Cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis is an abdication of moral reasoning and responsibility. There is no such thing as an abstract life, only concrete realizations. What if the victim of an avoidable fatality is the one person who had they survived had the skills/insight/vision to literally save humanity from extinction?

I can accept an argument that there are societal tradeoffs that we must make that involve the sacrifice of human lives (obviously we should not try to remove risk to the extent that we live in sterile protective bubbles), but we should be honest about what we are doing and not hide behind some phony numbers that mask the fact that money, and hence numerical value, isn't an imaginary construct and that lives are fungible under this value system.

I further think that if we have an honest conversation instead of hiding behind quantitative analysis, we may actually have a productive dialogue about risk tradeoff and accountability. Perhaps if there is a wide gap between the bean counters and the bleeding hearts, there is a third possibility that needs to be explored.