Is there a dollar value on a human life?

[McCulloch]

This leads me to an interesting question.....Do you think that we, as a society, should place a dollar value on a human life. In other words is there a limit per person that should be spend to correct the problem (if indeed, it can be corrected?).

Indeed, an interesting question. Limited financial resources. Competing demands. How much should we spend to save lives? How do we justify spending on other stuff when lives are at stake? Is there a dollar value on a human life? How is it determined?

[RobertUrbanek]

Under pressure by the auto industry, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 1972 issued a report that decided a human life was worth $200,725.

Ford used that estimate in deciding it was not worthwhile to make a safer fuel tank in the Ford Pinto, a decision that resulted in many fire deaths and lawsuits.

[Haven]

It is a sad commentary on the capitalist system that even something so precious as a human life can be reduced to dollars and cents. It is deeply disgusting, in my humble opinion.

No, there is no dollar value on human life. Each person's life is priceless, and all the money in the world cannot replace someone's spouse, child, parent, grandparent, or friend. Yes, I know I sound like a hopeless idealist, but so be it.

[Thatguy]

This leads me to an interesting question.....Do you think that we, as a society, should place a dollar value on a human life. In other words is there a limit per person that should be spend to correct the problem (if indeed, it can be corrected?).

Indeed, an interesting question. Limited financial resources. Competing demands. How much should we spend to save lives? How do we justify spending on other stuff when lives are at stake? Is there a dollar value on a human life? How is it determined?

PM me with how much you are offering. I can't speak further about it here.
Oh, wait, this isn't the Soldier of Fortune help wanted board.

Our first inclination is to say "how awful, life is invaluable and no price is too high to pay." We are right to do so. And yet we have not hopped on an airplane to go save the life of a starving person in [Insert blighted location here.] For a few thousand dollars, each of us could go save lives. There are people dying as we speak who could be easily identified and could be rescued if we spent the money. But there are so many demands in life and we have to prioritize. And we rationalize. As a society, we put prices on life all the time. There are drugs we could develop that could save 3 lives at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. We don't invest it. There are safety devices we don't mandate because the cost is too high. The cost to farmers and manufacturers if we simply banned cigarettes is too high, we have to compromise and allow tens of thousands of deaths to avoid financial hardship to others. We can justify this further by talking about the freedom to grow and ingest what you want, but it's contradicted by so many of our other laws that it's clearly just a matter of balancing lives vs. dollars. In order to function as a society we have to develop moral callouses over the raw wounds of watching people die.

[palmera]

Thatguy makes several good points about the reality of living in a society which demands certain goods and services. While dollar values are placed on human life "all the time," this does not answer whether a dollar value should be.

Again, Thatguy is correct in pointing out the inclination to view human life as "invaluable." This echoes past sentiments from other posters correctly noting that no amount of $ can make up for the loss of a loved one.

Yet society not only does place values on human life (as Thatguy and other correctly point out), it should. In order to recognize the pricelessness of human life in the abstract, society has a moral duty to place values on human life in certain contexts. The crux is how, and in what context. There should be no generally applicable amount prescribed to human life in the abstract. That would be absurd and indefensible. Rather, the value placed on human life is based on what one life represents in a specific context.

For instance. A town's roads are in serious need of updating, particularly at one intersection where Road Z crosses a busy railroad (RR). Over the course of a ten year period "X" amount of people are killed at that intersection in car/person vs. train collisions. The value of "X" is necessary to determine when the town chooses whether to repave the road or construct a bridge over the RR ensuring greater public safety. Because "X" not only represents a human life, but also litigation costs, construction costs, livability factors et. al., it's value may determine whether the extra costs of building a bridge are worthwhile expense for the town and its people to incur. If every time a railroad crosses a road, a bridge is built, then there is necessarily less $ to spend on other municipal needs, some of which may be necessary to save human life. A basic cost/risk analysis is useful. If one person dies every ten years, then the cost of the bridge is high relative to the minimal safety provided by the bridge. If 1,000 people die every 10 years, then the cost of the bridge is minimal related to the safety it provides. Moreover, saving those 1,000 people may help pay for the bridge through taxes and economic activity. (Crass, I know.)

A dollar value on human life in this context is not on life in the abstract, but rather what a human life represents in the greater scheme of governance, and is necessary in order to responsibly allocate limited resources.

In order to function as a society, values must be placed on "human life." It is of course most crassly featured in the context of lawsuits, yet as a practical matter, a specific dollar amount on what a human life represents in a given context is useful and necessary as a tool for the efficient and beneficial decision-making that saves lives in the aggregate.