Recently, hundreds of Google employees signed an open letter to their company. The letter wasn't about labor issues like salaries, benefits, or working conditions. It also wasn’t about any of the issues that have increasingly been in the news, like sexual harassment or unequal pay. Instead, the employees wanted Google to cancel Project Dragonfly, which involved building a search engine that complies with Chinese laws.

Those laws would require the search engine to omit “forbidden” results (like Wikipedia and the BBC) and to collect identifying information about users. The Google employees, along with human rights groups like Amnesty International, claimed that the proposed search engine would support censorship and surveillance in China, a country whose government is known for suppressing dissent. The open letter urged Google to be “a company willing to place its values above its profits.”

Project Dragonfly now appears to have been halted. It is hard to determine whether the Google employees’ campaign against the project was the main reason for this reversal, but the incident raises some interesting questions. For instance, the employees cited Google’s “values,” but what does it mean for a company to have values? How are a company’s values different from a person’s values? Should a company’s values reflect the beliefs of its founders? Its shareholders? Its directors, officers, employees, or customers? Can a company really “place its values above its profits” like the protesting Google employees suggested?

When we talk about values, we mean the things that are important to us and guide our actions. For instance, if friendship is a key value for you, then you will probably make decisions based on loyalty to your friends. We also talk about moral values, meaning beliefs about what is right versus what is wrong. But beliefs and personal priorities are things that only human beings can have, so does the idea of a company having values even make sense?

A company or corporation is not a person, but for legal purposes corporations are considered “persons” because they can exercise many of the same rights individual people do. Numerous laws and regulations define what people and companies should and should not do, but we also face small and large ethical decisions that are not covered by laws—like whether to help others, tell the truth, return a lost item that we found, etc. This is where values come in. In the case of Google, there was no law saying the company should not create a search engine designed to comply with Chinese laws, but many of the people who made up the organization felt that doing so would violate their values and ethics.

We expect individual people to do the right thing, and we expect groups of people to do the same. A company is just a group of people acting as a single entity, so we can reasonably ask companies to behave ethically. A company might not have a gut feeling or intuition or emotions, things we often associate with making ethical choices, but a company can definitely behave as if it thinks and feels like a human being—especially since all of a company’s choices are ultimately made by real people.

Of course, even if you’re not sure about the logic of this argument, or about the idea of corporate responsibility, Google itself publicly claims to be committed to acting ethically and responsibly. That makes it fair to assess whether or not the company is living up to its own standards. In fact, Google specifically includes this section in its online list of values and rules of conduct for employees and board members:

“Google is committed to advancing privacy and freedom of expression for our users around the world. Where user privacy and freedom of expression face government challenges, we seek to implement internationally recognized standards that respect those rights as we develop products, do business in diverse markets, and respond to government requests to access user information or remove user content.”

A lot of companies publish official statements about their values. Often they list things like “innovation” or “customer satisfaction,” which aren’t really about ethics; they have more to do with effectiveness, professionalism, commercial success and a positive public image. Other companies do talk about ethics, but for values to mean anything, a person or company has to be ready to transform those values into action. For a person, that means making ethical choices. For a company, it’s a little different.

Companies don’t have brains, so instead they need official policies aimed at guiding ethical behavior, such as a code of conduct plus ways of monitoring compliance with that code. One of the problems at Google during the Project Dragonfly crisis was that the teams overseeing security and privacy—usually the exact teams that would be most involved with monitoring whether the new search engine lived up to the company’s policy about protecting privacy and freedom of expression—were left out of the loop. Only some of the people who made up the organization were involved, sort of like if you tried to make a decision using only certain brain cells but not others.

This raises an important question. If a company is made up of multiple people, should its values reflect the values of all of those people, or just some? The Google employees responsible for that open letter wrote: “We also demand that leadership commit to transparency, clear communication, and real accountability… we deserve a say in these significant decisions.” In other words, they wanted their opinions to matter, not just the opinions of the people at the top who were running things. They were saying, “You are not Google, all of us together are Google.”

Is that an accurate view? After all, companies are not democracies. Important policies are usually determined by the board of directors, the CEO, and other top management. The Google employees wanted their voices heard because they wanted to help guide those decisions. Even people and groups completely outside a company will often do the same thing, asking a company to change its behavior to avoid hurting people or the environment or society. Boycotts, protests and letter-writing campaigns have all been used to pressure companies to stop doing business with a particular country, or stop using a harmful chemical, or stop mistreating workers. In the 1980s, numerous companies were pressured to stop doing business with South Africa until racist apartheid policies there were eliminated.

Obviously, the main goal of most companies is making money. Problems usually come up when behaving “ethically” conflicts with profit. Child labor was a common and cheap way to manufacture things until it was outlawed. Many factories and plants have polluted the air and water so badly that they made people sick or destroyed local ecosystems, until environmental regulations stopped them. Car companies didn't even want to install seatbelts in automobiles until they were forced to.

When Google employees and other groups objected to Project Dragonfly, they were basically saying, “It doesn’t matter if this will make money; we shouldn’t do it because it’s wrong.” They were asking Google to prioritize ethics over profits. This demand for a company to demonstrate values, and not just financial success, reflects the idea that pursuing profit without ethics can lead to injustice (like supporting an oppressive regime) or harm (like inflating prices on drugs that people need to live) or even disaster (like global warming and climate change).

This is an opinion that many people share, but it contradicts a lot of assumptions in the business world. Companies may worry that if they don’t take an advantage of an opportunity, their competitors will. Corporate executives may worry that if they don’t maximize profits for shareholders, they will get fired. Employees may worry that if they speak up, it could damage their chances for promotions and raises. That’s why pressuring companies to do the right thing instead of the profitable thing is not always easy. It depends on whether employees and the public can convince a company’s leadership that sharing their values, and sticking to those values, will be better for the company in the long run than making decisions based only on profit. In other words, companies can have values—but only if people keep them on track.