Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The end result may be the same, but for me, yes, the origin of the material does matter.
It's the same as asking if there's any ethical difference between buying a bottle of Scotch in a supermarket, on which all the appropriate taxes have been paid, and buying the same brand at half the price from "a man in a pub", which has been smuggled from France, and on which UK taxes have not been paid. The end result is the same - you have a bottle of whisky - but one has been obtained legitimately and the other from an illicit source.
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The proper analogy is that you go down to the supermarket to buy a bottle of Scotch, and you find out that the only thing available is blended. You want a single malt, and the supermarket manager tells you that the purveyers of Scotch have conspired to buy up all the single malt and sell it to the French. So when the guy in the pub offers to give (not sell, GIVE) you a bottle of single malt, you take it. (But of course, before drinking it, you test it on the parrot.)