> A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.

So don't go around stealing catalytic converters. Same deal with states with "stand your ground laws". It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.

And on the "replacing" part- on whose dime? What if someone's only means of transportation is affected, and they lose wages or outright lose their job? Are you going to pay for it? Of course not.

No, a better reason to not allow shooting of common thieves is that you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this, but they either don't care or are incompetent.

Which leaves the ordinary upstanding citizen stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Man extracts taxes from their earnings, and thieves who ruin lives get a slap on the wrist because "lives are oh precious".

Nobody is forcing people to risk their lives to infringe on other people's rights. Whenever I see a news article about a criminal killed in the act, I never think "I wish they were alive.", I think "I wish they never went down that path in the first place that lead to that scenario."

If I kill you over a $2K catalytic converter, my sanity is gone.

I could never sleep at night without thinking about what I have done.'

A life is worth a lot more than $2k for my sanity.

That's not cliché; Texas is the only state that applies stand-your-ground to crimes against property alone.

You’re removing context by referring to a generic “human life” as if we don’t have more information than that.

Ah, but that’s not the choice. The choice is whether there exist probability p, life L, and material possession m such that the possession is worth more than p times L.

The conclusion that there is no such triad seems clearly absurd since we allow people to build things for us the construction of which offers them a non-zero chance of death.

It is reasonable to say that a precise frontier is not describable because of Sorites but to say no triad exists implies that you only participate in an economy consisting exclusively of zero risk behaviour[0] That seems improbable.

Once we’ve dealt with that, perhaps we may be able to conclude that catalytic converters exist on one side of the frontier or on the other side or perhaps we might say that they lie along the Sorites boundary.

0: we are not unreasonable. We might even choose to consider imperfect information about the risk, the risk being at a Pareto optimum, the risk being at optimum against counterfactual, etc.

No, your comment sounds incredibly privileged and naive.

its not about the money. its about the threat to your life.

A mugger may be stealing $50 in your wallet, but the crime is the threat to your life.

Life is pretty easy to make actually

This sounds great in theory, and I used to agree, but:

a. There's no guarantee against escalation, a property crime turns into a violent crime very easily.

b. Property crime can have a deep psychological impact on the victim - something the perpetrator demonstrably gives zero fucks about.

c. The police and justice system in 2026 don't care about prosecuting property crime. Having no recourse at all if you're being robbed (a common situation when defending your own property is effectively illegal because of the risk to the perpetrator) is grossly unfair.

The thief shouldn't value something more than his life then.

this is so untrue, gullible and naive. so if I steal your home, your car, your food, your water, and everything material, and you end up starving and dead or stranded on the side of a ride in a desert where no ones coming to help you - are you are saying that is ok since that stuff can be replaced?

You absolutely can cause death to a human and take a human life through material theft.

The life of most of the people who steal catalytic converters is not worth much.