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by Nursie 1675 days ago
That logic wasn't meant to be exhaustive. Even an irreplaceable thing can be recovered from a thief. A life taken cannot be.

FWIW I don't believe that even making the comparison is valid. By the time you're weighing up stuff against literal human life, you've already gone wrong.
1 comments
pclmulqdq 1675 days ago
We weigh stuff against human lives all the time. Cars, bridges, buildings, and industrial machines all make tradeoffs between safety and cost. We generally value a random life at about $7-10 million - much less than a faberge egg. In reality, adding up all the grief of loved ones, $7 million might be about right.

Treating life as some sort of priceless treasure really is divorced from reality too. I think most people would choose to shoot an arsonist before they could burn the Mona Lisa, and that's totally rational.

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Nursie 1674 days ago
We tend to evaluate risk like that. We don't directly talk about buying a death for a certain amount of money.

> I think most people would choose to shoot an arsonist before they could burn the Mona Lisa, and that's totally rational.

I think you might be surprised at how many didn't think that was all that reasonable.

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alex_sf 1673 days ago
This modern softness is absurd. Let the Mona Lisa burn, let the Library of Alexandria burn, bomb the Louvre. It's ok, it's never worth harming someone to prevent.

We'll be polite and refer to it as pacifism, but the truth is it's cowardice.

This extreme pacifism, if actually practiced by anyone not so absurdly privileged to be able to take that stance, would lead to the downfall of civilization.

> I think you might be surprised at how many didn't think that was all that reasonable.

The magnitude of my disgust would seem to be growing, yes.

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