Why does D-503 consider life in the previous society to have been “actually wholesale murder” (Paragraph 20)? "That I cannot understand. True, their minds were rather limited in those days. Yet they should have understood, should they not, that such a life was actually wholesale murder, although slow murder, day after day? The State (humanitarianism)12 forbade in those days the murder of one person, but it did not forbid the killing of millions slowly and by inches. To kill one person, that is, to reduce the individual span of human life by fifty years, was considered criminal, but to reduce the general sum of human life by fifty million years was not considered criminal! Isn't it droll?13 Today this simple mathematical moral problem could easily be solved in half a minute's time by any ten-year-old Number, yet they couldn't do it! All their Immanuel Kant’s14 together couldn't do it! It didn't enter the heads of all their Kant’s to build a system of scientific ethics, that is, ethics based on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing."