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If you show up with a mob and try to burn my house down, I'll kill you, and I will almost certainly not be prosecuted for doing so. Is this an example of "regarding certain peoples' lives as a less sacred value than property"?
Drivers have an elevated chance of dying or being crippled in car crashes. Wingsuit enthusiasts run a much higher chance of dying or being crippled in wingsuit crashes. We maintain an insurance system for drivers, but do not maintain one for wingsuit enthusiasts. Is this an examples of "regarding certain peoples' lives as a less sacred value than property"?
Do you believe that choices made shouldn't influence apportionment of consequences of those choices?
Handy that we are not restricted to ultimate conclusions, then, and are entirely capable of balancing competing interests.
One of Nature's more useful qualities is that it IS. It provides a default. We can diverge from that default if doing so seems preferable, but that does not give you or anyone else grounds to demand a divergence. You do not get to claim that Nature is unjust in any meaningful sense.
Just so, though I get the impression that we differ on who Alice and Bob are, and to what degree they are culpable for the percentages in the first place.
That would be a case of self-defence; the individual persons in the mob are actively attempting to harm you. However, if your town has 1,000 $FOO, and you know that 990 of them are planning to attack you, but not which ones, you are not justified in declaring $FOO as a group to be guilty, killing all 1,000 of them, and claiming self-defence.
If no $FOO has tried to harm you, letting them die to save a tiny fraction of a percent on your tax bill is also not justifiable.
It's more a matter of seeking an ethical framework less amenable to gerrymandering for the benefit of one's ingroup/harm to one's outgroup.
The interest of "AIDS patients continuing to get the medication they need to live" > the interest of "your tax bill being slightly smaller".
And that default leaves behind piles of skulls. Many of those skulls are alarmingly tiny.
Someone getting medication that keeps them from dying of AIDS is preferable to them dying of AIDS.
And yet I am claiming that.
I would not want the medical system picking over every aspect of my lifestyle to decide whether I am worth saving; therefore I apply the Golden Rule, and oppose the same being done to my neighbour.
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