Quote Originally Posted by Coidzor View Post
It's a very dangerous road to go down, though, and one that can very easily lead to saying that people's lives have no value, even if they're not criminals who have been tried and condemned to death as the punishment for their wrongdoing.
It is very dangerous, yes. However it seems a logical possibility if one wants to avoid the rather unsatisfying bit where you go "Sure Frank is a violent, abusive, racist who has killed seventeen people to date, in between selling heroine to toddlers. But these are traits that society needs so he has value!" Now a person may decide that the hypothetical Franks of the world aren't worth the ethical cost of killing, or that the baseline value of being a member of the species puts one in the class of things that we don't kill, but saying everything is valuable and can contribute is pretty obviously nonsense. Which in turn suggests that if you accumulate enough negative, non-contributing traits in a person they don't contribute, even in a gross (not net) sense. Ergo the need for a more satisfactory remedy than simply saying everything is valuable, which is the sort of coddling thing people post on Facebook to avoid feeling bad.