But money is fundamentally just a unit of value. We use it to compare the value of different things. We can use it to convert between labour (someone's time, which is a fraction of one's life) and goods and services. We can also use it to measure lives: 5 statistical lives lost is worse than 1 statistical life lost, all else being equal. We can also use it to weigh years lost to disability, etc.
Note that this doesn't mean things always have a fair price, and it says nothing about whether money is fairly allocated in society. And it certainly doesn't mean that people can be replaced with money. None of this is the point.
As a thought experiment, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is a human life worth more than nothing, or zero dollars? (I hope you will say yes)
- Is a human life worth more than 20$? (I hope you will say yes)
- Does a human life have infinite value? I hope you will agree that this is not the case: if it was, then we would be justified in sacrificing all of the world's resources combined, in order to save a single life. The paradox is that this would come at the cost of all other lives, which is clearly nonsensical. Even a pharaoh's life, or a king's life, is not normally considered to be worth the combined lives of all of his subjects, from the perspective of modern society. Lives have some non-zero, but finite, economic/social "value".
- Is there a fair price, in dollars, for an hour of labour or work? If there is, then you accept that there is some conversion factor between a fraction of a human life, and some amount of dollars.
Putting a price tag on a human life is something that is so important, that we ought to discuss it more often. Whether we put the price too high, or too low, is often what explains political disagreements on the provision of public goods and services. We do ourselves a great disservice by not forcing ourselves to come up with a concrete number, or by not being honest about what our numbers are. We should challenge each other's assumptions and ensure we put a fair price on it, and ensure that this price is based on the things that matter to us as a society.
Judges, actuarial scientists, and economists, all do it explicitly. Nobody agrees on a specific number, but they all pick a number. The rest of us? We do it implicitly, whether or not we're aware of it, every day of our lives. The problem is that our value judgments and our choices, especially if they are not conscious, are often not self-consistent.
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See also:
- https://fee.org/articles/marginalism-and-the-morality-of-pri...
- https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-government-agen...
- https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230963-100-put-a-pr...
- https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/get-honest-about-the-price-of-...
- http://justiceharvard.org/lecture-3-putting-a-price-tag-on-l...
- https://www.porchlightbooks.com/blog/changethis/2020/all-liv...
Less directly, there's the fact that new safety features often come to luxury vehicles first, and might eventually trickle down to cheaper cars due to competition and regulation (backup cameras, automatic emergency braking).
I think mostly we don't like to think about it. This comes up particularly in the health care industry. There was the (manufactured) furor over "death panels" but there's also the very real challenge of deciding whether it's worth paying possibly millions of dollars on a drug that might have a marginal-at-best improvement in someone's survival odds. And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely.
> And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely.
Not only that, but even in first world countries (ie.: countries that have a good universal/public healthcare system), the dollar value of a statistical human life matters as well. There are waiting lists where you have to decide a priority rank of who gets the organ first, or who gets scheduled in on Monday for their surgery vs who has to wait, etc. Nobody likes that it has to be this way, and nobody wants to be the person that decides (in reality, it's often an ethics committee and there are rules and guidelines to follow), but that's how it has to be.
The money used to save and extend lives has to be taken from somewhere, and it's taken from the money that represents a fraction of the population's labour one way or another (it's a bit more complicated than that, especially when you consider monetary policy, and non-labour sources of income, but the general idea stands).
If you don't put a dollar value on it, then you're going to be making a lot of subjective decisions based on how you feel resources should be allocated: you're going to be taking from some people and giving to others, based on a gut feeling rather than a system. Your gut feeling might be the right one from time to time, but chances are it won't be self-consistent, and will be very biased.
Depending where in the world you are, you may have grown up to believe that humans are more worthy than animals because we have “souls” or whatever that means. A lot of our culture and religion deeply reinforces the “humans are special holy magic” feelings. I won’t develop this thought to great detail unless someone wants me to.
But in addition to that, you’re absolutely correct in saying that oftentimes the price we put on life is too low.
In addition to that, even if the price is correct, it may be difficult for us to have a good perspective on that, simply because we are talking about large numbers (we’re really bad at large numbers), and because pricing stuff is hard. Even stocks are hard to price, and people argue with each other about wildly different price targets.