The Value of Human Life

Here’s something that both Taoists and Confucians can agree upon: it is foolhardy, and perhaps stupid, to attempt to determine a monetary value of a human life. This comes to mind today because of this news story:

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s not just the American dollar that’s losing
value. A government agency has decided that an American life isn’t
worth what it used to be.

The “value of a statistical life” is
$6.9 million in today’s dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency
reckoned in May — a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago.

The Associated Press discovered the change after a review of cost-benefit analyses over more than a dozen years.

Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.

When
drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life
and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed
rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for
a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

Confucians would ask: how can we know the value of a single human life when we can only fully appreciate the value of any human life in relation to others? The analytic act of isolating an individual makes little sense to those who understand the self as irrevocably relational. Also, given the Confucian hierarchy of obligations (i.e. that one’s duty to family is greater than one’s duty to fellow citizens, for example), it makes little sense to posit a universal value of any individual life. Lives will have different values for different people in different contexts. That is not to suggest that Confucians value life less. No. It is merely to point out that some lives will be more valuable to a Confucian than others, even while accepting the notion that all human lives are worthy (because, following Mencius, we all have an inherently good human nature).

This whole thing makes even less sense to a Taoist, who would question why we would want to construct a falsely precise valuation to begin with. If all things move as one and the same in Tao, as Chuang Tzu suggests, then all things, not just human lives but all things in Way, are equally valuable. And to put a number on that only leads to folly, as today’s news story also suggests. It turns out that the new number is just another Bush era political ploy:

Some environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of changing the value to avoid tougher rules — a charge the EPA denies.

“It
appears that they’re cooking the books in regards to the value of
life,” said S. William Becker, executive director of the National
Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents state and local air
pollution regulators. “Those decisions are literally a matter of life
and death.”

Dan Esty, a senior EPA policy official in the
administration of the first President Bush and now director of the Yale
Center for Environmental Law and Policy, said: “It’s hard to imagine
that it has other than a political motivation.”

…..

“This sort of number-crunching is basically numerology,” said
Granger Morgan, chairman of EPA’s Science Advisory Board and an
engineering and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
“This is not a scientific issue.”

Other, similar calculations by
the Bush administration have proved politically explosive. In 2002, the
EPA decided the value of elderly people was 38 percent less than that
of people under 70. After the move became public, the agency reversed
itself.

Devaluing elderly life: a Confucian would absolutely reject that idea, denying, as it does, the “root of Humanity.” Just keep that in mind when Bush defenders invoke “family values” arguments…..

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Sam Crane

I have moved The Useless Tree to WordPress. Hope this works!

Categories: Confucius/Confucianism, Current Affairs, Taoism

4 responses to “The Value of Human Life”

RBA

July 11, 2008 at 4:13 am

It would seem that Confucianism and Daoism are even less aligned with the current situation in Beijing, one of the worlds most toxic cities and constantly getting worse. Life is cheap in China, and for those without connections, the value of life is close to nill.

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isha

July 11, 2008 at 7:56 pm

RMA:
Your humane compassion, conservative or otherwise, for the “those without connection” cheap lives” in China, moves me to tears. How to deal with it? How to increase their value from “nill” (whatever that is) to the civilized standard of “$6.9 million in today’s dollars”. Would you feel like to enlighten? Are you compassionate enough to bother?
Breathless yours,
Isha

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Jeremy

July 12, 2008 at 11:57 am

I’m a bit bothered by some of what you say, but I’m not sure I’m understanding you properly. The whole “value of human life” thing is a bit misleading. In a rather technical accounting and policy sense it’s accurate term, but it’s at the same time very misleading when taken out of context. It makes a useful phrase for a journalist because of the shock value, perhaps, but it doesn’t seem at all clear that you can take the concept and apply it straightforwardly to Confucian thought. The “value of human life” is a way of trying to get a handle on what people are willing to spend on things like preventative medical care. See, for example: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2002/10/09/news/5646.shtml which talks (superficially) about one attempt to calculate this value.
When you think about the various ways the number is calculated, and the various ways in which it can be used, I think there’s a strong case that this number is actually inherently relational. It’s about the interactions between people and the choices and tradeoffs they make, and trying to find a number that allows us to talk about these choices quantitatively while at the same time reflecting the way people actually behave. As such it doesn’t make sense at all understood as describing an isolated individual. If that would be a Confucian’s main issue (and I don’t know much about Confucian thought), it seems to me that a Confucian should have no problem with the idea.
As for political motivations for changing this number, that’s unfortunately all too believable, and unfortunate.

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John Fitzgerald

February 7, 2009 at 9:19 am

The reality is that all people, in there day to day lives, put a monetary value on their own lives and the lives of others. That government agencies do so explicitly is of little surprise. Every day, people make the decision to buy organically grown products over standard products. Though they haven’t sat down and made explicit calculations, they are making a simple economic choice whereby they have decided that their life and their health is worth more than the few extra dollars that they spend on the organic products. Expecting parents across America trade in their compact car for an SUV costing tens of thousands of dollars more because they value the lives of their children, in monetary terms, more than they value their own lives. Still others choose not to though they might very well sell their two story house for a smaller floor plan to accord to pay for it. In both strict monetary terms and in terms of other trade offs, day to day living is full of examples of people making decisions that put a value on human life. And people, in their infinite wisdom, have infinite personal opinions on exactly what these trade offs are.
Economics is about the decisions we make in how to allocate limited resources. If we had infinite resources, there would be no issue but the reality of life and living doesn’t afford us this. Certainly, a human life is priceless but even at a paltry value of one million billion trillion gazillion dollars, could we even afford implement every life saving procedure, every life protecting device that costs less than one million billion trillion gazillion dollars? Unfortunately, we cannot. And when engineers and policy makers are faced with making decisions on how to spend public money, they must come up with a value that gives them some measure with which to compare different options.
The point of putting a monetary value on human life isn’t to devalue the preciousness of our intrinsic value but to allow comparisons between options and make a reasoned decision as to how to allocate limited resources. Money, itself, has no real value. It is simply a devise by which we measure other things. A clock itself, has no time. It is a device that we use to compare the passage of time between events happening in different places at different times.
While there are millions of automobile traffic intersections in the world where a child might be hit by an automobile, the unfortunate reality is that we have simply do not have the resources to install traffic lights at every intersection all at the same time and still have resources left over to build schools and buy books. So decisions are made whereby one intersection is determined as not needing a traffic light, then another is determined as not really needing one. There comes a point whereby the choice is between an intersection where two children cross it every day and another used by three children. There in is where it becomes necessary to come up with a number, a reasonable number, that forces us to face the harsh reality that we do not have infinite resources. And as such, given that we must have a number, three children are calculated, for lack of a less grotesque term, as being worth more than two children even though, in our hearts we know that two times infinity is no less than three times infinity.
Measuring a human life in terms of money is not a judgment on how little a human life is worth but rather a determination on how much can we afford and a painful admission of how limited we are as human beings.

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