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In the deadly wake of Saturday's earthquake in Kashmir, Nipsey Russell fan Tim Cavanaugh investigates how we put a price tag on human life.
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|10.13.05 @ 5:20PM|#
Despite being one of Cavanaugh's fiercest and most unyielding critics, I have nevertheless always refrained from questioning his impeccable credentials as a Nipsy Russell fan.
fyodor|10.13.05 @ 5:21PM|#
I believe Adam Smith once theorized that an Englishman would give up his pinky to save the lives of everyone in China. I understood his point to be that we intrinsicly care more about ourselves than others, and more about those around us than those far away.
|10.13.05 @ 5:23PM|#
Interesting article. I think the last sentence addresses the unspoken part of the argument: while there are significant differences in the monetary value of people's lives, there is no appreciable difference in their less tangible value. The psychic and emotional costs, of course, are difficult to measure and impossible to compensate. And, as Tim Cavenaugh says, they are personal.
That's probably the main reason we pay less attention to distant tragedies: our sympathy is abstract. That sympathy also tends to correlate with how like us the people involved are. That's an ugly truth, but it is a truth. We are, after all, pack animals, and tend to care more about members of our own pack.
fyodor|10.13.05 @ 5:28PM|#
That sympathy also tends to correlate with how like us the people involved are.... We are, after all, pack animals, and tend to care more about members of our own pack.
I thought of this phenomenon when my feminist sister talked about how female cats are routinely raped. Luckily she admitted there was nothing to be done about it.
|10.13.05 @ 5:29PM|#
"Some lives are more valuable than others" is probably better phrased "Some lives are more valued than others [by a given person]."
I say this because the concept of the value of a thing, in the abstract sense, is an agreement reached by a bunch of people trading in a marketplace. The expectation is that there's going to be some congruence between our different ideas of the value of the thing, so when we say 'that car is worth $5000,' we're really saying 'a consensus of sellers and buyers agree that $5000 is a reasonable value for that car.'
But there cannot be a consensus on the value of lives. My wife's life has near-infinite value to me, and very little value to all of you. We couldn't possibly come to any consensus that didn't include something like, 'Well, that life is worth X to me...'
So a life can certainly be valued, but only given a person who is valuing it. I don't think you can arrive at an abstract numerical value for any person's life.
|10.13.05 @ 5:38PM|#
Isildur-Hence the distinction between monetary value and abstract/emotional value.
|10.13.05 @ 5:56PM|#
This article reminds me of a recurring daydream I often have. My father/mother/sister is hanging precariously on the edge of a cliff. Next to them is a child/pregnant woman/billionare who is also hanging on for dear life. I can only save one. Which do I choose.
I suppose that is one way to determine the value of a person's life that goes beyond monetary value. If two lives are in peril and only one can be saved, which one?
|10.13.05 @ 6:19PM|#
"I believe Adam Smith once theorized that an Englishman would give up his pinky to save the lives of everyone in China."
Was that supposed to read "wouldn't give up"?
Ron Hardin|10.13.05 @ 6:23PM|#
Distant tragedies are entertainment, distant meaning not your acquaintances. The media hold audiences for days with that fact.
The moral truth is that you can't _calculate_ with human lives, often put that the value is infinite, but infinite means ``without bounds,'' not big. It may be tiny.
For this or that purpose, you can get a working value out of what risks people take to avoid how much expense, and so forth. That doesn't contradict the moral truth but is simply in another field. Economics ignores also the value of what the money buys instead, cutting itself out of another field so as to be able to calculate.
Just as the media economize tragedy, that is, get something out of it.
Tim Cavanaugh|10.13.05 @ 6:35PM|#
I believe Adam Smith once theorized that an Englishman would give up his pinky to save the lives of everyone in China
Proving that it's all been said before only better:
Larry A|10.13.05 @ 6:45PM|#
But what are the alternatives?
fyodor|10.13.05 @ 7:13PM|#
Larry A,
Yup!
|10.13.05 @ 7:22PM|#
Behold:
The Monkeysphere
|10.13.05 @ 8:06PM|#
I suppose that is one way to determine the value of a person's life that goes beyond monetary value. If two lives are in peril and only one can be saved, which one?
You know, I believe Superman had this problem a lot.
I think the usual solution is to save one, then turn back time by using your super-strength to reverse the rotation of the Earth, and then save the other one. (I recall that you can also go back in time by flying around the Earth's equator in an east-to-west direction several times, very very fast.)
|10.13.05 @ 8:52PM|#
It's "wailing," Tim, not "whaling" :)
If you whaled on him, you'd have to stick him with a harpoon.
|10.13.05 @ 9:08PM|#
What we feel when we see someone like us mistreated and the propensity to dismiss the mistreatment of people less like us explains the behavior of some of the torture apologists I've encountered, I suppose. ...I suspect many of them would be appalled to see lily-faced Americans mistreated by Arabs--even if it was for the same reason.
I've found that Americans seem to sympathize with the suggestion that what we've won in Iraq isn't worth the American casualties--more so than the suggestion that what we've won isn't worth all the dead and wounded Iraqi civilians. ...but this may be a result of the assumption that thousands of Iraqi civilians would have suffered and died under Hussein's rule anyway.
...Meanwhile, I'm glad we left Somalia, and I was against an American invasion or occupation of Liberia. So long as there weren't too many American casualties--a silly condition perhaps--I would have supported an armed UN effort in Rwanda. I think of Kosovo as being relatively tolerable in no small part because there were relatively few American casualties. I still wonder about the trade we made in Panama--22 dead Americans for Noriega? I don't see the upside of losing those Marines in Lebanon. ...and in spite of my vehement anti-Communism, if it were up to me and I thought I'd get my uncle back, I think I might have let the Communists have South Vietnam from the beginning.
Civilians are so often a victim of our efforts. ...I think that's why I'm so reluctant to see saving them as a legitimate cause for war.
Tim Cavanaugh|10.13.05 @ 9:55PM|#
Moby,
Not according to Random House Second Edition, which defines "whale" as v. to hit, thrash, or beat soundly. To my surprise, the dictionary cites it as early as 1780 (I thought it was a recent slang coinage as I've only heard it and never read it, and so looked it up prior to publication).
|10.13.05 @ 10:45PM|#
Tim, that was a pretty good job of stating a global truism that most are too squeamish to admit outright. But you forgot to note the most striking present-day example on this part of the planet: The separate values placed on the loss of American and Iraq lives at the hands of the insurgency.
|10.13.05 @ 11:34PM|#
I find the "we're fightin' 'em o'er there" argument to be racist. To *me*, American lives are worth more than Iraqi lives, but that kind of personal bias should never be enshrined in policy.
|10.14.05 @ 8:10AM|#
The problem is that when people sit back in their comfortable chairs and grandly say things like "It's a worthy trade-off--X number of lives in exchange for meeting Y foreign policy goal," it's never their lives, nor the lives of people they care about, that are at risk. So it's easy for them to talk about the amount of blood that must be spilled, and then set in motion the events to spill it before moving on to something else.
I remember once when the Esidentpray was making excuses for one of our dictator-sonofabitch 'allies' who had just massacred a bunch of civilians in his own country, and I suggested that if the Esidentpray's Aughterday was among the dead it would make him realize that human lives actually fucking matter. But it turns out you can't say stuff like that here, so never mind.
But I will say this: no country stays on top of the world totem pole forever, and someday Americans will be the ones whose lives are deemed expendable by the leaders of the big, important nations. I hope the torture apologists and "turn the Middle East into a glass parking lot" people are alive to see that happen.
(That's also why it's in the self-interest of future Americans for us to be less of a goddamned bully to the rest of the world--never do anything on your way up that will make people want to kick you on your way down.)
|10.14.05 @ 1:39PM|#
Tim,
Thanks for the edification. I will begin to use "whaling" in my everyday conversation. And good article as well.
|10.14.05 @ 5:17PM|#
Jennifer - agreed, but the problem is one of realpolitik; no matter how much we insist on keeping our hands clean, there are people who don't care, and will happily break eggs to make their personal omelette (and mix their metaphors). I don't want to be an apologist for said realpolitik, because I think there is a real slippery slope, where you end up saying "I have to do X even if it's distasteful because otherwise my opponents will do Y, which would be worse" and the sphere of X keeps expanding and expanding. But the problem remains that it is not always possible to solve real-world problems in a perfect way.
Part of this problem is that there really are questions of the kind in which you could stop something bad from happening, but only at the cost of doing something bad yourself. If you can stop the advancing enemy army by bombing the city, knowing that a certain number of innocent civilians will be killed, do you do it? I think that there is no generic bright line for situations like this - you can only say that there are general principles, and hopefully things like torture lie on the outside of it, while admitting that there are going to be a lot of edge cases about which people can legitimately disagree.
|10.16.05 @ 1:10PM|#
Part of this problem is that there really are questions of the kind in which you could stop something bad from happening, but only at the cost of doing something bad yourself.
True, but when the US does bad things these past couple of decades there often aren't even THOSE benefits. What bad things were prevented back when we dragged the Vietnam War into Cambodia? What bad things are prevented when we round up random people in the streets of baghdad and mistreat them in Abu Ghraib? What are we saving ourselves from when we deliberately spray poison on the farmlands of Latin America as part of Plan Colombia? Nothing, nada, zip, we're just crashing about causing all kinds of damage, infuriating other people and refusing to admit that anyone has any legitimate reason to feel ticked off at certain things about America.
We're not even sacrificing other people's lives for any proven Greater Good; we keep doing it for hypothetical bullshit that never turns out as we were told it would.