The line between deciding that a particular level of harm is acceptable, and accepting it by default, is blurry. And yet allowing, through inaction, a human being to come to harm is not functionally or morally different than deliberately harming them. And so we wash our hands of responsibility by telling ourselves we didn't do anything. But who are we fooling?

If that definition were taken, and people were moral, you could infinitely blackmail moral people by threatening harm.

But here the decision making is localized to individuals, and their decisions can formally be translated into pricing human life. I'd hate to be the one having to make these calls.

I mean, various insurances price human lives already, so it's not exactly novel, but here the decisions directly cause these tradeoffs to play out (whereas e.g. a life insurance does not cause a death for monetary gain).

We have incredible amount of regulations on what personal vehicles can do and how they can be made. We did not just accepted deaths from automobiles, we wrote driving rules, mandate seat bells, automobile makers have to prove their cars pass safety tests.

Yet we still have dozens of thousands of people dying from them every year and nobody stops sleeping at night at the same time.

Unites States have 35,000 to 40,000 car crashes deaths per year. It is what we get. Cumulative Covid deaths so far were 90,694 and it is not done yet.

> nobody stops sleeping at night at the same time

When driving deaths go up, people do react. There are driving safety campaigns, dont drive drunk campaigns, wear seatbelts campaigns. The roads are changed, signs are put up, speed limits are placed.

> When driving deaths go up, people do react. There are driving safety campaigns, dont drive drunk campaigns, wear seatbelts campaigns. The roads are changed, signs are put up, speed limits are placed.

Yes, but these show marginal improvements. I don't think you can make the case that any of these measures, even combined, would be able to reduce the death toll by even 50% over time. It means that, all in all, we are pretty much willing to sacrifice at least X amount of people per year for a number of reasons.