Hanno Sauer

“The existence of excellent reasons for curbing our need for punishment is particularly evident when we make political decisions simply because we want to see our desire for retribution satisfied, for example. The American philosopher Neil Sinhababu has calculated that for the cost of the Iraq War, every single one of the 3,000 or so pandas alive in the wild could have been given their own stealth plane (the price of one is more than US$700 million).49 Even if we may have thought the ‘war on terror’ was justified at first, we have to ask ourselves whether the murder of 3,000 innocent Americans on 11 September 2001 was appropriately compensated by sending more than 6,000 further Americans to their deaths, not to mention the hundreds of thousands who died on the Afghan and Iraqi sides, only to agree a peace treaty with the original enemy twenty years after the war started. An approach like this does not stand up to a cost–benefit analysis.”
― Hanno Sauer, The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality