Originally posted by WheelyI don't know how you could measure the degree to which a person scarring changes their outlook or diminishes their opportunities and leads to them not achieving their full potential.
You actually believe that someone having sex with someone else who is married is as irresponsible as someone driving 80mph around city streets while drunk?
Most people are not emotionally scarred by sex you know.
How many resources are wasted in a divorce? How much duplication of service is required when a couple splits and hopefully shares the custody of their children in an adult civil manner.
How much therapy has to be paid for, by those who have been scarred. From the teenagers who were barely getting a grip on their own development when their parents decided to get jiggy with others to the young adults themselves who by jumping in and embracing life and love whenever and wherever it called them, and find to their dismay that they missed the starters gun and are way behind their self actualization, self developmental goals/dreams.
Unless the drunk driving at 80mph hits and kills a pedestrian the chances are that only property damage will ensue. But as unfortunate as the possibility of that drunk killing a pedestrian could be, the probability of it occurring is about as likely as the disgruntled ex committing a crime of passion and murdering the object of their desire.
On the one hand we have property damage which at worst may represent a few weeks labor to repay, on the other we have psychological trauma that can lay submerged and repressed for years to eventually manifest itself in destructive corrosive relationships that can have a sustained emotional as well as an economic impact on more than just the original participants in the infidelity.
Just an aside about shoplifting. In the US an ipod nano costs about $150. US minimum wage ranges between $5.15 to $7.93/hr depending on state. Average non farm non supervisory private production workers earn about $16.80/hr. So ultimately stealing an ipod at worst could represent maybe 23 hrs worth of average minimum labor or if taking the average non specialized wage rate only 8 hrs of labor. If you start looking at technical or professional rates of pay that ipod represents less and less labor to replace.
Yet we make much of the ipod being stolen in what it means to the possible breakdown of society than the injury suffered by unquantifiable emotional factors. I just think that the cost of the latter far outweighs any cost of the former to any society.