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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Is it? Can we be a just society if we allow any company to close their eyes to bad things in their supply chain? Should we not just call this "failure of due diligence"?

Otherwise none of our environmental and worker protection laws make any sense. Anyone can just do the unethical thing and move everything to a country that does not care about the rights we have set over here. Do our values not apply to any human? Including to those that happen to live outside our rough geographical area?

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Why not push it all the way to the consumer? Why shouldn't you be liable if you buy a wrench, but actually the worker who made it was mistreated? That would make people think twice before buying products of unknown provenance and supporting slavery.

In the UK, if a homeowner (customer) pays a company to clear domestic rubbish, and the company illegally fly-tips it, it's the homeowner who gets chased. The law requires them to check that the company is legit.

I considered this too, but I think it's unreasonable in the end, since there seems to be a fundamental difference/motive between an individual consumer and an entity trying to generate profit. A consumer should be able to trust that the product they're buying was manufactured in an ethical manner.

The customer is sometimes liable for a purchases. If a person go and buy a known stolen item, pay money to known criminal activity/terrorists, then they may end up being punished for it.

The relevant question is what knowledge the buyer had, which the Court of Appeal did consider. Dyson UK companies and personnel was aware of the crime being done by the supplier.

The general legal question is not if a customer can be held liable for purchases. They can. It is how much due diligence is expected before someone should be held liable.

> Anyone can just do the unethical thing and move everything to a country that does not care about the rights we have set over here

Well, instead of using North Sea oil in the UK we buy it from Norway, who got it from the North Sea. We have hilariously high energy prices because of green energy policies, so we import more and more things from other countries that have workable energy policies.

So - yeah.

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