Quote Originally Posted by EyeKhan View Post
So people's value changes as they take action in life, like commit crimes or accumulate skills. Example - teenagers are mostly worthless, criminal or not, their value being entirely encapsulated in potential, which is very difficult to quantify accurately (or separate from life circumstance for that matter). So killing a teenager is not as serious a crime as killing a graduate student in medicine. And killing that student is not as serious a crime as killing a doctor with a 5 year practice, and so on. And killing unskilled laborers, depending on the job market, is only slightly worse than killing a teenager - after all, how much can you value the actions of an adult man that lead him to work retail for a living? Very interesting indeed.
Since I'm on board with death penalty for murderers it seems pretty obvious that the difference in theoretical value of a life won't change the sentence.

Furthermore the *legal* idea of all people being equal is very different than the reality that all people are equal. Even if two people have grossly different value and worth I certainly wouldn't want the fucking government to be making that determination.