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So what is the price of a human life?

Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 6:38 am
by Insurrectionist
Just a basic question for a human being. A person with a moral outlook on life, life is priceless. To a person who only sees dollars and cents, a life may be worth $355,000.00.

Seems right now the price for human life is left in the hands of Political Geniuses in Washington.
Wiki wrote:The value of life (or price of life) is an economic value assigned to life in general, or to specific living organisms. In social and political sciences, it is the marginal cost of death prevention in a certain class of circumstances. As such, it is a statistical term, the cost of reducing the (average) number of deaths by one. It is an important issue in a wide range of disciplines including economics, health care, adoption, political economy, insurance, worker safety, environmental impact assessment, and globalization. Discussions about the value of life would be more-or-less limited to university philosophy departments and religious groups if it were not for the fact that this value must be calculated in an exact quantitative way by practitioners in these disciplines.
Some people feel that putting an economic price tag on life is inhumane, because every life is "priceless". However, with a limited supply of resources or infrastructural capital (e.g. ambulances), or skill at hand, it is impossible to save every life, so some trade-off must be made. Also, this argumentation neglects the statistical context of the term. It is not commonly attached to lives of individuals or used to compare the value of one person's life relative to another person's. It is mainly used in circumstances of saving lives as opposed to taking or "producing" lives.
Seems to me a few people just want all humans to die except themselves to save the planet.

Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 8:46 am
by Spidey
Did you happen to catch “The Soviet Story” the other night on PBS?

Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 5:26 pm
by Insurrectionist
Nope should I look it up?

Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 6:42 pm
by Will Robinson
To me my life is worth a quite a few and the lives of my my children is worth killing perhaps everyone on the planet....

So you see, even though I'm in the 'every life is precious' camp I am willing to come up with a value for the \"right\" reasons.

Just my dark way of saying I don't find the idea of coming up with a value totally wrong but I worry that having the official calculation done in advance for him would make it easier for some bureaucrat to detach his humanity from the decision to let a group die prematurely based on cost analysis.

Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 7:37 pm
by Duper
What's the price of a life??

oh that's easy.

Another Life.

Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 8:01 pm
by Krom
Ask an insurance company review board, they will have precise and regularly updated dollar amounts drawn up that show how much life is worth.

Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2009 1:53 pm
by Floyd
it looks as for this business, the value of a life depends on the geographic location:
http://www.endgame.org/carbide-history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_dis ... bilitation

sick and disgusting. watch \"The Yes-Men fix the world\". that movie covers the Bhopal disaster as a main part.