If it Saves One Life and Other Meretricious Lies

It’s not unusual that power-mad politicians justify depriving us of liberty using the appeal to emotion:“If it saves one life.” Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo justified the statewide shutdown with this poppycock: “And if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” Former president Obama said “If we save even one life from gun violence, it’s worth it.” Then vice president Joe Biden endorsed that: “As the President said, if your actions result in only saving one life, they’re worth taking.”

This is not justifiable constitutionally any more than it is factually: These actions often cost far more lives than the theoretical one life saved. Everything in life is a tradeoff:

 If we really believed that any law is justified if it saves just one life, we would require all Americans to pass a mental health evaluation on a regular basis or be institutionalized (more than 38,000 Americans commit suicide annually). We would outlaw all motor vehicles (almost 35,000 Americans die in vehicle accidents annually). We would require all houses to be single-story structures (more than 26,000 die in falls annually). We would ban alcohol (almost 17,000 die annually from alcohol-related liver disease). We would require people to be certified as swimmers before allowing them into any large body of water (more than 3,500 die from drowning annually). We would prohibit women from getting pregnant unless they had no family history of birth complications (more than 900 American women die in childbirth annually).

Of course, none of these things will ever happen, nor should they. Life is full of dangers that cannot be legislated away.

My online friend Alex Bensky nailed it:

They don’t mean “if it saves just one life” anyway…  and nobody does.

When I was substitute teaching, a few years ago someone brought this up in a high school class, I forget the particular policy the girl was urging, and I suggested that we don’t in fact believe this. “If you gave me the power to make laws,” I said, “I could save ten thousand or more lives a year but no one here would support how I would do it.”

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