We have of course abolished slavery since then.
Which is a weird way of saying I don't think we necessarily should put a monetary value to people. Instead we need to realize that money isn't everything in life. So much of life is unpriceable, and that's as it should be. Attempting to price the unpriceable necessarily makes a mockery of the unpriceable thing.
Why do you think religion existed en large mass? It was a means for self-control.
In a world where you have OF, lots of soft-porn content, content designed to get reactions etc which billions of people are exposed to to - do you not realise humans are implicitly stating there is a price for everything?
That’s essentially what America figured out whilst Europe and the rest have tried to remain ‘true to values’.
It's possible to set that latter value to be nonzero. You can't use free markets to set it because they necessarily cannot see what price to set, so you kinda have to guess, but IMO, it isn't zero, and I'd hazard to say it's positive.