the shifty side of making money (at any cost?)

[I apologize in advance for this post and others like it where I attemept to process a thought or an idea. My thoughts tend to ramble and often are not thought all the way through. Blog posts like this tend to be, for me, a place to begin working through thoughs. Therefore, the thoughts are not polished, the grammar and syntax are not polished, and sometimes sentences make sense as I write them but seem quite non-sensical later on...Thanks for hanging in there with my thought process!]

There exists a philosophical and moral question that seems a second-cousin to the ever-popular "What is Truth?" It is the question "What is Bad?" Think about this for a moment. Even if we'd want to grope for some basic universal bads, who gets the final say as to what is bad?

In one specific example, the ones with money get to say what is bad. I'm not anti-computer, and even though I am a new Mac user, I spent many happy years with Microsoft, and I am not inherently anti-Microsoft (though I make fun of Windows...I made fun of Windows often for a good duration of my use of it...but all in fun), and yet I have to say that what Microsoft is agreeing to do in China bothers me.

It's all your point of view, of course. I don't find myself nearly as bothered by censorship (though I'd rather not use that word) of Nazi subject matter in France and Germany. Perhaps if I truly believed in communism (communism as it stands in China right now), I might agree with Microsoft's limitations. But at the same time, I have to remind myself that I am all for liberty and democracy and all of those ideals that America wants to exemplify, but that I would not feel the need to censor online talk of communism. Perhaps communist ideas are not a threat to America in the same way that democratic ideas are to China? I suppose that even the idea of "free speech" is something upheld by (though not without debate) our own system of ideas and not upheld by China's system of ideas. I think that we take it for granted that free speech is or should be universal. Sometimes we forget that when other countries disagree with us, it is not because they are trying to suppress free speech, but rather because they haven't known free speech. Maybe they see it as preservation of the status quo instead of suppression or oppression.

The real question for me, however, is not what China should be doing about free speech. It is what Microsoft should be doing. It is at once an American and global corporation. It is inextricably tied to the Internet, a place where the free speech debate is lively, if not heated. Should Microsoft censor in China to make profit from China? Is it economically sound to shape-shift a corporation given its surroundings in order to make a profit? Probably. But is it ethical?

I'm not sure.

All I know is that while I try to stay out of the free speech debate (because I find myself on both sides of it too often), and while I often feel the need to defend economic practices, this bizarre agreement between China and the Microsoft corporation bugs me. Maybe it will bug you too.