Comment by granite26 on Boredom vs. Scope Insensitivity · 2009-09-25T16:37:42.979Z · LW · GW

Valuing lives on a sliding scale makes sense to me... Saving 1 person for X dollars is good citizenship, 100 lives at 100*X is being taken advantage of.

Maybe that's the long and short of it though. We aren't 'buying' lives, we're 'buying' communality.