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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Property can be replaced. Lives can't.

property < life at all times.

But I don't get back the time I spent acquiring the property. I can't replace the two weeks of work it would take to buy a new one. And what if it gets stolen again?

It sounds like you're saying that anybody who wastes my time deserves death? Pretty sure busybody neighbors would be far ahead of thieves in that line...

But you can get the property back or be financially made whole in a variety of ways.

This really is a bizarre line of reasoning.

I actually think your reasoning is bizarre. Not all life is equal.

> Not all life is equal.

That's not relevant to the argument at hand, nor is it a claim I have made.

You keep talking about how you can't take back killing. The thing is I don't want to take it back. The kind of person that would steal things that people rely on to survive has ceded their equal protection under the law.

> You keep talking about how you can't take back killing.

Yes, which is one of the things that makes killing different from property theft.

> The thing is I don't want to take it back.

That's not relevant to the discussion here, which was one in which posters were claiming that their property represents part of their life, time they cannot get back, and thus taking it is somehow equivalent to taking a life. My point was that this is a false equivalence.

You do not appear to be making such an equivalence argument, so it's hardly a surprise that my counterpoint doesn't apply to whatever your reasoning is.

It's like jumping into an argument about which shade of green is better and saying "My favourite colour is red". Uh, good for you I guess.

you can't replace any time, ever, under any circumstances. it's a one way trip.

Even if we assume that there is some kind of property-value-to-life exchange rate (that's not a given), by killing someone you are taking, potentially, decades of their life in exchange for the loss of your two weeks.

If you kill someone who has 30 years of their life remaining to avenge your lost two weeks, you are extracting a 780-fold punishment on them. Unless a geriatric steals your Ferrari, the numbers will be similarly lopsided in other examples.

We make new people all the time.

some of it not even on purpose

You can't replace the life of the dead person though, you've taken that forever.

Well you can’t replace anything, exactly. If your house burns down, and insurance builds a new one, it’s still a different house. Your dog dies and you get a new dog, it’s a different dog.

If you say, people can’t be replaced because they’re just inherently irreplaceable, that’s a tautology.

> If you say, people can’t be replaced because they’re just inherently irreplaceable, that’s a tautology.

This line of argument is entirely disingenuous. My life, once taken, cannot be given back to me. Neither can any substitute life.

By that logic it should be legal to kill people stealing things that are irreplaceable. Mona Lisa, Faberge Eggs, Mom's ashes?

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.

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.

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.

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.

irreplaceable does not imply valuable. Every rock is completely unique, and thus irreplaceable.

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