Full Idea
There is often a big discrepancy between what a society will spend on saving the life of a known person in peril, and what it will spend to reduce the future level of fatal accidents.
Gist of Idea
Societies spend a lot to save known persons, but very little to reduce fatal accidents
Source
Jonathan Glover (Causing Death and Saving Lives [1977], §16.3)
Book Reference
Glover,Jonathan: 'Causing Death and Saving Lives' [Penguin 1982], p.210
A Reaction
This is a good point in favour of utilitarian approaches, which ask for impersonal calculation (which presumably embody an ideal of justice, buried somewhere in utilitarianism). But it isn't just 'sentimentality'.