[zardo]

>If your model contains infinities, it's automatically unhelpful; that takes you into Pascal's Wager territory. If the damage is infinitely bad, then it it would justify draconian measures against even trivial risks of too many plastic bags. But however bad they are, they're not infinitely bad. Such a model would justify arbitrarily high bag fees, not some piddling ten cents with the hope of changing long-term consumer behavior.

Sometimes that's the reality of the situation, there are things that cannot be priced. That's why we don't consider a murder tax an acceptable way to deal with homicide.

[SilasX]

We also don't treat murder as being infinitely bad, and we reject policies that would decrease the murder rate because they would cost us in terms of something else we value e.g. privacy and convenience.

[zardo]

I didn't mean to imply that it has infinitely negative monetary value. I mean that it is a sort of wrong that cannot be undone by money.

[SilasX]

It's the same principle -- however bad some harm X is in the abstract (be it death or environmental catastrophe), it doesn't justify arbitrary measures to fight it, be it more cameras tracking your movement or $20/kg taxes on plastic bags, because in every practical sense the actual harm is bounded.