Human life isn't priceless
Here’s my controversial statement for today: Human life is not priceless. The argument that nothing can ever justify a single loss of life is just plain ridiculous.
If that statement brings about a sense of revulsion and you feel triggered by this cavalier dismissal of human sanctity, I don’t blame you. But just try to hold back the seething moral outrage for a minute and hear me out.
It’s common to say that you can’t put a price on life or that each human life has immeasurable value. The very act of calculating such value can be deemed as highly immoral; it appears to deconstruct and thus invalidate the inalienable dignity of any individual. Following this logic, it means that no single human life can be traded off at any cost. But we know this to be patently untrue. In fact, the choices we make every day implicitly impute a cost to a human life, whether through our direct/indirect actions or our through our complicity in a system.
The social contract: Accepting deaths for efficiency
We know for a fact that by reducing speed limits reduces the amount of deaths that occur. Just in the US, it’s calculated that for every 10km/hr reduction in speed limits, some thousands of lives are saved from fatal road accidents every year.
Yet collectively, we would find it unacceptably inconvenient if we were to all sign on to a law that regulated speed limits to 20km/hr. It’s possible to argue that there will always be people who violate speed limits, but if we take a broad statistical view, bringing the average speed down drastically to a slow bicycle’s pace would still significantly reduce road casualties. Even knowing that fact, many of us would choose not to sacrifice a huge portion of our time crawling in cars. We all make an implicit tradeoff here, knowing full well that some people will have to lose their lives for us to operate efficiently in a city. We’ve made a value judgment.
In fact, we know that there’s a correlation between the number of cars on the road and fatal accidents. Just making a trip in a car presents a risk, however minute, of killing someone. Even if the probability is insignificant per event, start piling up the trips and the law of large numbers kicks in. Road accidents become statistical certainty. Are you really able to justify killing someone just so you can get to point A to B more quickly? Most of us say we wouldn’t, but our daily choices say otherwise. We choose a certain level of pragmatism and close our eyes to abstract risks. But the risks are still real, and they are measured in blood.
The economic contract: Accepting deaths for lower prices
Continuing with the example of cars, when car manufacturers are designing cars, there are always additional safety features they could that would statistically reduce fatalities. However, to build a perfectly safe car, the cost of production would be astronomical. Most people wouldn’t pay a million for a car. They make safety versus cost tradeoffs and we are willing buyers, simply because there’s a level of risk we are willing to take (to our own lives and people in our cars) for a reasonably priced vehicle.
Personal obligations
If you insist that you play no part in the political process and economic system (though I’d be hard-pressed to find someone who lives in the city and hasn’t sat in a car), there’s a more relatable example for you. If I told you that right now, you could save someone’s life for $300, would you pay that amount?
I’m not going to delve into failure modes of empathy or moral reasoning here, but let’s assume most of us would say yes. After all, $300 is quite a sum, but a life is invaluable, right?
Well guess what, you actually can. It turns out, through the research of effective altruism ( fascinating topic in its own right where they calculate the ROI of nonprofit activities), the most cost-efficient way to save a life is through malaria prevention. They’ve worked out that based on the cost of mosquito nets provided and lives saved, every $300 has resulted in one person being saved. The question is, if people truly believe that every human life is invaluable, why aren’t we constantly emptying out our wallets to these causes? (Assuming that you’ve met your basic survival requirements) There’s an obvious dissonance here. Either we are horrible people because we know that we’re unwilling to give up any amount to save a human life (something we view with infinite value), or that we implicitly have a view on how much a stranger’s life costs. Sadly, that amount seems to be below $300, a far cry from invaluable. When value is something you suddenly need to pay for, extreme discounting kicks in.
Governments make these calculations all the time. We obviously do not divert all our resources to save a single human life; there are necessary tradeoffs required. Is the education of a 100 children worth more than an elderly person’s life saving medical bill? Is a city’s infrastructure more important than the accidental deaths of 10 industrial workers? The reality is that lives and livelihoods, human goals and empathy, all come in complex packages.
So how much is a life actually worth?
Based on governments and institutions that require some risk/benefit analysis, the most commonly used model is VSL (value of a statistical life). The number ranges from $2 - 10 million, depending on the country and agency. You can find more on the calculation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life. The premise is that they calculate how much risk a person is willing to accept for a specific dollar value, and derive the price of a human life based on those variables.
I’m not in any way arguing that we should just be cold, calculating machines. Every single life is unique and precious - tragically yet profoundly irreplaceable. Real, deep, meaningful connections lie at the core of humanity. But it’s because human lives are so important that we need to have an honest analysis of value, suffering, and painful trade-offs. Making statements like there’s no price to a human life, or no price is too big to pay to save a life, statements we know are not true, simply distort the conversation and avoid the facts. If we stand any chance in improving the world, we need to make better decisions, and the only way to do that is to have a radically truthful view of reality.