For others, boycotting Uber may be a way to register an objection to what seems a growing tendency among multinational corporations to maximize their profits at the expense of liberal democratic values. The past month alone has seen National Basketball Association’s Daryl Morey apologize to the Chinese government for tweeting his support of Hong Kong protesters and Netflix defend its decision to pull an episode of Hasan Minhaj’s “Patriot Act” at the Saudi government’s behest (“We’re not in the truth to power business,” Netflix’s C.E.O. said).

In the wake of the N.B.A. controversy, The New York Times editorial board wrote:

Far too many American companies have shown that their values are for sale. They don’t even haggle much over the price. … Corporations are the creatures of a particular state, however much their executives prefer to think of their operations as multinational. American companies choose to operate under the laws of the United States and to reap the benefits of life in the United States — and they ought to be held accountable for upholding the values of the United States.

Mr. Khosrowshahi’s apology on Monday is not the first time the company has promised, as it were, to do better. “We should all hope it does,” Farhad Manjoo, a Times columnist, wrote back in 2017. And to be fair, there are signs that Mr. Khosrowshahi has taken Uber’s problems more seriously than his predecessor, Travis Kalanick, whose mess he was hired to clean up. Yet Mr. Manjoo’s point about how to respond to Uber’s failings still stands:

We should do more than hope: There’s an Uber app on your phone. Think twice about tapping it, because if Uber remains terrible after this, we have only ourselves to blame. … There’s a lot at stake. Ride-sharing, as an industry and a civic utility, is too big an idea to be left to a company like the one Uber is now.

Boycotting Uber won’t do much

In 2017, Hannah Lownsbrough argued that boycotting Uber wouldn’t rein in the company’s worst abuses, including how it treats its workers, who as contractors receive no benefits. She wrote:

Uber is not the only corporation effectively forcing the world back into a paid “piecework” model of labor that harks back to the industrial revolution (not a period renowned for its progressive employment practices). … Politicians are right to condemn companies such as Uber, but not using the app will not solve the problems posed by the gig economy. Instead we need to use our power as customers, workers and shareholders to force tech giants to change their behavior and their business models.

Ms. Lownsbrough’s argument dovetails with a deeper criticism of relying on boycotts as activism’s go-to tool — namely, that they risk reducing to an individual consumer choice what is fundamentally a collective political problem. In Quartz, the writer Alden Wicker has called the phenomenon of conscious consumerism “a lie”:

On its face, conscious consumerism is a morally righteous, bold movement. But it’s actually taking away our power as citizens. It drains our bank accounts and our political will, diverts our attention away from the true powerbrokers, and focuses our energy instead on petty corporate scandals and fights over the moral superiority of vegans.

That the cultural stress on boycotts may be out of proportion with the change they can effect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t boycott Uber, of course — only that doing so is a beginning, not an end, to meaningful political action. As Andrew J. Hawkins and Sean O’Kane point out at The Verge, Uber has shown itself to be “remarkably resilient despite its inability to earn a profit,” having survived an “almost comical number of scandals, lawsuits, regulatory challenges, protests, boycotts and more.”

The broader picture

When it comes to Americans doing business with human rights violators, Uber’s $3.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia pales in comparison with the $112 billion in arms that the Obama administration sold the country (some of which it has used to bomb hospitals in Yemen), the $23 billion in Saudi fossil fuels the United States imported in 2018 and President Trump’s continued embrace of the crown prince.

True, breaking up the United States’ near-century-old relationship with its most autocratic ally is a trickier project than sending Uber a message by downloading Lyft. But then Lyft itself is no stranger to Saudi largess: The company received a $248 million investment in 2015 from another Saudi royal, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who last year insisted on Mohammed bin Salman’s innocence in Khashoggi’s murder.

If that bothers you as much as the Uber connection, it may be time to consider a cab. (Or a bicycle.)