You're asking a philosophical question about what is still fundamentally an economics problem.
Suppose we have a program which is saving lives for $50M each. There are other ways to spend the money that would save lives for $10,000 each. If we have $50M, should we save one life or 5000? This is not an academic trade off, it's what actually happens whenever the government allocates money to something with poor cost/benefit because there actually are ways to save lives or do other highly valuable things for even less than that amount of money and we don't have unlimited resources.
Suppose we have a program which is saving lives for $50M each. There are other ways to spend the money that would save lives for $10,000 each. If we have $50M, should we save one life or 5000? This is not an academic trade off, it's what actually happens whenever the government allocates money to something with poor cost/benefit because there actually are ways to save lives or do other highly valuable things for even less than that amount of money and we don't have unlimited resources.