or, really, what I mean to say is, there is no way to stop everyone from paying ransoms when we assume they are rational or even pseudo-rational actors, except by making it impossible for them to be presented with the choice of paying a ransom which makes sense to them to pay from their perspective
for example, if someone is going to die based on the information, then we would have to be ready to kill that person anyway to make a point, and apparently have perfect information about everything except how to stop this tragedy from happening, in any case the person being ransomed is essentially morally bound to pay the ransom, with the only difference in the vindictive justice case being the tangentially but not necessarily meaningfully involved party is guaranteed to die, and that doesn't seem like the outcome we're looking for here really
for example, if someone is going to die based on the information, then we would have to be ready to kill that person anyway to make a point, and apparently have perfect information about everything except how to stop this tragedy from happening, in any case the person being ransomed is essentially morally bound to pay the ransom, with the only difference in the vindictive justice case being the tangentially but not necessarily meaningfully involved party is guaranteed to die, and that doesn't seem like the outcome we're looking for here really