Statistical risk comparisons can normalize accepting innocent deaths as collateral cost

Evidence

The second part of the comparative defense contrasts the size of the risk of wrongful execution with fatality rates for other activities. Death penalty proponent Wesley Lowe (The death penalty in the United States, 2011) complains that people find the “slim risk” of wrongful executions “unbearable” but “accept the average 45,000 person a year death toll in this nation due to car wrecks.” Continuing with the comparative justification, there is “much paranoia on the slimmest and unlikely of risks,” he stated, but tolerance of “mass murders and genocides.” Lowe even cites Joseph Stalin for his “insight on human nature,” in risk assessment when he said, “One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are statistics.” This statistical defense of the death penalty masks the utilitarian morality that it is acceptable to sacrifice a few innocent people for the benefit of many. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1926

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth researching how risk-comparison rhetoric (car deaths vs wrongful executions) functions across other policy debates.
• CANDY: A death penalty advocate citing Stalin’s ‘a million deaths are statistics’ is a compact, conversation-stopping line.
• XREF: connects to: Formalized risk regulation would still fail to register regret over tragic choices — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 72; Pricing statistical lives obscures harms that are real only at the collective scale — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 301