"I'd like to think that the economic cost of regularly killing people on the streets is higher than getting to a place ten minutes faster."

However comforting that logic may be, it is unusable in the real world. If you value lives infinitely, then you will never ever do anything that risks your or somebody else's life in order to gain on any other need. You routinely engage in things that are not the safest possible option in order to fulfill other needs, ranging from food or water acquisition through mere entertainment. Therefore you place a finite value on your life. Don't feel bad, so does everybody else. It is possible to determine the value placed on life, I believe there are studies that show the value is more stable than you might think, and balance things appropriately.

It may be uncomfortable thinking, but, again, unless you literally never take even the smallest risk in the pursuit of other goals, you are already thinking this way. You just haven't lifted it up to the conscious level yet.

No one is asking for infinite value. A cursory glance at causes of death rates in USA reveals that far too many people are dying in automobile collisions. There is nothing about our world that requires that level of carnage. Future generations will find our customs ghastly.

As in the famous Churchhill quote, once you agree it's not infinite, now we're just dickering about price.

I'd say you're almost right about nobody asking for infinite value, but I'd say it's more like nobody who has pulled this up to the conscious level is asking for infinite value. People who have not examined the belief are quite prone to speaking as if life's value is infinite... but their own actions inevitably belie that claim. Once examined, it becomes rationally obvious that life is not infinitely valuable (including your own), but, well, if humans automatically accepted and believed all rational things they examine without emotional consequence the world would be a very different place.

Agreed, your parent post was strawmanning. Is there a name for this second-order sort of meta-strawmanning, in which we imagine people's unconscious inclinations, rather than merely imagining their arguments?

The United States government led by the Obama administration came up with values from 6-9 million dollars when weighing marginal costs of safety regulations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/business/economy/17regulat...

>It is possible to determine the value placed on life, I believe there are studies that show the value is more stable than you might think, and balance things appropriately.

For evaluating safety regulations relative to the cost of inplementation, NHTSA values the risk of loss of human life in relation to the market value of risk reducing products, and the safety they provide.

They extrapolate from the take rate of airbags and their cost and effectivity, to how much value the average American places on their own life. IIRC on the order of $5 million.

FYI, juries do not look kindly on companies that implement this in liability suits. The data is that if a corporation writes down a $-figure for a (statistical) human life, it anchors punitive fines at a higher level.

Well, you do waste minutes of peoples lives. Let's see: 100 mio people driving 250 days/year, losing 10 min each way (so 20/day). That's about 12k lives of 80 years. It's actually worse, because you are wasting "awake time", so add 30%. It seems America isn't /that/ far of from the optimum. Maybe better driver education or better roads would be more effective?

Regardless of what you'd like to think, actual costs and benefits of driving speeds would make a more compelling argument.