Many feel our societal responsibility supercedes the financial
benefit of purchasing goods from companies that oppress their
workers through substandard wages and working conditions, and who
follow unsafe environmental practices. Moral responsibility is an
important consideration in public policy.
Dear Editor,
Many feel our societal responsibility supercedes the financial benefit of purchasing goods from companies that oppress their workers through substandard wages and working conditions, and who follow unsafe environmental practices. Moral responsibility is an important consideration in public policy. To the extent we have a choice in supporting a casino, we bear a societal responsibility for the good or ill that derives from the gambling practices of that enterprise. I am open, but I suspect that any reasoning to the contrary is largely rationalization. I’m not sure I know why, but the evidence appears ample that gambling is, for some percentage of the population, an addictive behavior. Bills are unpaid, jobs are lost, houses foreclosed, spouses and children abused, families broken … hardly a “mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services.”
We’d like to call it entertainment, but clearly something more is going on here. We can turn our eyes and drive on our widened highways to our local jobs and say there is nothing we can do about it. Or we can shoulder our societal responsibility and choose to not invest our community in an enterprise with such high human costs.
Terri Hill, Hollister
