[nkrisc]

Sure, I understand why people want to. I just think it's a futile effort. In order to determine whether bankrupting 1000 people is worse than killing 1 person you have to quantify all those variables, including the value of a human life (an actuary will gladly do that for you). By some measures, say economic impact, killing a single person may not matter at all, depending on who they are. What people want is to quantify morality. Good luck.

However what we do see that correlates to some "badness" metric is the punishment we mete out for crimes. Years of imprisonment is a simple, linear measure that can be used to measure crimes against one another.

You see it all the time. So and so killed a person and got X years in prison, but this other guy ran a Ponzi scheme and got Y years in prison. Whether X is greater than Y, and your viewpoint, will determine if you think that's fair or not. But my original point is I think it's a rather pointless determination to begin with because it isn't really telling you anything. It doesn't answer the question of whether one crime is worse than another because that's fundamentally a philosophical question that I don't think can be measured.