@skelband
The question is not remotely meaningless and facile. It is a legitimate and very concrete question that anyone proposing to reshape a society must face. It is part of making the command decisions that all leaders of man are required to make.
Example: we have the technology to end all traffic accidents within our lifetime. All autonomous, human-driven cars could be eliminated; replaced by Googlecar-robotic minicabs or a complex virtual-rail system (strips of tracking material down each road, driven by robots festooned with sensors that avoid hitting babies, cats, etc.) No country in the world is moving towards building such infrastructure and banning personal vehicles, despite the multitudes this would save every year.
Why?
Simply put: it's too expensive. The cost is not simply money, but an aspect of personal freedom. You could not simply get in your car and drive somewhere. To enable freedom at that scale, every single lane on every single road and highway across the country would have to be retrofitted. So we could spend a staggering amount of money and some freedom to accomplish this goal, or we could spend an incomprehensible amount of money.
The point is that we choose to do neither. Our leaders - and by extension we, the people - accept the deaths everyone killed in a motor vehicle accident because the cost - money and freedom - are beyond what we are willing to pay. Those lives have a fixed value and saving them is just too expensive.
Oddly enough, I'm okay with that. That's a decision that we make as a nation about our own lives. We are saying "we accept this risk upon ourselves and our children and our loved ones in exchange for not expending our resources on that particular safety net." We all accept the risks, we all reap some part of the rewards for not spending those resources.
That is fundamentally different from "blood minerals" because here we are simply writing off people who have no say whatsoever in the process. We are faced with a very tangible, very real choice: how much are we as a society willing to pay to stop rape, torture, murder and maiming of other sapient beings in another society?
Our choice is simple: Is $32 /device too much to ask us to pay to put an end to that? Gather up the number of people murdered, raped, tortured and maimed and do the fucking maths.
When you say "no, that's too much to pay in order to stop this shit from happening" then you have discovered your personal threshold for the value of a human life. You are unwilling to pay $X / shiny gizmo to prevent the suffering of X people thus you value each life at ($X * number of devices shipped into your nation) / individuals involved.
This is completely different maths from a society accepting risks collectively (as in the balance between freedom and security), a doctor performing triage or a military commander making a command decision. This is us, with the power in our hands to stop the suffering of people who do not posses the power to stop it on their own.
Anyone who cannot understand the above is a sociopath. Pure and simple.
The only relevant question is "how much is too much for us to pay?"
Everything else involving this discussion becomes a two-step process:
1) Get the cost of action below the "how much is too much" line so that we can take initial action.
2) Continue to grind the cost of action as low as possible so as to weed out inefficiency.
For the truly hard-boiled sociopaths who give no fucks whatsoever, the "how much is too much" amount will be zero, or damned close too.
Indeed, there exists a category of disconnected number-nerd types who will seize upon the fact that taking action now might not be the most efficient possible action, cost-wise, and thus naysay and holler.
They might support action if that action could be "proven" to be the most efficient possible action to take, cost-wise. Of course, since that is proving a negative, it's possible for them to constantly demand action never be taken because it is impossible to be sure that we are being absolutely efficient, that not one penny of waste exists in the solution.
I have nothing but the utmost loathing and lack of respect for such individuals.
1) Determine "how much is too much" to pay to end the suffering of other sapient beings.
2) Get the cost of action below the "how much is too much" line so that we can take initial action.
3) Continue to grind the cost of action as low as possible so as to weed out inefficiency.
Any other path of action is quite simply saying "the possibility of cost inefficiency exists, which may make me pay more than the absolute minimum possible to resolve the problem. Thus we should not solve the problem."
Adding "until we have agreed upon what the most efficient possible means is and agreed to use that means" doesn't make you any less a goddamned monster than if you hadn't added it.
I'm all for efficiency. But we can work to make a process more efficient after we've implemented a more inefficient version of the same process. When the lives of sapient beings (especially those who have no say in the risk/reward balance whatsoever) are at stake, you work with what you have and then continue putting in effort to make it the process you have better and more efficient.
These are lives we're talking about. Not delaying some purchase agreement so we can grind an extra $0.10 per unit off the vendor.
Anyone who cannot get the difference really, truly is a sociopath...and I am completely unable to respect them at all. You can the lot of you call me whatever names you want, but on this I promise you you will never change my mind.