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Comment by snakeboy | Hacker News Reader

Let's not even get started on abortion...

Edit: I meant this as a joke, albeit in poor taste, I see it was not received well.

That being said, I do think that relativizing deaths in terms of "opportunity cost" does lead to some somewhat unpalatable moral conundra.

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The way my friend in an epidemiology program put it to me (two years ago) was "Everyone dies. The question then is when?"

Hard to argue with it. But it does lead to some places mainstream american morality would consider unpleasant.

What's the point of the question? What would you argue? Yeah, obviously everyone dies, but when is the important part. It's generally agreed that shortening someone's time to live is one of the biggest offenses possible (if not the biggest). How does that question change that notion?

It directly implies that if we prefer dying later to dying sooner (in almost all cases) that older peoples lives would have statistically less value. Which is anathema to many Americans. The only way around it is to say you are indifferent to when death is for people, which is also anathema to a lot of people. It’s a paradox of our ethical system.

If you consider that shortening someone's life is not a continuum but discreetly bad, then there is no paradox. Moreover, I consider that to be the only ethical way to view it. If you take the life expectancy of the victim when judging the killer, you may find yourself giving lighter sentences for those who kill impoverished people, who have a shorter life expectancy, than those who kill rich people.

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