conuly

“There are hundreds of cases this could help solve,” said Cindy Rudometkin of the Polly Klaas Foundation. “And even if it helped solve one case — imagine if that child returned home was yours.”

Also, I'm wary of appeals to emotion like this one - "Won't someone think of the children?" I don't think they're always conducive to the most sensible decisions.

Imagine if someone proposed surgically implanting GPS tracking chips into children from birth so they could be tracked remotely. "Even if it helped solve one case - imagine if that child returned home was yours."

I still think that would be overly invasive for the proposed benefit: or in other words, that the ends do not automatically justify the means.

We live with a certain measure of risk every day: calculated risk (well, calculated to some extent), because it's a trade-off with convenience.

We could reduce a whole lot of deaths every year by banning automobiles. (Over 30'000 fatal crashes per year in the US according to this .gov site (http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx), for example: far, far more than people who die by terrorist attacks in the US.) But do we? Is this even seriously proposed? No, because most people consider the benefits of allowing automobiles to far outweigh the risks they pose.

So similarly, one should not simply say that "there are benefits, so we should do this", but consider the entire ramifications and realise, that yes, a certain amount of risk is considered acceptable, as a compromise. It sounds bitter when you look at an individual, specific, concrete casualty of those risks we take as a society, but pretending that we can eliminate risks while keeping the rest of life the same is not particularly useful, it seems to me.