I mean, in those cases they are often writing the playbook for the government when it comes to implementing certain policies. Crazy that is even legal for a western firm.
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.
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.
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.
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