You're just committing to the bad abstraction again. Driving drunk is worse than speeding by exactly the amount that it increases the probability that you hurt someone. Which in that case is a lot, and so the fine should be proportionally a lot higher.
"You can't bring them back" isn't any less true for someone who kills someone driving 65MPH in a 55MPH zone -- or 55MPH in a 55MPH zone. The only difference is the probability, which is a difference in quantity rather than kind.
> No amount of money can bring them back.
Neither can it bring back the person hit by a bus because the government didn't have that money to spend fixing a bad intersection. Should we really let two families lose loved ones to that intersection when they could be saved with the money that not deterring a risk taker generates, even if that risk ultimately kills one person? What about the family who lost someone but the compensation allowed the survivors to live somewhere safer or afford better medical treatment and that saved someone else?
What you really want to be arguing is that we should never be trading money for lives. Everyone viscerally feels kind of that way. But that doesn't work. There is always a marginal safety improvement that would save additional lives in exchange for additional money. Any time you choose a smaller number of lives over a larger amount of money, what you're really doing is choosing a smaller number of lives over a larger number of lives.
"You can't bring them back" isn't any less true for someone who kills someone driving 65MPH in a 55MPH zone -- or 55MPH in a 55MPH zone. The only difference is the probability, which is a difference in quantity rather than kind.
> No amount of money can bring them back.
Neither can it bring back the person hit by a bus because the government didn't have that money to spend fixing a bad intersection. Should we really let two families lose loved ones to that intersection when they could be saved with the money that not deterring a risk taker generates, even if that risk ultimately kills one person? What about the family who lost someone but the compensation allowed the survivors to live somewhere safer or afford better medical treatment and that saved someone else?
What you really want to be arguing is that we should never be trading money for lives. Everyone viscerally feels kind of that way. But that doesn't work. There is always a marginal safety improvement that would save additional lives in exchange for additional money. Any time you choose a smaller number of lives over a larger amount of money, what you're really doing is choosing a smaller number of lives over a larger number of lives.