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> The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. Any company is just a bunch of people doing stuff. Those people always remain morally responsibl

> The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. Any company is just a bunch of people doing stuff. Those people always remain morally responsible, there's just legal exceptions, but no moral ones. If one doesn't question something, or even seeks to remain ignorant of it, they could be argued to even be responsible even for something they didn't know about -- since it wasn't despite, but because of their efforts that they were ignorant of it. > simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users There is nothing "noble" about slightly better product, any more than making a slightly thinner laptop is "noble". > "We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the moral good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility. -- Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation" (1976) It's a disappearance of insight, not new insights. Some regressed into a moral stone age, but they didn't change the world as much as just themselves with that.

justicezyx 8y ago
> simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users No, considering what Chinese consumer are getting, a US normal search product is morally more noble. People literally get gulled into spending their life's saving because of Baidu's fake ads. Just like giving African famine victims some amount of food is morally noble.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > People literally get gulled into spending their life's saving because of Baidu's fake ads. Then try this, in order of ascending difficulty: make link lists and web rings, make search engines, organize for consumer protection, actually demand the concentration camps be closed, for starters. You can't appeal to humanity, "mercy for the non-dissidents", while ignoring the dissidents as out of scope and irrelevant. That's like telling someone they should stop snoring while you are operating machinery at 500dB or something. You can't impress me by saying this person who burned 23089234 dollars needs my 50 cents or they will starve. And that's besides the point anway. It's not about the wellbeing of Chinese non-dissidents, it's about the potential complicity of companies in countries which so far are not totalitarian. I'm not going to feed someone who is starving if it means I wipe my whole intellectual heritage with some virus I bring home. To even bring up a sub-optimal search engine as something that could ever matter in such a context is staggering. > Just like giving African famine victims some amount of food is morally noble That "victim" is in turn currently brutalizing (and/or complicit with the brutalization of) someone else who is both starving and being brutalized. The only condition for "giving them food" is to stop with that, something they should have done already anyway. But even now, the actions show that the brutalization and/or the looking away is more important to even themselves than the "food". The appeal to compassion to normalize being not compassionate does not work. If you can't have sympathy for someone kidnapped or murdered for pissing off the wrong corrupt henchman, then don't talk about ads mixed with search results like some super tragic thing. Comparing the results of what humans are doing (or fail to do), with a famine, which basically just "happens", that is also duly noted, and fully rejected. At this point, I think I could make a totalitarianism rationalization bingo card.
  - justicezyx 8y ago
    Tbh I do not get what your saying and their connection with my statements. But mine probably appears the same to you...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      1.) Chinese citizens can't fix their own stuff, because organizing for a change that they want is not something they dare / are allowed to do. 2.) To not spread that into non-totalitarian companies, we must not mormalize totalitarianism. If we did, who would we beg for a better search engine or such petty gimmicks -- when the whole world is a corrupt place run by murderers? 3.) Speaking of that, murder is not government. Obedience towards murderers is not citizenship. 4.) You just used the word "noble" to deny the nobility of those quitting Google, and ascribe it to something that is not noble in the least. It's like something you noticed other people care about, you just don't quite know what it is. > Every powerful state relies on specialists whose task is to show that what the strong do is noble and just and, if the weak suffer, it is their fault. -- Noam Chomsky > Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go. -- Meister Eckhart 5.) The confusion is not mutual.

justicezyx 8y ago

> simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users No, considering what Chinese consumer are getting, a US normal search product is morally more noble. People literally get gulled into spending their life's saving because of Baidu's fake ads. Just like giving African famine victims some amount of food is morally noble.

PavlovsCat 8y ago
> People literally get gulled into spending their life's saving because of Baidu's fake ads. Then try this, in order of ascending difficulty: make link lists and web rings, make search engines, organize for consumer protection, actually demand the concentration camps be closed, for starters. You can't appeal to humanity, "mercy for the non-dissidents", while ignoring the dissidents as out of scope and irrelevant. That's like telling someone they should stop snoring while you are operating machinery at 500dB or something. You can't impress me by saying this person who burned 23089234 dollars needs my 50 cents or they will starve. And that's besides the point anway. It's not about the wellbeing of Chinese non-dissidents, it's about the potential complicity of companies in countries which so far are not totalitarian. I'm not going to feed someone who is starving if it means I wipe my whole intellectual heritage with some virus I bring home. To even bring up a sub-optimal search engine as something that could ever matter in such a context is staggering. > Just like giving African famine victims some amount of food is morally noble That "victim" is in turn currently brutalizing (and/or complicit with the brutalization of) someone else who is both starving and being brutalized. The only condition for "giving them food" is to stop with that, something they should have done already anyway. But even now, the actions show that the brutalization and/or the looking away is more important to even themselves than the "food". The appeal to compassion to normalize being not compassionate does not work. If you can't have sympathy for someone kidnapped or murdered for pissing off the wrong corrupt henchman, then don't talk about ads mixed with search results like some super tragic thing. Comparing the results of what humans are doing (or fail to do), with a famine, which basically just "happens", that is also duly noted, and fully rejected. At this point, I think I could make a totalitarianism rationalization bingo card.
- justicezyx 8y ago
  Tbh I do not get what your saying and their connection with my statements. But mine probably appears the same to you...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    1.) Chinese citizens can't fix their own stuff, because organizing for a change that they want is not something they dare / are allowed to do. 2.) To not spread that into non-totalitarian companies, we must not mormalize totalitarianism. If we did, who would we beg for a better search engine or such petty gimmicks -- when the whole world is a corrupt place run by murderers? 3.) Speaking of that, murder is not government. Obedience towards murderers is not citizenship. 4.) You just used the word "noble" to deny the nobility of those quitting Google, and ascribe it to something that is not noble in the least. It's like something you noticed other people care about, you just don't quite know what it is. > Every powerful state relies on specialists whose task is to show that what the strong do is noble and just and, if the weak suffer, it is their fault. -- Noam Chomsky > Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go. -- Meister Eckhart 5.) The confusion is not mutual.