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Notes -
The full quote is, "Whosoever destroys one soul, it is as though he had destroyed the entire world. And whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the entire world." It refers not to government policy or action but to individual wickedness and acts of grace. It is also Talmudic in origin so its persuasiveness will vary.
But generally the meaning is about pulling a person into sin or pulling them from sin. What it means is your soul's fate will often not turn on the fact you've raised $1billion for charity or if you shoplift cigarettes to sell on street corners, rather it will often hinge on you coming across a person who's soul lies on the verge of two paths, on one path he becomes a healthy, relatively pious, member of the community, and on the other he becomes deranged and sinful. Say you are a tired ass dad who was cajoled into being a camp counselor and there is a sad kid. You can, destroy his soul, by taking advantage and raping him and sending him onto the path of drugs, booze, and homosexuality. Or you could uplift him and take him to the fitness center and teach him lifts and cardio and a sport. Now he's into fitness, teamwork, etc and is on the path to a good life. That would be your classic such situation.
Yes, its the total command of people's lives and hostility to dissent. A policy that benefits the community because people are being useful, and excludes people who are not is the Earned Income Tax Credit, and various child tax credits. People who don earn income or don't have children cant benefit from those things. Many such policies in the modern liberal system.
Government programs are always both overbroad and underinclusive. This is because they have to apply to massive populations. There will always be some portion of rich people who can by some loophole get food stamps, and some portion of genuinely hungry people who cannot. Such is a government program.
There is no cosmic justice in a government program. So consider the government program of marriage. Why does it exist? To simplify family formation because the government has an interest in the future children of the country. MF couples spontaneously create children in the common scenario. So government marriage was constructed as a policy, often borrowing heavily from religious marriage, which also only at the time applied to MF couples. Now, obviously some MF couples are infertile and some homosexual couples adopt children. So its imperfect at both fringes. But as we see with welfare, that must necessarily apply to any government program.
I will tie this back to one of your other statements:
This formulation just almost never works with government policies. Take immigration. There is your classic FOOBAR situation here no? Why should we allow American descendants of slaves to remain in the US, while not admitting all SSAs who want to come? Their difference is one of FOOBAR. Some had ancestors that were sent over, the others did not. The ones that did not would be better if they had been. But that isn't what we do. We aren't sending them all back or letting them all in. Because this frame is just a sort of deck stacking for either side "ethnically cleanse" or side "open borders". Its impractical to think this way when we are talking about large scale solutions to social problems.
These are both downstream of treating the individual human person as a means to an end, rather than an end in themself.
But they don't have to be.
The cost of the former is minuscule compared to other government inefficiencies and thus does not excuse the latter. If there are 11 applicants, 1 of whom needs x assistance to live and 10 amoral liars, and you cannot distinguish between them, or if the cost of doing so exceeds 10x, the morally correct action is to give assistance to all of them, even if it means Uncle Pennybags won't be able to afford a new yacht this year.
(If you can distinguish between them at a cost <10x, but Uncle Pennybags, instead of spending x on assistance and 5x or 2x or 0.25x on investigating fraud, would rather terminate the program, keep the 6x or 3x or 1.25x for his yacht fund, and let the one needy person starve to decrease the surplus population, we take him aside and explain what happened at Big Swamp Village.)
Then extend it only to couples who, supported by oath or affirmation, declare that they either
or
and otherwise leave gender out of it.
(I don't recall where I read this, but supposedly there was at least one tribe which explicitly had something akin to your attitude towards marriage; the marriage would only be finalised once the bride was pregnant and would sunset when their youngest child reached adulthood. If they didn't have or intend to have children, what they did behind closed doors would be of no concern to anyone else, regardless of gender. I'm not sure whether two people adopting children would have been considered eligible, but they probably would be if they had kept their system into the modern day, again regardless of gender.)
I believe, if not in 'open borders' sensu strictu, at least that the borders should be more open than they currently are. Thus I don't find this a convincing example.
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Dude.
If you're a camp counselor and you're even considering raping the kid, you should not endeavor to teach the kid a sport. That is NOT the normal dilemma faced by a normal tired dad.
Well of course, because people's decisions are the reflection of their soul. These are not the same tired dad. One is on the path to evil and one on the past to good. The point is that perhaps those on the outside don't, and may never know the difference. One guy does a perfectly small and positive thing and really improves the kid's life. The rapist is too extreme a comparison on the other side of the ledger, but perhaps the bad tired dad gives the kid some booze and weed to go away.
Anyways I consider this portion much more important:
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