The value of a human life

Economics and science have created injustices that legal systems cannot solve. Two looming problems are climate change and ageing societies

- ARUN MAIRA

Modern economics has become a contest between human values and economic valuations, caused by two conceptual problems. One is the utilitarian principle. The other is the impossibility of quantifying a human life. Economic cost-benefit valuations have corrupted human values, as well as public policies and legal processes.

A good policy, according to the utilitarian principle, benefits the maximum number of people, even if it harms a minority. Utilitarian policies are politically popular because a majority favours them. The utilitarian principle does not protect the rights of marginalised people, whose needs are trampled upon in the march of economic growth. Political and economic majoritarianism are natural partners. A majority persuaded that it will be economically better off turns away from the needs of those left behind. The majoritarian principle may be good for electoral politics, but it limits a democracy. In a majoritarian democracy, not only are the majority better off, they can be persuaded they are inherently better people too.

The benefits and losses must be quantified to compute overall gains and weigh losses amongst sections of society. The application of cost-benefit analysis put economists in the driving seat of policymaking in the last century, explains Binyamin Appelbaum in The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society. Economists were able to persuade political leaders to apply cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the impacts of regulations and take supposedly rational decisions. In the 1960s, the US government weighed costs of weapon systems against the values of lives destroyed in the Vietnam War. In 1971, the US President asked the government to weigh the economic costs and benefits of environmental protection.