> how do you approach that morally? I really want to know the opinion of someone actually working there.
Employers can’t (yet) do the same. I’m under no obligation to them to do what I morally disagree with because I can always quit playing their game.
All I can do to quit my country is uproot from everything I’ve ever known, including my family, to another country that I agree with more that will also let me in.
They’re completely different situations and I’m pretty sure we all recognize that, but I’ll add my own personal anecdotes:
Employer
I don’t like the idea of software patents or generic business patents that can be summed up with “... do it on a computer”. I created some really awesome things for an employer many moons ago that were essentially revolutionizing how people in this very particular niche could more efficiently do their jobs. What did I really do though? I put together some open source tools completely foreign to this niche, glued them together with some nifty ideas and code that I wrote, put a decent unified UI on it, and packaged it up as a virtual machine appliance for our people in the field. My company wanted me to sign the invention away so they could patent it, and were going to put in 5 different applications. It was sign on the dotted line or walk, I walked at significant financial penalty.
Government
My dad’s from Libya. I lived there for a while growing up, and all my dad’s family is still in Tripoli. They all hated Gadaffi, and with the Arab spring uprising- things were getting bad. I joined in some protests across the US asking for intervention. Welp, we got what we asked for but not what we wanted. Turns out governments and geopolitics are tricky.
> See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico;—see if I would go”; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it differed one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.
-- Henry David Thoreau