> The answer is: it doesn't matter which is worse. Both destroy lives in different ways.

Though it is very natural for people to think "how bad I am" or "how bad is that company compared to the other companies" and so on. Also in the end the justice system has to sentence these crimes and there has to be some kind of "badness" metric that should be seen as fair by the general public. I don't think this "they are all just crimes" approach works.

Sure, I understand why people want to. I just think it's a futile effort. In order to determine whether bankrupting 1000 people is worse than killing 1 person you have to quantify all those variables, including the value of a human life (an actuary will gladly do that for you). By some measures, say economic impact, killing a single person may not matter at all, depending on who they are. What people want is to quantify morality. Good luck.

However what we do see that correlates to some "badness" metric is the punishment we mete out for crimes. Years of imprisonment is a simple, linear measure that can be used to measure crimes against one another.

You see it all the time. So and so killed a person and got X years in prison, but this other guy ran a Ponzi scheme and got Y years in prison. Whether X is greater than Y, and your viewpoint, will determine if you think that's fair or not. But my original point is I think it's a rather pointless determination to begin with because it isn't really telling you anything. It doesn't answer the question of whether one crime is worse than another because that's fundamentally a philosophical question that I don't think can be measured.

Right on.

Similarly, people often conflate something morally good with something morally bad and ask/argue ”If I mix the two is it overall good or bad?". Which similarly doesn’t matter.

The good should never be conflated with the bad. Otherwise, the good will just be used for rationalizing the bad...

(That’s not to say morality is not somewhat ambiguous. I just often see people trying to justify immoral behavior by doing this)

> Fraud and spam are crimes that ruin lives in their own ways.

I never denied that. I wanted to know what exactly is the fraud that the company is causing. Also, spamming is all about matter or perspective. All major consumer companies send billions of emails. I would love to know what this company was doing differently .

I suspect that if someone did bankrupt a thousand people through fraud you are going to have a number of suicides on their hands.

Agreed. If you account for second-order effects, the result could look pretty grim. That's why I'm of the opinion that some white-collar crimes can absolutely be worse than violent ones - including murder - and that they should be punished accordingly.