Honestly, both of these, the car accident and the gas tank are being treated exactly the same here. You've looked at the given "truth", evaluated it, and then come to a decision on whether it's worth it or not. It's explicitly making that decision and that trade off.

what andrepd said felt far more like a handwave

>However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society. It's impossible we'll ever find otherwise.

It's a denial of a hypothetical, which is not engaging with the core point, but instead attacking the analogy instead. It's a standard (and often unintentional) logical fallacy.

This is my interpretation of the conversation. Please avoid approaching this from the "perfect hypotheticals" perspective, their perfection is besides the point.

A: We have a perfect target metric, and we've found that C, which we philosophically like, performs far worse than B, which we find abhorrent

B: There's no perfect metric, and if there were, we've already found C is better, and there's no way how C could be worse.

It's deliberately avoiding the point.

To break it down even further:

>However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society.

we've already found C is better

>It's impossible we'll ever find otherwise.

there's no way how C could be worse.