water provider in this prison. You know the escape phrase. You know that by doing your job, more prisoners are fed more quickly and are healthier and have better lives. But you know they would have even better ones if they could escape.

Would the moral thing to do to be to quit in protest and remove yourself from the equation, because you cannot speak the passphrase, which is a decision that ultimately helps no one?

Or would the moral thing be to continue providing a helpful service that prisoners need, meanwhile having access to the prisoners and the wardens, and being able to push for the ability to speak?

It seems to me that the providing of water and the ability to speak the passphrase are two separate things that you as a water-provider have the ability to do. And when you remove yourself from the prison on the absolutist moral basis, you leave the prisoners worse off in practical terms, for essentially no purpose.

I think in Google's case, it is helpful to identify what is the water and what is the unspeakable passphrase. Water is returning benign results, and the unspeakable passphrase is (separate & distinctly) returning censored results.

Providing water is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. It is not aiding the prison in hurting its prisoners, it is keeping the prisoners alive and healthy. The citizens are permitted health, and it is a good thing to help them have it.

Providing benign search results is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. It is not aiding China in censorship, it is keeping the citizenry within quick reach of benign information. It is a good thing to help them have that.

A bad thing for you as a water-provider to do would be to not provide water, or whack the prisoners with sticks.

A bad thing for Google to do as a search provider would be to not provide benign results, or to develop tools for forcing the Chinese to have access to less information than they currently do.

The providing of water is a good thing and is distinct and separate from bad things.

Not speaking the escape phrase is not a bad thing, because it is not your choice. It is forced on you by the context.

At worst, not speaking the escape phrase lets you continue to provide water. At best, while you're there, you can try to convince the warden to loosen up, possibly leading to more freedom.

I think the point here is that given the threat of force, morality is not absolute, it is contextual. When your options are morality vs. survival (or knowledge/life-promoting things), then your morality must be re-evaluated, because survival (and life-promoting things) are the goal of any framework that is actually moral. Returning benign search results is a good/life-promoting thing.

There is a large swath of search results which are very good for the Chinese to have access to, which enriches their lives, which Google can provide better than anyone else. This is the knowledge/life promotion on one side of the equation. On the other, many are holding an absolutist position that only complete uncensorship can be offered morally.

They are holding adherence to the morality in a specific context (the US/free speech), above the actual goal of the morality, which is life-promotion.

I argue that when a morality leads to the removal of good/life-promoting things in this way, it must be re-evaluated for the context, because it is no longer achieving its goal. We must see what parts of the morality we cannot apply because _it is not our choice whether or not to apply it_. We discover that within the context of the threat of force, it is acceptable to abide by that force, and provide a subset of results that is still helpful for people to have access to.

Morality only applies to decisions you can make within a context. If you don't enter that context, you can't claim to be doing anything moral. And if you do, the things that are not your decision cannot be part of your morality. Given what remains, you do the best you can.

This is why I think Google should enter China with a restricted search engine.

Maybe their argument is more in line with "harm reduction"? Just because we can't do the best thing doesn't mean we have to do nothing.

>How do the Chinese benefit from that?

If products and services from companies like Apple and Google are not available in the market, it raises the question why. More people may become aware that there are certain limitations which prevent these services from being used.

Offering the censored versions means it is easier to think that things are the same as in other parts of the world - we even have access to the same products and services they are using.

I'm not saying that people would not otherwise know of the censorship - they certainly do. I see this more as an awareness thing. When something is constantly on people's minds, they might be more active in trying to push a change.

Of course, it is a bit hard to relate to this thing. Uber is pretty much the only example that I can come up with. In my local market, the taxi business used to be heavily regulated and Uber could not operate here. People having used to using Uber abroad were annoyed and I think that helped at least a bit in pushing more relaxed regulation.

China is already doing this quite aggressively in the US universities.

Thanks, this is a good argument.

Being from the western world, it is very clear to me what Google's absence from China signifies.

Given that China censors its media, do you think the Chinese citizenry are aware at all about Google's position up to this point, or its symbolism?

It seems to me that the Chinese would not be influenced by Google's absence or presence, since the reasoning is the kind of thing that would already be censored.

To many Chinese people though, Google not in China is simply a sign that it can't compete with homegrown companies. Many are still drunk on the 厉害了我的国 kool-aid.

China has been ruled autocratically for thousands of years. There's nothing to "normalize." It is normal.

We have pretty substantial empirical evidence on the outcomes of US- and Silicon Valley-backed regime change operations in the modern world. They don't work out too well. One could argue that trying to plunge China into civil war is the real unethical behavior here.

The search in other parts of the world is already distorted or full on censored across various "morally acceptable bounds". China just happens to have different morality. This is more akin to McDonalds having a different menu everywhere than it is akin to Orwellian thought policing or that being a universal wrong. The morality is different and ethical is subjective. If you don't like it, don't use it, but to say this is some kind of outright evil imposed by the government is to ignore that the majority of Chinese support Confucian morality and there is little concept of Western style privacy. Why should China abide by Google employees morality? That is the bigger question to me. Why should Google abide by their employees morality either?

He didn't say it was a problem.

I think he’s saying that corporate ambitions are now dealing with googles legacy values.

I’d say this is a good thing

Or pragmatic? Is google a church or anything, and requires idealogical purity that is not relevant to its core business, advertising?

Oppression destroys more lives than an addictive freedom.

I think the reaction is much better than the reaction we saw out of Facebook about a leaked internal memo earlier this year.

Unions aren't for exercising the political will of workers? What is it that the labor movement has achieved then? What did the strikes achieve? If not forcing those in control of the company to take seriously the demands of workers, then what else is a union for?