I work(ed) for McKinsey. Writing this in present tense for vague anonymity.

I don’t do anything public sector so I don’t know what policies we do. But in reading this it feels like you are implying that McKinsey would be behind various draconian policies or censorship. I would say that’s relatively unlikely given the nature of what the firm does and does not like to associate itself with. As the only anecdotal evidence I have There was that Saudi thing from a while ago where someone did a social network analysis on political ideas, and the internal discussion was adamantly that we don’t do projects like that (identifying dissidents) for governments.

Also while it is a company founded in the west, a team serving Chinese government interests is highly likely to be 100% Chinese people, living in China, landed by Chinese partners. Both because Chinese workers tend to serve Chinese clients and I would guess that the Chinese government requires this. If you were to make such a thing illegal, what would likely happen is the firm would just split into two firms, the Chinese part and the not Chinese part, and it wouldn’t make a ton of difference because most work is driven by individual contributors on an individual basis rather than a large group effort from an entity like Google.

That's a really good point and not one I had considered in the context of everything that's happened recently.

McKinsey has been involved with a lot of bad stuff internationally over the last decade or two. Monitor's work with Gaddafi was also really gross. There's an odd dichotomy though - the ex-McKinsey employees I know personally and work closely with are all very thoughtful, ethical people.

You can create an interesting modified trolley problem if you replace the trolley with a person. Assuming you don't have recourse to stop them in any way, but you can help them make a less destructive (but still awful/harmful choice), do you?

Much as the trolley is going to hit some group, and you have the option to reduce it from a larger group to a smaller group, except this time instead of a large metal contraption under the influence of gravity and/or steam, you have a bag of flesh and bone working using the power of glucose. Does this change the parameters of the trolley problem at all?

Honestly, until now I've never thought about it. Might be an interesting thought experiment.

A lot of good, decent human beings justify doing awful things in their day job. Wasn’t there just a post on here a few days ago about someone who worked at Capital One writing about how everyone working there justified getting poor people deeper in debt?

FWIW, most McKinsey employees won’t be doing anything immoral. In fact it’s perfectly cool to turn down assignments for personal ethics. E.g. not wanting to work for a gas company, even if the specific task doesn’t have any moral implications.

Immorality is subjective. McKinsey is hired to (maximize|minimize) some objective. The fact someone didn’t want to work on the Purdue Pharma opioid marketing project when McKinsey employs a fungible pool of thousands of consultants means nothing.

I don’t really think that contradicts anything I said

Just because you choose not to work on a project due to personal reasons doesn’t free you of the unethical or immoral things the company you chose to work for does. And if you actually believe it does then it only supports the argument that these firms have found a way to act immorally in the pursuit of fees while making sure their staff don’t become too demoralized. They know there will always be someone to take on the work because the workforce is highly fungible so they don’t care either way, and if anything makes them look compassionate to their employees which benefits them.

Conversely, just because a few people do a bad thing does not characterize the moral stature of a large decentralized organization. Sometimes, bad decisions are made. That doesn’t mean the day to day is one that makes the world worse, both in fact and in personal perspective.

The Purdue thing was really bad. That’s acknowledged. Nobody is happy about it. Plenty of work has been done pro bono to combat the opioid crisis even prior to the realization of what had happened. I have worked at other places and I legit feel comfortable saying that relative to most American businesses, the firm is not an evil purely profit maximizing machine. Most people’s day to day is benign and well intended and you can just straight up talk to people about it because people are interested in such things.

tldr: while I fully recognize bad things have happened I would say that on average McKinsey is more morally self conscious than your average us company. Take it as you will

Monitor was bought by Deloitte.