Wait, is it? Unless you actually knew that massage parlor - and in particular the individual offering the massage is an individual who is in a condition of exploitation, you basically belong to that same group as the hypothetical coffee scenario - i.e. impassive supporter or indirect contributor. You can't be an active exploiter if you don't know that the individual in question is exploited.
As mentioned before, it would take someone much more dumb than Layton to not know there was a good chance he was exploiting someone or that a seedy Chinatown "shiatsu" massage parlor is not suspicious. That is just willful ignorance.
I argue against both - instead of taking the lowest common denominator - at the end of the day, we'd have to ask ourselves why we think it is ok to consume products that is literally the by product of slave labour (at an even more horrendous scale) and yet we are willing to draw such sharp boundaries against other types of exploitation. I suspect emotional and cognitive distance is the reason.
I'm not saying that the former is OK, only that there is a clear distinction between directly perpetrating exploitation and indirectly supporting it. Neither are fine, but there is a difference between the two.
And I think that's moral sophistry. It's precisely how sweatshops and child labour and third-world pollution and other forms of exploitation are allowed to occur, because it doesn't seem to be caused by the purchasers of the products of that exploitation. You can't buy a car from someone you think is a car thief and not be morally implicated in their crimes. There is little moral difference from enslaving children to make clothes and buying clothes from a company you suspect uses child slave labour. If anything, the intentional willful ignorance of the latter situation is worse.
Well, I think this is moral equivalence. There is a clear difference between someone who steals a car and someone who purchases a stolen car. Yes, the latter is implicated in the crime, but these are recognized as different crimes by the law and are clearly different magnitudes of wrong.
Unfortunately our society is set up in such a way that most people indirectly support exploitation multiple times daily. Its in the very fabric of our society. In fact, if you trace every purchase back far enough through however many degrees of connection, its quite possible literally every purchase you make supports some sort-of injustice or exploitation. Furthermore, any purchase by a consumer involves some degree of uncertainty - its not possible to be completely clean or not morally compromised in some way. As well, with almost any consumer purchase there is a degree of moral compromise - eat meat and animals need to be slaughtered, have a pet and buy them food which is processed in developing nations with high rates of starvation and hungry poor. Yes, there are a lot of injustices, but that doesn't mean they are all of the same severity.
So, yes, in lieu of this, I do think several degrees of separation do dilute the severity of supporting exploitation in contrast to directly administering it. There's a difference between buying a food product, which you need for eating and which probably does support exploitation in some way if you trace it back far enough, and directly exploiting an immigrant sex worker by making her jerk you off.
The reason I really don't like your line of thinking is that it excuses basically any immorality and draws a moral equivalence between everybody no matter the degree of their crimes. Do you really think you (who I'm going to assume has purchased a Nestle product in your life, or Apple, or some other major corporation product) are the same as a guy who flew to Thailand and fucked a kid once? You really want to equivocate that? There's a clear difference in severity there. I feel like it really takes a lot of academic, spurious reasoning to equivocate these two things.
There is also a crucial difference between the Rob Ford and Jack Layton scenarios (beyond the repeatability aspect, which has already been mentioned) - the former has associations with the individuals with criminal involvement around the drug trade; there is absolutely no evidence of Layton's involvement with the operators of the parlour, other than being the recipient of a hand job. That's a very important distinction.
Fair enough. The reason I see the Layton scandal as more problematic is because his act was directly exploiting someone.
I hate to burst your bubble, but there's a massage parlour in my old neighbourhood that I visited with relative frequency and received very high quality massages (and nothing else),
Sure...
sometimes from people who appeared to be recent immigrants. Some of the masseuses would sometimes complain about clients requesting sexual services. Later, I read in the paper that someone had been busted there for offences of a sexual nature, but I can assure you that, if it was a rub-n-tug, it was not strictly a rub-n-tug. The place Layton was in could have been more clear cut, but you're making it sound as if it is always clear-cut, which it is not.
Well, we don't know that, but we do know that it was under investigation by the police and that it was located in a neighborhood where there are a lot of illicit massage parlors. Plus, he was naked, which should have set off red flags for him.
Also, if your only source to "convict" Layton is a police notebook of a cop who (by virtue of his holding on to the notebook for years and then selectively and illegally leaking it at a politically opportune time) clearly had an axe to grind against Layton, then that's far, far below the word of two Toronto Star reporters. Again, Layton may or may not have done what he is accused of having done, but the available evidence is specious.
If the officer had an axe to grind against Layton, he could easily have arrested Layton or leaked this to the press the moment it happened. This "axe to grind" argument is the exact same narrative some Ford supporters use in regard to the Toronto Star, and it just doesn't wash.
Another argument leveled at Ford which equally applies here is that Layton never denied the allegations. There's a police officer, with his notes from the day as proof, alleging Layton was at a massage parlor, was naked, had wet tissues disposed of, and Layton not only confirmed that he was at the parlor on the day and encountered the police, but did not deny being naked or any of the other allegations.
The whole Layton scenario has about as much proof as the Ford-crack scandal. There's no concrete proof, but all logic and reason, along with the reactions of the targeted parties, points towards the allegations being true.
