(February 14, 2013 at 2:15 am)Tiberius Wrote:(February 13, 2013 at 4:06 pm)Chuck Wrote: He did. The question is whether, pour encourager les autres, an exception should have been made.Given the amount of lives he probably saved, I hope so.
Of course the strictly economic interpretation says one ought to be awarded not for the whole value of one's products and actions, but only for the incremental one adds to the value one's products and actions.
So his reward should not be based on how many lives he saved, but only on how many fewer lives would have been saved had he been replaced by his most likely replacement.
In this sense the net incremental number of lives he saved is likely to be somewhere around zero.
The point of rewarding him is not for the value of his service, but for the reputation of the service itself. A service that is not seen to reward those who served would deter volunteers, regardless of the bullshit about patroitism being its own reward.
