“...It’s all dreadful; no life lost is insignificant...” [JayGalt, post 117]
A great many folks - Americans included - cleave to this sort of moral absolutism, and deem themselves superior. Not to say that it’s wrong or invalid, but out in the real world, scarcely anyone believes it - and they prove so by their actions, not their words. On a practical quotidian basis, one immediately runs into problems, trying to apply it in life.
If all lives are infinitely valuable, then the loss of one life is indistinguishable from the loss of one hundred, or one million; infinity times one hundred is the same as infinity.
If we punish a perpetrator for killing one person, practicality suggests we must visit greater punishment on the killer of 100. Imbuing the arithmetic with real force indicates we ought to punish them to a level 100 times “worse” - a move that may not be physically possible. If we exact the death penalty for a single murder, we cannot execute the perp in our 100-murder example 100 times (can’t even do it ten times). We might consider various tortures, but our own moral code - imposed by self-appointed arbiters with no stake in any outcome - already throws roadblocks in our way, when it doesn’t ban such cruelties outright, a notion most of us agree with anyway.
The value of a single life cannot be defined in the absolute abstract sense. It always involves measurement and measurement is always and everywhere irreducibly relative.
Value, then, has to be defined in relation to the community. Any useful definition of “community” must includes some sense of its size - in a word, numbers. The loss of one person means more to a community of ten people, than a community of 100. Or of 1000. When the community (city, nation, whatever) reaches a size of one million, the death of one may not even be noticed by most of the other community members (indeed, when we achieve totals of a million or more, deaths - and births - are going on through natural processes every day). The sad fact of one murder may mean incalculable loss and dismal suffering to immediate family and close friends & colleagues, but citizens on the other side of town may not even learn of it, until someone else tells them.
It’s the same, inside large professional organizations. The death (by murder, or by enemy action) of one private soldier rocks his entire fire team, or even his platoon, but his division will not suffer any serious degradation to its operational capability. The mission will still get done.
Since the squabble over which group suffered the “worst” seldom refers to actual numbers, it gets carried out in moralistic terms rather than references to reality. Doubles the absurdity - if indeed such a numeric reference has any meaning here.
All lives have finite value which differs depending on earning power & years. Any insurance agency can give specifics (for their industry) of the worth of a particular life in case of accidental death and routinely set values on lives in the form of insurance. Juries set life worth in $ and in level of punishment. For each person and for the people who love them, their life value is invaluable and cannot be counted in $.
There are many ways to measure the value of a life but not to value and mourn each individual death we learn of, is to dehumanize ourselves. The tragedies we touched on earlier involve so many lives that our minds numb at the task of grasping the horror of the loss, the inhumanity that caused the loss, at the pain of those who dies and of those who loved them and at the lost potential.
The understanding of that level of loss is contained in your reply when you refer to the loss to the community. I am unable to really grasp the implications of any of those massive losses for more than a short time before turning away back to life. As you say, the numbers game is not a realistic way to measure an event such as the holocausts referred to earlier in this thread. The loss is measured in the effect on the community, the nation, the specific group of related individuals and on the world.