I'll try and ELI5 it.

I have a child. Now if I sit here I can imagine the two paths that would be followed in parallel.

Down one path ill talk about the selfish reasons... If my child was killed by fault of a business or person then how would me, my wife, and my family cope with that loss.... would I be able to jolly back into work the next day? Would my wife the mother of my child? Would my parents be immediately able to get over the loss of their grandchild, would my wife's parents? The first path you're paying for basically what is lost time costs and bereavement costs. Add up all the possible salary losses of all of us, put a weighted multiplier against it, how long would everyone expect to be destroyed by this? Me... The rest of my life... would it possibly destroy the marriage? Wouldn't like to think so but in a tremendous proportion of marriages it does, so how about all the costs that come with that? By the way, you're literally talking about a nightmare scenario for me as a person. I have a nearly crippling fear of death (when i get the panic attacks, which are very very rare) but if you asked me to cut my own throat to save my child I would be twisting my belt off to get the belt buckle prong into my throat before you'd offered me the knife. This is what you are paying for in oath 1. By the way, this is not how the legal system works exactly, or even close, but it's the ELI5 version...

Now down path 2 there are a few things but they basically link to the person themselves and the process of how the death happened. Firstly what cost would it take to sufficiently punish the business so that they take note and do something about it so that it can never happen again? Major multinational freight and transport company truck hit my kid and killed them? Well then you're talking tens of millions, if not ten times that. How does this punishment also ensure that the company is ethically punished to a degree that values a human life? That's going to be added on to the cost as a weight too. Lastly there's the loss of the person themselves; they have a mortgage, bills, assets needing care, dependents maybe, now funeral bills have to be paid, debts have to be paid off, and lawyers fees to go through this whole mess. There's about 100+ things that need to be looked at, investigated, and taken care of that all take up people's time, energy, and in the end costs money. This all needs to be covered.

Do you think I should have to pay for the funeral and be put in financial distress because a group of people murdered my child through gross negligence?

In the 40s and 50s if a worker hurt themselves on the job they were negligent and had to pay all costs... do you think health and safety in the workplace changed before that? It's the same here, if someone or something which is owned and operated by someone leads to the death of a person then the only way to make the process and environment in which we live better is to punish the wrongful parties.

There is a legal term which is vicarious liability as well... This basically means that the company is liable for the stupid crap their people do because they're too lazy and/or stupid to manage them properly.

This is all absolutely right and should happen by the way. An argument against it always comes from a very misinformed and narrow minded position.