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> We're talking houses vs houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different? If we'd be talking paperclips vs paperclips would that be morally si
by rootlocus 9y ago
> We're talking houses vs houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different?
If we'd be talking paperclips vs paperclips would that be morally similar? Or is the monetary value of houses somehow large enough to justify a similarity to human lives?
- danschumann 9y agoLets say you lose 10000 dollars worth of paper clips. Big deal, buy more. But if you lose 10000 dollars worth of photos, computers, files, etc, it is a big deal because they are harder to replace.
- parenthephobia 9y agoPeople are harder to replace than houses.
- thedaemon 9y agoThere are more people born each day (400,000 a day) than there are houses built each day (4,657 a day). So I'd say no, houses are harder to replace than people.
- NiceGuy_Ty 9y agoYou can replace a house to the extent that the old residents are happy with the new house. You can't really replace a deceased family member with someone else.
- mdemare 9y agoI'm pretty sure more than 1.7M houses get built every year worldwide.
- mcbits 9y agoIf you count "dwellings" or "housing units" then surely yes. Many/most of those will be apartments and multi-tenant buildings rather than houses per se. And then there are all the "houses" built from salvaged materials in poor countries. Not sure if you'd want to count those. A person living in such a structure would still be considered homeless in many places.
- jwilk 9y agoWhere did you get these numbers?
- octothorp3 9y agoPeople are self replicating, houses are not. Give them sufficient food and time, and there will soon be too many of them. It would be more accurate to say 'People are more emotionally attached to people than houses'.
- rootlocus 9y agoYou're just arguing that houses are worth more than paperclips, but on another metric: sentimental value / effort spent. Even so, none of those things matter (photos, computer files, etc) when you balance them with a human life.
- maxerickson 9y agoIf they are harder to replace it is likely they are worth more than $10,000. Maybe only to the people involved, but it's likely that a fairly accurate dollar value could still be assigned to the loss.