Honestly I'm not prepared to make a judgment without actually visiting a sweatshop and interacting with the people there as well as their families. Maybe "it's debatable" was a bad phrase because I don't actually have enough facts to debate, period. But so far the arguments to the contrary hinge on treating people like the sum of their financial assets, which I don't think is true at all. My issues with the arguments so far (i.e. why I am not persuaded by them, NOT why I think other people should believe Sweatshops are evil) are this:
a) I frankly disagree with the statement "people are normally good at choosing what makes them better off." The whole point of a rationality blog, I thought, was that people are notoriously BAD at this and rationality makes them better at it. I know that I personally stuck around in a dead end job for way longer than necessary because it was the path of least resistance. Changing jobs is scary. You don't know for sure you'll be better off. There might not be multiple factories available in every area. The factories might have unspoken agreements about hiring practices to keep prices down. And while people aren't forced to work in the factories, part of the whole reason sweatshops get a bad wrap is emotional abuse that the employers dish out, which can impede people's judgment once they're in the situation.
b) the basic system seems to be one where families offer up sacrificial lambs. On person spends basically their entire waking life at a crappy job to support an extended family. This might or might not create an overall net bonus to utility, I don't know. I know my gut reaction says that's unfair. That may just be Western bias.
But my sense from what I've read is that the people in question face extensive pressure to make that choice. Interviews I've seen suggested that they aren't completely miserable and that they genuinely feel that staying is the right thing to do, but that they don't at all consider it a "good choice," just "the least bad choice."
If all that's available is a "least bad" choice, it's still important not to rearrange things in ways which result in a worse set of options.
Lately I've been thinking about all of the various services and products I consume and how pretty much all of them are bad for the world in one way or another, large or small. Some of the problems associated with them I am less concerned about. Some of them could be construed as good things (i.e. sweat shop labor DOES provide jobs, whatever impact it might or might not have on the overall quality of life).
In general I'd like to live my life having as minimal a negative impact on the world as possible. But "negative impact" is a hugely broad topic and there are a million variables to consider and I just don't have time.
The best solution, I think, would be to have a wikipedia-like website where individual people with knowledge of specific problems can start tagging specific products with the types of negative consequences associated with them, and (somehow) sort those consequences into categories that individuals can decide how much to worry about. Over time it could eventually become a fairly efficient way to track the utility value of things.
I'm sort of hoping something like this already exists, even if in an infant form, and that someone here knows about it. But I doubt it, so the I guess this falls mostly under the post category of "hey someone other than me should devote a bunch of time and energy to this project that I myself am not qualified to do." But maybe a few people here at least have a better idea than I do of the scope of the requirements for it, so the idea can be refined a bit.