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Comment by sbmassey | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the punishment for murder ought to decrease as world population increases.

Not the punishment, but to make the analogy more precise: society's "interest" in individual murders does decrease proportionally with its own size.

In a village, a murder is the talk of town. In a city, we don't even know.

So, yes; GPs point, while cold and calculating in the way only actuaries can sometimes be, was a fair point nonetheless.

Well, but (by the same metric) the punishment is already reduced. If you execute someone for murder today, you're only executing 1/7.7B of total population.

(I agree, it's kinda silly metric.)

No. For the victim it's still a 100% loss.

And the victim's loved ones.

What if you murder someone that everybody hates, and who in turn hated everybody?

Those are the murders that the police frequently don't expend a lot of effort in investigating.

There's actually a lot of murders that never get solved.

It's hard to argue the world wouldn't be a better place, but I think it's hard to know where to draw the line. It's all fine until you're in the minority, then I can't imagine you'd want people killing someone you like and respect even if they're nearly universally despised. It's a slippery slope probably best avoided.

The damages from murder aren’t calculated relative against population count.

But it's a thought provoking question because the impact to society is.

(from a purely; sociopathic standpoint anyway)

I think that was his point. It was a subtle jab at the GP's comment of using global population as a benchmark for the severity of a sinking ship.

Perhaps it should instead increase as the average lifespan increases.

Which would imply that the punishment for killing a child should be more severe than the punishment for killing an old man. And that killing a cancer patient shouldn't be punished as harshly as killing a healthy person.

There is definitely a good argument there. A child has far more potential years of life left than an elderly person, so killing them seems worse. Perhaps that's one reason why we tend to think so badly of child murderers.

Of course, in reality (at least the American judicial system), punishment is usually based more on other factors, such as motive. So premeditatedly killing an old man because you wanted to steal his stuff is punished more than killing a child purely by accident.

FWIW, I don't really believe that the punishment should increase with increased lifespan, I was just giving a contradictory example based on different numbers.

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