Weird how characters in science fiction often go on about "the species". I care about "the species" about as much as I care about the charge on an electron or the melting point of caesium. It's *people* I care about - or not, as the case may be.
@dpiponi This made me think about why we consider the crime of genocide to be worse than just killing an equal number of random people. Genocide is defined as destroying "a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
"Genocide, especially large-scale genocide, is widely considered to signify the epitome of human evil"
I think this is similar to considering murder worse than an action that will on average increase the amount of early deaths by 1 (e.g. emitting some amount of dust).
My intuition in both situations is that the reason is that murder/genocide can be used for coercion in a great multitude of ways.
