Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by SilasX 3716 days ago
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.
1 comments

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.
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.