“Would you kill Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny?” is an important question if and only if you have trouble deciding. I’d definitely kill the Easter Bunny, by the way, so I don’t think it’s an important question.
In this case, I think I’d kill Shakespeare, for the simple reason that however important, Shakespeare is just one writer, whereas all foods except for peach ice cream are, well, almost all foods.
(I guess this comment is meant to illustrate that it is possible to compare changes that seem different in kind from each other, even if it doesn’t seem so at first. Of course, there are still pairs of changes that it is very difficult to compare, e.g. losing Shakespeare vs X dust specks, for some suitably chosen value of X.)
Your example reminds me of an old Eliezer quote:
In this case, I think I’d kill Shakespeare, for the simple reason that however important, Shakespeare is just one writer, whereas all foods except for peach ice cream are, well, almost all foods.
(I guess this comment is meant to illustrate that it is possible to compare changes that seem different in kind from each other, even if it doesn’t seem so at first. Of course, there are still pairs of changes that it is very difficult to compare, e.g. losing Shakespeare vs X dust specks, for some suitably chosen value of X.)