Reply #104: Not So, Sir

[The Magistrate]

You merely wish to confine the matter to immediate questions of life and death, but in fact it extends beyond that. You are by a variety of everyday actions saying that an end, your comfort, convenience, etc., justifies a means, a variety of exploitations by which these things are made available to you. You want the argument confined to one extreme of a possible spectrum, and wish to ignore the other end of it, which my examples open out for display. If you doubt people die, even, or suffer maiming, for your electrical power, the rare earths in a computer, the food on your table, you are not paying close attention to this world we inhabit....

"We're all rotten, Maude, rotten to the core."