You don't know up front what's going to happen. Seeing the future is not an ability humans have. Unless the pen is being sold as part of some murder fundraiser and you're going out of your way to specifically buy it there than from any better options the person doing the murder is the one responsible for the murdering.

If that's the rebuke then the whole comparison is silly. Since if you buy clothes at some chain like Zara you know before hand what the conditions are which they impose on their workers. You don't need "future sight" for that.

You personally know the conditions? You know that the workers would be better off not having the option of working in the Zara factory? I don't mean a choice between working for Zara and a hypothetical fantasy option of them working in an office with 40 hour work weeks and air conditioning, I mean their actual other option like subsistence farming or whatever they did before there was a Zara factory. You feel you are more entitled to make that choice for the workers than they are themselves?

> You personally know the conditions?

You think I can only understand the conditions if.. what? I've directly worked at the factory? Published a peer-reviewed study?

> You know that the workers would be better off not having the option of working in the Zara factory?

That’s not the only other option and presenting it that way is intentionally dishonest.

This entire line of thinking, as presented, is absolute sophism and bad faith.

> You think I can only understand the conditions if.. what? I've directly worked at the factory? Published a peer-reviewed study?

When do you think you understand the conditions? When you watch a TikTok video about it? When you read an artistic the Atlantic? When you watch a segment 60 minutes?

I guess I’m unclear why you don’t want to answer what I thought was a fairly simple question. Being evasive just looks like doubling-down on the dishonest way you’ve approached the entire conversation.

And how does that same reasoning apply to your first example? Giving money to someone who you know is going to buy a bullet to murder someone.

"You don't have all the details, he could be murdering a bad person"? Something like that I guess?

The example is deliberately contrived and hyperbolic. In real life, if there is reliable evidence that someone is murdering people, the police conduct an investigation, we have a trial, and they go to jail. You know what we don't do? We don't go "Hey, I think Bob the pen-seller is a murderer. Nobody buy his pens so hopefully he runs out of money and can't afford to murder people anymore". We don't do that because it would be a really stupid and ineffective way of stopping murderers, and it's really stupid and ineffective for most other things too.