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Comment by geofft

Neutrality is a moral viewpoint in itself. It's the viewpoint that nobody is actually wrong, that simply by being a country you have a right to have your moral views respected. In the specific case of app stores, it's the viewpoint that everyone deserves to have the things they're doing made more efficient, and that helping anyone speed up their work is virtuous.

(Neutrality, by the way, is IBM's present defense of Dehomag's actions in World War II: there was a market opportunity in Germany, market opportunities are not inherently immoral, and by the time Germany's morality was beyond the pale, it was too late to say no. See https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss .)

And this isn't really neutrality, anyway. It's neutrality between the views of the powerful. The morality of Saudi Arabia is in scope; the morality of the Unabomber isn't. The morality of the LDS Church is in scope; the morality of Jews who object on religious grounds to the actions of the state of Israel isn't. The morality of China is in scope; the morality of non-authoritarian Communists isn't, because they lost all the Communist countries to authoritarians.

parent geofft 7 years ago

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