Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

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mechanical_fish

By using their services, aren't you tacitly assenting to their business practices?

Certainly not! I do business with plenty of people that I disagree with. So do you, no doubt.

This is a classic (i.e. "really old") line of argument against political activists. To testify to that, I give you MIT's most (in?)famous political activist, Noam Chomsky:

As to how I tolerate MIT, that raises another question. There are people who argue, and I have never understood the logic of this, that a radical ought to distance himself from oppressive institutions. The logic of that argument is that Karl Marx shouldn't have studied in the British Museum which, if anything, was the symbol of the most vicious imperialism in the world... But I think Karl Marx was quite right in studying in the British Museum. He was right in using the resources and in fact the liberal values of the civilization that he was trying to overcome, against it.

Remember, the goal of an activist is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The goal is to convince the baby to join the activist's side. Which you accomplish by living inside the baby's culture, appealing to its better nature, and using all the tools at your disposal, including the baby's tools.

It's not as if the whole idea of Google is fundamentally evil. It's a few specific aspects of Google's business practices that Cory dislikes -- aspects which, he might well argue, could easily be reformed without significantly affecting Google's prosperity.

Maybe I don't understand the whole Google+China issue, but if you can do business with people you disagree with, can't Google do business with China?

Whether or not a particular aspect of Google's business with "China" [1] is ethical -- and whether or not "the business" can be readily separated into "ethical" and "unethical" pieces that can be independently pursued (or not pursued) while maintaining Google's own ethical standards -- is, not surprisingly, a question of ethics and politics. One which I don't think is best carried on here at Hacker News.

[1] "China" is a word for a very big place. Does it refer to the government, or the people? Is there a difference? This footnote is too small to contain the volumes of debate which might ensue from this question.

I think his issue is not with doing business with China, but rather with the censorship Google has implemented in the Chinese version of the search.

One thing is to do business with an entity you disagree with, another thing is to act unethetical (or "evil") yourself in order to do business.

What's the difference between financially supporting someone who would do evil, and doing it yourself?

Is hiring a hitman wrong? Is shopping at a known hitman's store, knowing that the profits he makes will be invested into killing wrong?

It's an extreme example, but if you feel that something a company is doing is wrong, financially supporting them is also wrong.

If you say "I'm supporting an entity that does wrong, but the benefit it brings me is greater than the guilt I feel from using them" is one thing. saying "I support them financially, but I disagree with them, therefore I'm not supporting immoral behavior, and am still moral" is just stupid and hypocritical.

This is what I call "the Vegetarian's dilemma." Basically, you can't be a vegetarian (for moral reasons) and a capitalist, in the modern, western world, at the same time.

Say you shop at a store that sells meat. Your money helps them buy that meat, even if they make no money on the meat, as they can use it as a loss leader: they have your funding to fall back on. So you stop shopping there.

But, hold on, the employees at that shop get payed by the other customers there, right? Customers like, say, the baker and the landscaper that you use. So now you can't pay them either, as they'll go out and pay the shop, and then the shop will go out and buy meat.

Take it as far as it can go, and it's clear that you can't participate in a capitalist society that also contains immoral business transactions without rendering yourself immoral.

Yes, precisely. This is the point at which you say "I may be indirectly supporting the slaughter of animals financially, but I need to eat. The benefits outweigh the costs, and I'm reducing the demand for meat. I hope that will make a difference. Maybe eventually demand will drop to the point that stores stop carrying meat if enough people follow my lead."

No, you can never support only entirely moral entities, but you can still make a difference. It's not an either-or proposition.

> What's the difference

In theory nothing, but you have to draw the line somewhere. By eating at a restaurant where the cook uses a pan made in China, you are indirectly supporting the Dafur genocide. So you draw an arbitrary line, which is better than the alternative, which is cynicism.

Point taken.

But at what point do you throw the baby out with the bathwater?

When the baby is Chuckie.

If so much of what a person does is completely supported by something they hate, the disconnect for me is that they aren't really making the kind of sacrifices their position entails, so they don't really seem to believe in their position. If that's the case, then why should I, unless it is an inescapable logical argument?

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