Okay, for the sake of argument, let's accept your worldview where good and evil are subjective and therefore irrelevant.
The only thing left then is, what do we want? It becomes a question of what do I want, and who can I view as allies in achieving my goals.
I want a search tool that serves my needs, not the needs of advertisers. I want privacy and I don't want distractions. So Google is not on my side, they are my opponent in this game[1]. And I suspect if the average user understood the implications of Google serving advertisers and not them, they'd be on my side, and not on Google's side.
In this framework, good and evil are just shorthand for shared goals. When someone says "Google is evil" they are saying "Google doesn't share our goals," and when they say "Google is good" they are saying "Google shares our goals". Of course, within this framework, the speaker is assuming that the listener has the same goals as the speaker, which is likely not a rational assumption.
But that assumption makes sense, because the goal here isn't actually to communicate, it's to persuade, and there's a good chance that when the listener hears "Google is evil" they will come up with their own goals that Google doesn't align with, and create an alliance with the speaker based on those goals even if they don't actually align with the speakers goals. In short: good and evil are sophist rhetoric, designed to persuade through soft power[2] rather than communicate meaning.
Of course, saying good and evil are subjective is also sophist rhetoric, because you aren't actually communicating about shared goals, you're just trying to undercut the argument that "Google is good" or "Google is evil".
I'll be careful to add that calling something "sophist rhetoric" isn't equivalent to calling it "evil" at any level, because we're operating in the framework where good and evil don't exist, so sophist rhetoric can't be evil. So if you're trying to persuade, there's no reason to think that sophist rhetoric is somehow beneath you.
But since I think people actually share my goals, playing the good and evil game is a poor choice for me, so I reject the whole framework of good and evil here. Anyone who uses these words, even to say they're subjective, is trying to sell you snake oil, because if they were actually being honest they would talk about how the thing they are arguing about aligns with your goals, because that's always a stronger argument.
So I'd suggest that if you actually believe good and evil are subjective, you make your argument based on what you think isn't subjective. Otherwise we can just discard your opinion as non-informative sophist rhetoric.
On the other hand, since most people actually do have goals they would consider to be part of a moral code, and we can objectively describe what most people would call good or evil, good and evil work just fine as shorthand, sophist rhetoric aside. If, for example, we can agree that we want to be able to differentiate between ads and search results, then we can agree to call that feature "good" and we can agree to call not having that feature "evil". If you don't agree to that terminology, it's because you don't share our goals, so why should we care? Go away, advertiser, we don't want you here. ;)
This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
[1] Using "game" in a game-theoretical sense here.
> Okay, for the sake of argument, let's accept your worldview where good and evil are subjective and therefore irrelevant.
How did you make that giant leap? Subjective doesn’t mean irrelevant, it means everyone has their own opinion on it which makes it quite relevant.
Your tangent was difficult to follow on the sole basis that Google is no different than any other entity. The US government is evil because we don’t share the same goals. Vegans are evil because we don’t share the same goals. Football players are evil because we don’t share the same goals. I can go on but you should get the picture by now.
At the end of the day, you should understand that businesses exist solely to make money. If they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t have investors. Without investors, most businesses would not exist. Without those businesses, we would be objectively worse off.
> How did you make that giant leap? Subjective doesn’t mean irrelevant, it means everyone has their own opinion on it which makes it quite relevant.
Relevant to what? If objective and subjective ideas are both relevant, why even bother pointing out that it's subjective?
Subjective ideas aren't admissable as evidence in most debates. Whether or not you intended it, when people go through the effort to say an idea is subjective, it's usually because they're trying to cut down the validity of that idea. So if that wasn't your intent, maybe you should have been more clear.
> Your tangent was difficult to follow on the sole basis that Google is no different than any other entity. The US government is evil because we don’t share the same goals. Vegans are evil because we don’t share the same goals. Football players are evil because we don’t share the same goals. I can go on but you should get the picture by now.
No, actually I don't get the picture. Yes, anyone can label anyone evil.
> At the end of the day, you should understand that businesses exist solely to make money. If they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t have investors. Without investors, most businesses would not exist. Without those businesses, we would be objectively worse off.
Actually, that's not objective, that's subjective. I don't agree that the world is better by having a huge amount of private data centralized under Google's control.
(Incidentally, see how saying that's subjective sounds a whole lot like saying it's irrelevant?)
The only thing left then is, what do we want? It becomes a question of what do I want, and who can I view as allies in achieving my goals.
I want a search tool that serves my needs, not the needs of advertisers. I want privacy and I don't want distractions. So Google is not on my side, they are my opponent in this game[1]. And I suspect if the average user understood the implications of Google serving advertisers and not them, they'd be on my side, and not on Google's side.
In this framework, good and evil are just shorthand for shared goals. When someone says "Google is evil" they are saying "Google doesn't share our goals," and when they say "Google is good" they are saying "Google shares our goals". Of course, within this framework, the speaker is assuming that the listener has the same goals as the speaker, which is likely not a rational assumption.
But that assumption makes sense, because the goal here isn't actually to communicate, it's to persuade, and there's a good chance that when the listener hears "Google is evil" they will come up with their own goals that Google doesn't align with, and create an alliance with the speaker based on those goals even if they don't actually align with the speakers goals. In short: good and evil are sophist rhetoric, designed to persuade through soft power[2] rather than communicate meaning.
Of course, saying good and evil are subjective is also sophist rhetoric, because you aren't actually communicating about shared goals, you're just trying to undercut the argument that "Google is good" or "Google is evil".
I'll be careful to add that calling something "sophist rhetoric" isn't equivalent to calling it "evil" at any level, because we're operating in the framework where good and evil don't exist, so sophist rhetoric can't be evil. So if you're trying to persuade, there's no reason to think that sophist rhetoric is somehow beneath you.
But since I think people actually share my goals, playing the good and evil game is a poor choice for me, so I reject the whole framework of good and evil here. Anyone who uses these words, even to say they're subjective, is trying to sell you snake oil, because if they were actually being honest they would talk about how the thing they are arguing about aligns with your goals, because that's always a stronger argument.
So I'd suggest that if you actually believe good and evil are subjective, you make your argument based on what you think isn't subjective. Otherwise we can just discard your opinion as non-informative sophist rhetoric.
On the other hand, since most people actually do have goals they would consider to be part of a moral code, and we can objectively describe what most people would call good or evil, good and evil work just fine as shorthand, sophist rhetoric aside. If, for example, we can agree that we want to be able to differentiate between ads and search results, then we can agree to call that feature "good" and we can agree to call not having that feature "evil". If you don't agree to that terminology, it's because you don't share our goals, so why should we care? Go away, advertiser, we don't want you here. ;)
This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
[1] Using "game" in a game-theoretical sense here.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power