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Comment by camus | Hacker News Reader

Immoral according to what ? to whom ?

There is only the law , the rest is b.s.

So you solved the question of what’s right and wrong. All we need is some people, elected using a byzantine voting process, who, with weird rules and centuries of inertia, come up with the Truth. That’s it, everyone else can pack their things and go home.

Why do you elevate the law in such a way? It’s possible to have a perfectly productive discussion about whether and why something is immoral without even so much as mentioning the law. People define what’s moral and what’s not just how people define what’s legal and what’s not.

The discussion about whether something is immoral or not is one that is completely separate from whether something is illegal.

Yes, but morality cannot be adjudicated whereas legality can.

So, when it's important for a point to be settled definitively, talking about the legality is generally more fruitful than talking about the morality. I suspect that was camus's point.

It’s not important for this to be settled definitively. I suspect it never will be. Plus, I think many here probably agree that it’s likely that Google didn’t do anything illegal. So why discuss something most people agree on? That’s pointless.

I'm pretty sure if you replace "Google" with "Microsoft" or "Apple" it would change the number of people dismissing it as b.s.

Microsoft and Apple are engaging in similar behaviours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Compa...

Moral philosophy doesn't really work that way. You may live in a lawless no-man's-land. Even though murder may not be "technically illegal," that doesn't somehow make it any less wrong.

Morality has nothing to do with law.

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