> I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly.

I disagree. It's super weird that we accept "well I was just doing it for the money" as an excuse from people who are often already insanely wealthy.

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.

And many if not most celebrities happily and frequently turn down jobs to protect their reputations. And that is not only turning down reputable jobs, but jobs for perfectly respectable businesses, because they don't want to sell out. I was literally reading of one yesterday, where George Clooney turned down $35 million for a day’s work on an airline advertisement.

Sure, they can almost always find someone willing to do the advert. But that does not absolve that person of the moral consequenses of doing the work.

>>I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly.

The exact same moral structure can be said about this, even though it is an extreme example: "I would give a pass to any assassin that was paid to kill the targets. They are paid to accurately deliver lethal doses of bullets or toxins and ensure that the targets end up dead."

Obviously, none of us would consider giving a pass to the assassin because it was a "professional paid job", even if (s)he was doing to feed his/her starving family.

Why should we give a pass to the actors? While different levels and directness of harm, both are taking money to do harm to others.

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/george-clooney-35-million-one...

You're comparing murder to an actor speaking lines in a 30 second commercial. Its an advertisement and you are questioning people's morals.

If any of the actors did any research they likely were convinced it was a solid thing to do at the time. It could have even been a "oh so-and-so is doing an ad, then I'm in" type of thing. Its pretty obvious whoever was involved at FTX was pretty convincing and doing wrong/illegal things behind the scenes so that's why I said they should get a pass.

Thanks for changing your argument, and validating my point.

Your first argument was that "...paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly."; i.e., you justified it on the fact that they were paid professionals; the type of work doesn't matter and no judgement should be done.

Now, you admit that there is indeed a moral/amoral issue in making advertisements, but argue that in this case the FTX players must have been good liars and the actors must have been fooled.

Considering the actors to have reasonably vetted the thing as worthwhile & ethical, but having been fooled, is indeed a much better grounds to give someone a pass.

Especially so for the celebs who also invested their own money and have now lost it.

Of course the assassin example is extreme, I said so, and selected it because extremes can make the point more obvious. That makes it no less valid. I'm not questioning people's morals — I making obvious the foundational element that something being a "professional job" does not remove the actions from the sphere of moral judgement.

Certainly the celebs who invested along with promoting the thing were also fooled. That does not mean that they were absolved of moral judgement because it was a professional job, but that they can indeed be judged and given a pass because they were also fooled. Sure, the end result of both is that they pass, but the reasoning matters.

Your second argument is a good one in probably most cases; the first was not.