Justice Lecture 3: The cost of a life

The case study in this lecture is an internal memo from Ford that assigns a dollar value to a human life in deciding whether or not to issue a recall of its Pinto cars. Most of the students in the class called this move objectionable, but the obvious objection to that position is: how else do you decide whether to do something? For example, we could certainly reduce the number of traffic deaths by imposing a mandatory 25 mph speed limit across the country. If the value of a human life were infinite, we would be compelled to take such an action. However, we don’t think that lives are infinitely valuable. An important point here is that no action can ever be guaranteed to save a life, i.e., we can only take actions that have some statistical probability of saving lives. This probability must enter into the likelihood of the calculation. Resources are scarce. We only have so many bags of rice or vaccines to ship around the world, so we have to make hard choices. I don’t think that we boost our ethical consciousness by ignoring the dollar value that we place on human lives. Rather, I think by talking about the value of a life we will become more aware of how tough ethical decisions have to be made. Also, I think it would expose the dramatically distorted value that we place on human lives in, for example, Congo compared to human lives in California.

Sandel offers a counter argument to the contention that we must assign a dollar value to human lives. He uses the example of the Roman coliseum: maybe the combined utility of all the people enjoying the show would outweigh the loss of life for the slave who gets tortured and murdered in the coliseum. Therefore: killing for sport is justifiable. Here’s another (imaginary) example: Jon Krakauer writes Under the Banner of Heaven, which offends millions of Mormons. Therefore, Krakauer’s book should not be published. In each of these examples, an individual right is overcome by the aggregate utility of a large number of people. How does the rule-based utilitarian face these cases? I think the answer is that we believe in individual rights because over the long run they lead to a maximization of utility. Though there may be some fluke cases in which aggregate utility is increased by violating individual rights, but overall we want to live in a society where we are free from murder or free to express ourselves. So we make those rights near-absolute. When individual rights are violated, as is done for criminals, we want this done by a body (the criminal justice system) that follows fair procedures.