Just to give a sense of the sorts of comparisons we have to make, consider the following. We are surprisingly tolerant of death and destruction arising from “unnatural, man-made” causes when they occur on a continual and regular basis, but are extremely intolerant when they occur suddenly as discrete events even though the numbers involved are much smaller. For instance, each year more than a million and a quarter people die from car accidents worldwide, which is comparable to the number who die from lung cancer, the most common cause of cancer death.
