George Rebane
For decades we have seen those yellow diamond shaped signs in the back windows of cars admonishing us to ‘Drive Carefully, Baby Aboard’. Years ago as a young father, I puzzled over the first such sign that I spied. Its message was clear, ‘this car is transporting a human whose life is worth more than that of the run-of-mill human life, therefore extra effort should be made to preserve it’. I recall that a moment’s reflection made me say to myself, no it ain’t. A couple of thoughts later I concluded that in the larger scheme of things that baby’s life is worth less than the run-of-mill lives we all encounter in the daily round, including our own.
Most certainly that conclusion is true if we consider the baby’s ‘replacement value’ – you can make a new one in nine months – or its worth to society in the investment made, or the investment still required to civilize the little guy and educate him to productivity.
In my way of reasoning, I thought a more appropriate sign in the back window should read ‘Drive Carefully, A STEM Worker Aboard’, or ‘…, An Established Taxpayer Aboard’, or something similar. It was clear to me that of all the other more demonstrably accomplished lives driving down a crowded freeway, the babies strapped into their car seats represented the least valuable expressions of humanity when viewed from the larger perspective of a community or society in general.
And from that greater vantage, societies have historically vindicated that valuation in how they have chosen to treat their young – depriving them of liberties and other social franchises, working them at the lowest compensation rates, and sending them to bear the brunt of battles. After all, as a resource, in them we are least invested, they are still ignorant and malleable (willing to sacrifice themselves for glory), and their replacement cost is minimal. (more here)
The received wisdom is that human life is precious beyond compense. But that is patently false since daily we allow bureaucrats to exercise public policies in ways that allows any numerate person to compute the marginal dollar value we put on different kinds of lives. For example, how many more miles of life-saving concrete center dividers could we have emplaced for the cost of highway landscaping or decorative sound walls? We can compute the expected lives so saved, and attribute the cost of alternative spending across those lives to get a dollar worth of a life we are willing to expend in order to enjoy a more beautiful roadside. And you haven’t seen anything yet until we sharpen our pencils to run some numbers on the decisions made in dispensing Obamacare.
Philosophers, sociologists, and other thinkers have considered the problem of the relative worth of human life within questions of social ethics and morality. A popular category of thought problems in this endeavor is called ‘trolleyology’ of which there are now many variants that have been posed and debated. The basic trolleyology problem involves a runaway trolley heading toward five unsuspecting workers on the track who will surely be killed if the trolley continues on its intended path. But there is a possibility of diverting the trolley onto a side track on which is standing one unsuspecting hapless human. The decision maker may be the trolley driver or someone on the sidelines who can switch the track. What is the right thing to do in this case, let the trolley proceed to kill the five, or divert it to kill the one?
A much discussed version involves a very obese man standing by the track whose body can slow/stop the trolley if he is shoved into the trolley’s path. What is the proper action for a bystander who can push the unsuspecting fat man, and sacrifice him to save the five? How will/should society judge the person who then sacrificed that one to save many?
Such questions are not just idle thought experiments for the intellectually effete. Their analogues are posed and answered every day, especially in the annals of healthcare, law enforcement, the military, and in our criminal and civil justice systems.
Is there a way to answer such questions that is better than the ad hoc, arbitrary, and haphazard way we now answer them? Should we develop a ‘calculus of morality’ or adopt some formalism about computing the relative worth or rankings of human lives, e.g. the mortality and morbidity utility posed in ‘Healthcare Utility Metric (with scriptural underpinnings)’? Some argue that this should not be done because that puts humans into the role of playing God. But then, a moment’s thought shows that we constantly play an arbitrary God with people’s lives, and have done so throughout human history.
These questions are increasingly relevant as the world has become more populated, inter-connected, and relatively ignorant. Of course, the easiest course forward is to forget the whole issue and just soldier on as we have been, using all the tools available from politics, cronyism, and corruption.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment