You could ask exactly the same question about any job whose effects include causing harm to someone. The same, but I don't think exactly so - I do put ending someone's existence on an entirely different plane from 'harm'. It's not worse, per se, but I do think it isn't useful to compare the two kinds of decision... what I was thinking about wasn't the cost-benefit analysis involved, but the kind of thought process that lets you compare someone's life against anything else in the first place. Granted, I might be thinking about a conceptual gap that many/most other people don't share... this seems to tie in with lizw's comment below.
Which is where the analogy comes in - it's to do with the kind of people who will make that decision, the commenters and readers, rather than the ones who will carry it out, the characters in the story.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2006-03-29 09:45 pm (UTC)Which is where the analogy comes in - it's to do with the kind of people who will make that decision, the commenters and readers, rather than the ones who will carry it out, the characters in the story.