Scales¶
From a widely cited defense of the Black Lives Matter synthetic meme at Reddit:
… societally, we don’t pay as much attention to certain people’s deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don’t treat all lives as though they matter equally.
Two points:
(1) Some lives (and deaths) do matter far more than others,
obviously. Everyone knows this, when they’re not
high, even if they usually feel compelled to lie about it. (Some
lives, indeed, characterized by criminality and parasitism, are worth
less than nothing — and even considerably less.) Only bizarre
religious ideas could lead anybody to think the opposite.
(2) Western societies are very rapidly losing the ability to make sane
calls on the point, as exceptional productivity loses its
capacity to inspire attention, and the merely piteous usurps
its central cultural position.
In the absence of adaptive sensibilities, life insurance premiums — or some equivalent expression of undemonstrative, practical value-processing — will have to serve as a default.