If there’s a moral obligation to fully vet the industry and operations of a company before accepting a short contracting job from them, why would one’s bank balance matter?
Does everyone fully vet their companies executive suite, board of directors and operations before accepting a job? Or the bank they use? Or the owner of the coffee shop they frequent?
Everyone walks around with a computer in their pocket built in a factory where people were to have known to be treated poorly, possibly to the point of suicide and then they use that device to type in comments about moral superiority.
Yes. And wait until you hear about how US railroads, which we in the US all depend on, were built.
Civilization is a story of gradual improvement. Insisting that anything be completely beyond reproach overnight is not a productive view. And yet some people can't resist.
There are problems with using the suicide factory as a moral point expecting someone to give up an iphone.
We're generally not given a baseline for the surrounding city, area, and country. The west has suicides, China will have suicides, how does this factory compare to those? Our impact isn't explained, along with the replacement for it, on the worker, the company, demand, and so forth. If there are any better alternatives and for who, and what the apples-to-oranges weighting for that decision is. The feelings and preferences of current, post, and hopeful company/industry employees and other citizens in that area.
Every choice and action a human makes is on some spectrum of consent.
At one extreme is a literal "gun to their head" moment where it's obvious there was no real choice and correspondingly the person shouldn't be held responsible (eg, someone points a gun at you and says hand over your wallet. That doesn't mean you really "gave" your wallet to them).
At the other end of the spectrum is a person with a tremendous amount of power, freedom and choice- eg, a rich person living in a Western country, making a decision where they have lots of options and/or can opt out or decline an opportunity freely.
It's easier to forgive a person doing something unethical to survive than a person living in luxury doing something unethical to have slightly more luxuries.
