The leader of the United States encouraging law enforcement and the military to shoot American citizens for looting, that's the line.
Is this supposed to be bad? I actually wish that our own PM had done the same. I am sure that the citizens of a lot of countries that live under the rule of criminal syndicates, looters, and highwaymen would agree.
It seems that the US citizens are fine with state mandated violence as long as it does not include them. Nothing happened regarding https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018041 for example.
The human life of the people looting your property is more important than the well-being of you and your family who will be in debt after that, I see.
Regardless, this seems to be your personal value, something that I (and most people that I know) do not seem to share - even the US constitution and laws do not seem to share it, after all it is legal to shoot someone invading your home. I have no grief to give to someone who died while trying to invade my home and loot my property. They are dead due to their own choices.
> A looted store can be repared, restocked, rebuilt
For free? It can be a lifetime's worth for some. Are you willing to pay it out of your own pockets? If there were enough people willing to do so I would support your statement, but that does not seem to be the case.
Your argument here seems to be that human life is worth less that the value of looted goods. So, if someone looted a TV, you think their life holds less value than a TV?
I want to interpret your reply charitably, but I’m really struggling with this sentence.
The answer seems self evident: Yes. Obviously. Without a doubt of course a human life (even a life that is doing something like looting) is worth more than the value of what it’s carrying.
Should we stop someone looting things? Yes. Should we kill them just over the theft? No, of course not.
The logical hole in this is that when one traces back "why" personal property has such a high value, the only source of its value comes back to it being thought of as an inseparable part of the life-experience of the person who owns it. To contrive an example, let's say someone's a pre-computer author (i.e. before easily duplicable backups), writing one of those life's-work novels, and they have a single copy of the manuscript of their magnum opus - to threaten to destroy the manuscript is to threaten their life's work; to threaten everything they poured their life's passion and effort into. It's conceivable that to destroy it might literally kill them by driving them to suicide.
But that's exactly the hole in the logic: at it's most extreme where property really is equatable with the value of a human life, the only thing that gives this property any absolute moral value is the value of the human life and passion that went into building it. If you've then got a conflict between "a holder of property" and "someone who wants to destroy that property", really it's just a threat on your "life".
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One is then simply asking a question of whether it's justified to take another person's life to protect your own.
Most secular ethics frameworks say no; christianity and buddhism repeatedly and explicitly say no, over and over again, including direct quotes from christ himself.