Fair, but had they completed their contracts under duress, who's to say they wouldn't be executed anyway? Those people were dead from the word go.

There's very little morality to be found in wars, even Star Wars.

What we need is a Millenium crossover. Time travelers show up and get all the innocents off the Death Star right before the torpedoes drop. Problem solved!

I remember reading in an expanded universe comic of some kind that storm troopers are actually paid a fair bit above the galactic average, and that the first order is actually the ones who would hold you at gunpoint.

If the choice is between working on a literal genocide machine and dying, the moral choice is dying. Granting an exception for the guy who sabotages the genocide machine by building in a way to blow it up.