| (NinjaJon) said: | Friday 25, September 2009, 1:31 pm |
Is the quiz link not working or is that just me?
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| Sure. The Coliseum example creates an artificial limit of happiness. This limit is that the Christians are, without reconciliation, extricated from the potentiality of experiencing pleasure. Here, the greatest pleasure can never be realized if only because pain is essential. Maximum pleasure can never be realized in a situation that makes necessary the pain of others. All assuming that no Christian wants to be eaten, and that the Romans and Christians might well experience equal or more pleasure from some other activity, both of which are quite plausible. reply |
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| Part 1: Not "All" Values. Money for human services, but not human costs. Human lives are invaluable because there is no limit to the capabilities and the potential abilities of a human being. Part 2: Individual rights must be sacrificed for the greater good of the whole. That is the main core of our existence. reply |
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| Part 1: Not "All" Values. Money for human services, but not human costs. Human lives are invaluable because there is no limit to the capabilities and the potential abilities of a human being. Part 2: Individual rights must be sacrificed for the greater good of the whole. That is the main core of our existence, but for what purpose? That is the question. Mere pleasure? I think not. To preserve life? Perhaps. reply |
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| What ford does is not in the best interest of the society, but in best interest of Ford. reply |
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| Why not just increase the price of the Pinto to cover the cost of making the car safe, ie installing the extra part. That way, the public is protected, and Ford can continue to do business without increasing their costs. reply |
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| I believe many of them were already in the field by the time the problem was discovered. | |||||
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| I assume that the Ford Company lost its argument in court. If they did not calculate the cost of litigation plus the potential cost of losing, then their calculations were incomplete. | |||||
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| (Off topic sorry) Is the quiz link not working or is that just me? reply |
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| Isn't working for me either. | |||||
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| Not just you! | |||||
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| The position of Bentham and Mill from the utilitarian viewpoint is flawed at its core. It is a masked attempt at creating a publicly acceptable version of hedonism based strictly on values assigned to human pleasure vs. pain. Throughout human history, there are mass examples of individuals, groups, religions, etc, in which pleasure or pain are strictly disregarded in favor of the benefits of moral behavior. For example, self-flagellation, while not something that I would find particularly curing of guilt, did find a home with certain monks. Large groups of them in fact. Or in the example given in the lecture of Shakespeare vs. Simpsons vs. Fear Factor, one could say that as grueling as it is to sit through the collective works of Shakespeare, that the reason for doing it would be a conscious effort to learn from the experience as opposed to solely basing it on which would be more pleasurable or painful for me. In conclusion, the assumption that a method of checking all decisions based on a quantitative report of pleasures and pains associated with them is finite and complete is flawed. While concerns for those qualities should be included, they are far from all encompassing for what we as humans need in order to deem something worthwhile for the whole. reply |
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| No, I think if you follow Bentham's premise through time has to be factored in. When we look at the value of various activities with the weight of time and their ultimate consequences factored in it holds up well. The problem is there is no practical way to do this objectively all the time. | |||||
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| Perhaps if the Ford and Tobacco company employees had to give one of their offspring to replace the deceased they could understand better the cost of the deaths that their products caused. It isn't about numbers. | |||||
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| You're misinterpreting pleasure. For those monks, though self-flagellation may be temporarily physically painful, the easing of guilt or whatever spiritually elevated plane they feel it brings them to renders it an essentially pleasurable experience. Ditto with the temporary difficulties appreciating Shakespeare... It is pleasure even if it isn't pleasure immediately, hence the whole discussion about high pleasure versus low pleasure. | |||||
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| If we are to follow Mill's approach to its logical conclusion,there can be no moral judgements because every choice is based on sensory experience,i.e.,the psychological state of "happiness".No room for free will here,thus no basis for moral judgement. reply |
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| “Humor is tragedy plus time” - Mark Twain “The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.” - Mark Twain "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." - Mel Brooks "Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute." - John Mortimer "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." - Karl Marx reply |
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| It's rather presumptuous to declare the Simpson's base humor and puns of being lesser than Shakespeare's base humor and puns simply because it's old. Most classic paintings and art are celebrations of simple pleasures such as beer guzzling and fucking. This is simple evidence of intellectual prejudice. What is 'higher' pleasure is that which gives us new delights at each experience, where we see deeper into the art some new thing or surprise. But some things are only designed for the moment, and for that moment they are not lesser. And did anyone consider if Christians are a proper diet for large cats? reply |
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| But he didn't compare the base humor of the two and that's the problem. He should have compared the Simpsons to Falstaff or Bottom and his blundering group of players instead of Hamlet. | |||||
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| Not funny. | |||||
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| Agreed regarding shakespeare/simpsons this was basically my thought as well. Shakespeare was not considered high art in his day it the plays contain many base elements, like violence and lowbrow humor designed to appeal to the same masses as the simpsons. | |||||
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| Episode 2: I think there is a higher moral and ethical responsibility that needs to be addressed in the cost/benefit analysis and that would be "do not harm". By adding this overarching umbrella, we more comprehensively address the issues. reply |
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| I like that very much | |||||
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| Does this mean that all Ford employees have to take the Hippocratic oath? How about the bank and insurance employees, especially the executives? |
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| The example of the cost analysis of the Ford Pinto is very very flawed. Ford did not tell consumers that the Pinto was defective. In fact, Ford repeatedly denied that there was a safety problem with the Pinto. Buyers of the Pinto were unknowingly entered into a dead pool lottery that not only put the Driver in jeopardy but passengers and other drivers as well as bystanders who could/would be killed or injured by the autos explosion. I believe it is safe to say that Ford executives and their loved ones did not drive Pintos which protected them from entering the dead pool (unless they were unlucky and rear-ended a Pinto). The level of hypocrisy that allowed Ford to rely on the cost analysis is unbelievable. The failure of the Utilitarian viewpoint is remarkable. Ford was able to put profit before the lives of the public. This may explain the many abuses of people that defined the Industrial Revolution. reply |
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| Right, Milton Friedman argued that they should have simply attached a notice to every car sold stating the car was made cheaper by way of omitting a safety feature. This may increase the drivers chance of death by X%. If the driver was OK with this then it was a fair transaction. It was not the cost/benefit that was flawed but the buyer had asymmetric information. | |||||
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| The notion of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures should be replaced by 'long-term' and 'short-term' happiness. Oftentimes, indulging in short-term pleasures leads to long-term unhappiness. Or avoiding short-term pain leads to long-term unhappiness. The long-term consequences of actions are what really count. In the Romans/Christians example, encouraging hate and violence within individuals and the culture in general would likely not lead to long-term happiness. reply |
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| But then the question is that how would you consider possible consequences of every action? | |||||
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| But is long-term pleasure or pain always preferable? Why is it necessarily automatically better? | |||||
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| I look forward for this oportunity. I am 81 yrs old and would like to see how my views compare to the younger students. Thanks Harvard..... reply |
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| In the case of the 5 versus 1, if the six were of roughly equal value, the answer woukd be: save the five, but if the one were an Eisntein the case would be much more complicated, but the solulion would probably be the same. Sept. 26,09 reply |
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| A Mill-style utilitarian could still condemn the practice by arguing that if the Romans had experienced a higher pleasure than watching a violent death, that they would prefer it. Also, the presence of a large mob could constitute implicit coercion. This doesn't change my gut-level feeling that there is something inherently wrong with a crowd of people deriving so much pleasure from witnessing someone's murder. Couldn't you make these same arguments to justify a gang rape, saying that the pleasure of the rapists outweighs the trauma of the victim? I suppose it is possible that the fleeting pleasure (if it is pleasure) felt by the Coliseum-goers would result in long-term pain and therefore be less just - but really, if we try to put a value on life and a value on entertainment, they just don't seem to belong on the same scale. I'm afraid I'm not much of a philosopher! reply |
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| I think you are making a very important point here. How to scale and measure the collective pleasure and pain? it is a big question. | |||||
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| The basic problem with Utilitarianism is that it can be used to justify our baser instints and allow us to mistreat the minority. For example, the early Christians in the Roman Empire, the non-Christian in medieval Europe, the slave in the antebellum South, the Jews in Nazi Germany, etc. reply |
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| In both the Ford Pinto and Czechoslovakia cases, the "higher good" being supported was a profit motive for a corporation. Apart from the problems with putting a dollar value on life, any net pleasure in Pinto case was concentrated in the few who profited, since the cost of the part could easily have been passed on to the consumer. There are also profound differences between the train/lifeboat examples and the Pinto case because 1) Ford had prior knowledge that it would be killing innocent people (isn't that murder?) and went ahead anyway; and 2) there is a qualitative difference between avoiding one's own death and pleasure-seeking. I also noticed that Dr. Sandel didn't mention the Dust Bowl or clarify whether fear of death might have been a factor in the "I would rather strangle a cat than live in Kansas" example. The trouble with dollars as a measurement instrument, too, is that it assumes money gives equal pleasure to everyone, when it really doesn't. The dollars needed for basic survival needs give more happiness than those used to buy a movie ticket, which is maybe a way of assimilating the social justice objections to utilitarianism. Unregistered Sat. 10:51, I agree with you that utilitarianism can be used to justify baser instincts - but all your examples also involve categorical moral reasoning in that the majority perpretrators of these atrocities believed in the rightness of their actions and even, in the case of the Holocaust and the Crusades, that they were protecting themselves. My biggest question right now is whether these moral frameworks are supposed to be DEscriptive - i.e., do they explain actual behavior? - or PREscriptive - i.e., do they give guidance on how to make moral decisions? In both senses they seem to have problems. reply |
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| The pinto obstacle- the cost benefit analysis tool is flawed in that it is finite. The ford folks did not contemplate the lawsuit in their model, oh and the marketing image as well-they most likely lost future sales. Additionally, the ford cost benefit team was flawed- they were biased. Their bias limited their faculty to consider all other factors(also in the Phillip morris study). Perhaps a nonbiased third party panel could assist in the analysis. 2. How much would it cost to make the pinto with a zero human disaster component, including a sadness factor(ie not enough cup holders)? Understandably, At the end of the day, a business decision had to be made. Ford hopefully learned a lesson reply |
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| I think Dr Sandel was unfair to cost-benefit analysis. He and the audience didn't really explore its current uses and the paucity of alternatives to it in certain circumstances. I would argue that it is perfectly reasonable to use CBA for industrial applications. For example in designing a chemical plant how else can you determine the required levels of protection that should be installed to prevent accidental release without balancing on the one hand the costs of installing them compared to the levels of reduced risk of the release on the other. Without utilitarian concepts, and a holier-than-thou approach to the value of human life, one would never build a chemical plant, and never get the benefits to society they undoubtedly bring.. reply |
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| Interesting point. There is a difference between insisting on a risk-free world, though (unrealistic) and rich executives having prior knowledge that their vehicles would explode and deciding not to do anything about it. For me, the other important piece of these cases is that information was withheld from the consumer. If someone says, "Okay, this car is really cheap and convenient, but you should know that if you get rear-ended it will explode," then the consumer can decide whether it's an acceptable tradeoff, and, in effect, do his/her own cost-benefit analysis. The willful deception to enhance profit is different than what you are describing and I think makes the Pinto case especially appalling. Similarly, the key issue in tobacco reform was how the companies covered up the health risks once they became aware of them, not that they inadvertently created a lethal product. For those same companies to set out to prove that smokers in a less powerful country than the US will make more of a contribution dead than alive is vile on multiple levels. I knew someone once who came right out and said, "Yes, the lives of people in other countries are not worth as much as ours," and that sense for me underlies a lot of the problems with utilitarianism. I don't know if you would describe my attitude as a holier-than-thou approach to life, but in your chemical plant example, the risks would be acceptable if 1) workers and people surrounding the plant are fully informed of the risks; and 2) the risk is spread equally between the decisionmakers and those directly affected by the decision. (There are probably other conditions, but I've reached the limit of my philosophizing for now.) The cases would be more complex, I think, if risks had been unknown, unproven, or able to be mitigated as in your chemical plant example: would you have made the same choices? But in the cases Dr. Sandel presented, there were crucial power differentials between the decisionmakers and the victims, as well as prior knowledge that was knowingly concealed - something I would consider itself to be an evil act. |
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| Agreed I had the same thoughts by the logic of the class all buildings should be 1 story high and surrounded by pillows on the off chance a construction worker might fall off. The fact is human life has a value and its is very cheap look at liberia or nazi germany. The girl who brings up the value of human life is undoubtedly thinking of her own life or family or even another american most people in the developing world dont have the same "holier than thou" look at human life. They can absolutely tell you what a life is worth. |
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| It does not impinge upon the ethical dilemma but accurately speaking there exists no historical evidence that the Romans fed Christians to lions. reply |
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| According to Wikipedia, the Ford Pinto scandal is kind of not quite true as it is normally told. reply |
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| Given that the lions, the Christians and the Romans were all being manipulated by a tiny yet powerful ruling class for their own selfish ends, would one need to have any knowledge of utilitarianism to find this practice objectionable? reply |
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| How is getting pleasure from watching death matches useful? If it is useful does that make it moral regardless of what it is? Death matches are not seen as moral by most people so that seems to indicate that Utilitarianism is not, as used in this way, getting at moral outcomes. Simply because something has no use does not mean that it is immoral. Humans have no use for some distant galaxy, but that does not mean that that galaxy is immoral. reply |
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| Funny, when the utilitarian premise is carried to its logical conclusion - Bentham's head upon a plate, his body converted to dummy á la Mme. Tussaud, his "non-voting" presence at faculty meeting - Bentham actually appears close cousin to Homer Simpson: it is therefore hard to take strict utilitarianism seriously reply |
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| I'm uneasy with the idea of using money to measure cost/benefit. Money is unused values or un-repaid debt. Its future value is unknown. It is an abstract thing being used to ballance a current concrete action. And it has too many confusing conotations. Nor does it fairly represent pleasure. Better to create an entirely new measure of pleasure that can satisfy everyone by definition. "Majubers" was one such thing that I remember from a long time ago. It was a kind of bean that acted as a seed for all things good. Good things that everyone would agree upon like love, mutual respect and human potentials for positive, life affirming acts. Money is difinately too murky a thing to be used as a measure of pleasure or goodness. reply |
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| Is it right to use 'dollars' as a currency in a cost-benefit analysis? Should the currency not be 'human lives'? reply |
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| Maybe not 'human life' but a standardized 'life quality index' that factors all things cultural, economic, and political. Some small value could be assigned to sadistic pleasures, and monetary security, but some far greater value to pleasures of love and human kindness which will insure that such ideas continue to be cherished and taught in our schools and homes, and aspired to by our young. After all, we are talking about "civil"-ization, no? This would be useful. | |||||
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| I sure wish I got paid 300,000 to live in Kansas. I don't get anywhere near that amount reply |
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| In a way 'human life' is the greatest of pleasures and the final common denominator. But not every outcome of every cost-benefit has 'human life' as it's last result, does it? Except, of course, when there is no habitable space left at all on earth and all transactions will have to factor it... How gloomy. reply |
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| Why do we limit ourselves to speaking of the value only of human life? Right now, with environmental calamity looming, can anyone say that a human's life, wants and needs, are always more intrinsically important than those of every other living organism? Does morality apply only to people? reply |
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| There seem to be two clear issues in the analysis of utilitarianism in the lecture. The first is in the incompleteness of the definitions of costs and benefits used in the examples. As was obvious from the outcome of the Ford Pinto case, not only did Ford not adequately value a human life, but they failed to include even the most straightforward additional costs (pain and suffering of the family). One other cost they neglected was the societal cost of allowing callous behavior by corporations - the basis of most negligence claims and a cost that society gave a high value in this case. Given a little consideration, I'm sure that we can come up with many other costs that would resulted in a very different outcomes of the Ford cost/benefit analysis. This analysis seems like more of a justification of a predetermined decision. This leads to the second issue - the difference in perspective rooted in the anachronism of the "Christian to the Lions" example. The value of intangibles like life, the definition of freedom, pleasure, pain, etc. are both personally subjective and to a significantly degree culturally derived. It is nearly impossible for us to understand how life was valued during the time of the late Roman Empire, with high rates of infant mortality, a much shorter lifespan, and an entirely different value system than we have today. reply |
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| I think you're making a great point that Ford wasn't doing a true cost-benefit analysis, at least not one using happiness as a measure. You also make an important point that the value of intangibles is culturally variable. Still, allowing that, if we measure the Pinto decision according to happiness rather than dollars, we would come up with a very different course of action. It also suggests, though, a huge problem with utilitarianism in general: apart from the variability in how individuals measure happiness, there are cultural differences that make calculation of "net happiness" too theoretical a proposition to be of much practical use. Any thoughts on how social responsibility might play into utilitarianism, one way or another? |
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| Consider the video of Fear Factor, The contestants are being to tortured (less lethal than the Christians) for the pleasure for the TV audience. Have we really advanced in two thousand years. reply |
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| While I don't agree with it, as an allowable practice, I think a cost benefit analysis may have (and still) justified Hockey players fighting with delayed intervention and minimal individual consequences rather than prohibiting the practice at all or by imposing the kind of penalties on the individuals involved that is done in other sports. I'd be interested in the students' views on this subject. reply |
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| It seems that a fundamental flaw in interpreting cost-benefit analysis is that the costs and benefits are developed relative to the person/entity that performs the analysis, and that achieving a "universal measure" is inherently impossible. In the Roman-Christian example, if the Christian were performing the analysis, would it provide the same outcome? reply |
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| Maybe these analyses needed to include the personal/interpersonal cost of taking actions that are repugnant. The utilitarian approach is useful, but I think you need to stack up all the approaches and compare them. SOmetimes it may be possible to adjudicate among them and find a middle ground that is more acceptable. (Given that alll facts are never known and perfection not possible.) Kate reply |
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| On Bentham: I think the moral is that if you stick to the wrong argument for too long you get your head handed to you on a plate. On Ford and Cost Benefit: I'd want to see arguments on the formulas first... for example - as an $11 part could save a life, does that not mean therefore that life=$11 or alternatively, the cost of NOT having the part equals $200,000 [ inflation] thern.... etc reply |
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| Ford's CBA (Cost Benefit Analysis) had no part of the dead people's utility to society in it. The formula was simply: if [ Cost of recalling and refitting all Pintos ] > [ cost of lawsuits*] then take the lawsuits. * cost of lawsuits = Number of Pintos sold (and likely to be sold) * average cost of a wrongful death lawsuit caused by the fuel tank problem. Ford's problem was that once the jury found out about the fact they knew about the problem and then decided to not recall as iot cost more than the lawsuits they decided to punish Ford with a huge lawsuit. Had no jury ever found out about the formula then Ford would have been in the black. This has changed the face of lawsuits (and CBAs) for corporate America. The threat of a jury handing out punitive damages in the hundreds of millions tends to mean companies will always find it cost effective to recall their products rather than risk a class action lawsuit. reply |
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| I'm glad you mentioned cost of wrongful death lawsuits here. It seems when the students (or viewers) saw this there was some amount of disgust at the idea that Ford, PM, or other incorporated entities were putting dollar values on people's lives. However, turn this notion of wrongful death litigation around for a minute. On the plaintiff side of such a lawsuit, presumably there is a normal person such as you or I or those students/viewers with no apparent problem with putting a price tag on someone's life. Perhaps the standard moral high ground would be to say, "Well, I would never engage in a wrongful death lawsuit." I find that statement to be as suspect as any claim of one's future or hypothetical behavior when faced with a moral dilemma such as being marooned at sea or seated at the Colliseum. I'm not arguing against anything you said, just pointing out something that was on my mind the whole time I was watching this - namely that we can't afford to believe that putting a price tag on life is something that only cold-hearted institutions and corporations engage in. Also, to the point of using dollars (or money, more generally) as the unit for cost-benefit analysis: The reason is that dollars are assumed to be perfectly fungible (exchangeable for other things). You may question that assumption in the case of human life, however, I don't believe that using human life as that unit accomplishes the goal you have in mind. In such a case what is being said is that we are measuring trade offs of various activities using human life, because human life is the most exchangeable unit (easiest to work with) imaginable. Quite the contrary, right? It is hard (or maybe you think impossible/morally wrong) to calculate the exchange rate for human life. |
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| Interesting comment. But If dollars (and not human lives) are the currency of utility, then it might be 'cheaper' in certain contexts to crash your trolley into the five workers (all illegal immigrants from Mexico) in stead of the single one - who appeared from a distance to be a banker from Manhattan. | |||||
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| Nah, I'd rather run the banker down. He has health insurance and can better deal with the expense than the other five. Besides he deserves it more for running our economy into the ground. |
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| Utalitarianism can't work for one simple reason. If I'm wrong with what I say next, then it's probably down to the fact that I'm not completely familiar with the word utalitarianism but here it goes. Utalitarianism's assumption is that if everyone acts in a way that increases the overall utility of society, then everything will be swell. This sounds very reasonable, but we run into the problem of what is this behvariour that will lead to utility maximisation? What is good? What is evil? One can not happen without the other as you require one as a contrast to understand what the other one is. If the conservation of mass theory is correct, then no matter what you do to an object, no energy is lost right? The same principle can be applied here as no matter how much good you do, you will create an equal amount of negative effects in some shape or form elsewhere. What humans fail to comprehend is their inherent psychological flaw whereby they are always striving to find the magic bullet to everything. All throughout history, you have very intelligent people, making mistakes based purely on psychological limitations that each one of us has. Having this ideal of utalitarianism is the same as the fad of religion during the crusades, or the recent IT bubble. If you do the simple mathematical equations by putting values on human life, or developing a big brother society, you are forgetting the simple truth that by doing so you are creating such problems as the psychological prisons that result from such systems and other things that we may not even be able to imagine. Once again referring back to the conservation of mass, all systems have draw backs and this one is no exception. Therefore I believe utalitarianism is the same irrational, emotionally reactive ideal as all the other aspects to human life which is quite possibly built up of a bunch of such emotional reactions rather than rational decision making in which case all the things that people strive for including fame, wealth, love and everything is else is essentially meaningless. reply |
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| Yes, utilitarianism is just one huge rationalization for human behavior. Without a moral code, it all just comes down to dollars and cents in a capitalist society. Take, in contrast the Amish way of decision-making or the "seven generations" way of the native American. These exact a moral code FIRST and then decision-making is made as a result. For example, given that murder is murder, wars would be antithetical to the moral code. However, with utilitarianism, war-profiteers' values outrank the lives of millions of people. reply |
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| Think Lord of the Flies. The philosophy of Utilitarianism enables the rationalization of the moral code and allows situations to determine right and wrong. Is it not also troubling to see entertainment and pleasure as one and the same? by the very nature of the term, it seems to take the humanity out of choosing what is the "greater good". it lowers people's choices to the most lowbrow common denominator. reply |
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| I was talking about this course with someone I know who has a degree in religious studies. She drew attention to the fact that these ulitlitarian philosophers were working and writing around the time of industrialization, the rise of factories and railroads, and the reign of robber barons - in other words, at a time there was a lot of exploitative behavior to rationalize. In the interest of being intellectually generous, though, I'm trying to think of a way utilitarianism and categorical morality could both end up drawing the same conclusions about what is actually moral. Are the utilitarians suggesting that what "feels" moral to an average person (i.e., not committing murder) is not actually moral, i.e., that 19th-century sweatshops were moral because the goods produced happiness for the consumers? or is utilitarianism, used properly, meant to produce the same answers as our gut feelings do? |
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| Utilitarianism and CBA are useful. They help us see paths to decisions when without them we would be lost for lack of criteria to make complex decisions. Any time we can place a decision in an analytic framework based on data we do shed light on the choices we face. Do we build this bridge? Do we pass that environmental legislation? Do we legislate workplace protection? At the same time we have certain absolute values embedded in the constitution. The right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, free speech, assembly and others. Those values give us additional guidance in making decisions. We have cobbled these guidance mechanisms and principles together in the course of history and they are not perfect and definitely can be further improved, but while we explore improving them better they serve us well in making better, yet flawed decisions. For teaching purposes we can show the flaws of CBA. That is useful because it helps us understand the weakness of CBA as a decision making system, it does not invalidate it as an aid in making decisions. The Pinto case, The Christians and Lions example are examples of flawed and unchecked applications. As the Director of Economic Analysis at EPA during the Carter administration, I introduced CBA to be applied to environmental regulations. At that time the environmental community was adamantly opposed to CBA for the same reasons mentioned in the course, you cannot put a value on human life, it is never complete, it is immoral and in EPA's case: the legislation does not require it. Over time CBA has been widely embraced by the environmental community as a way of improving decisions, making them more acceptable to the body politic and and generally more defensible to the public. reply |
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| Anyone refusing to put a dollar (or any other) value on human life would not function well in the public health sphere. When we provide a vaccination for a disease (MMR say) then there will inevitably be a few people who will have a reaction to it and die. What we have to do is ask if the deaths of those people outweigh the pain and suffering of those who would otherwise get the disease if the vaccine was not given. There has to be some way to decide between these two outcomes. The fact we use dollars to measure may seem distateful (we could use happiness units if you prefer) but it also allows us to add in some real costs assosciated with the issue, such as the roll-out cost of the vaccination; development costs of a vaccine; scoietal costs of large number of people with the disease. Once added up we can come to a simple is the number greater than zero decision to see if it is worthwhile. And to anyone who thinks life is priceless I ask you why don't want speed limiters in your car that uses GPS to know the local speed limit and won't let you go over it? Why don't you want CCTV cameras everywhere to deter crime? Why not have all flights install parachutes for each seat in case of a problem (this is actually feasible but phenomenally expensive)? The reason you don't is because you have already valued the number of lives that would be saved and decided that your liberty, or money, is more valuable. reply |
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| A good point. On the other hand: What is the present day dollar value of a human life? Is it the same all over the world? | |||||
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| The dollar value of a human life varies wildly around the globe. While this may be (understandably) uncomfortable it does recognise the difference in the standard of living in different countries. It isn't all bad... For example: while it may be perfectly acceptable to spend $400,000 on a guard rail to save 4 lives per year on a US road it is not feasible to do this in Afghanistan where the average income is about $30/month. That money would be better spent on various health programs saving thousands of lives. And if you think all lives are equally valuable then ask yourself why you are happy to spend 25% of the US budget keeping 300 million Americans safe when that money could easily save (and improve) the lives of a billion people in the third world. Or ask yourself why you bought a new car rather than second hand and give the extra cash to a well drilling charity in Africa. reply |
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| The dollar value of a human life varies around the world. And how is the situation within the US; have all US-citizens the same dollar value? Judging by the US health care system, the answer is, I think as an outsider, no. The idea that human lives have different dollar values seems contrary to the Declaration of Independence. | |||||
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| Jell: We do seem to be a bit uncivilized even to us "insiders". The debate about health care is more complicated than the value of human life. The debate is more about individual liberties and responsibilities and the role of government. Frankly, it is more about politics than anything else but deep in our psyche is the belief we should control our own destiny. Unfortunately, the debate hasn't been about whether health care is a human right. I am truly enjoying these lectures! |
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| I was thinking about all these issues last night and came up with another hypothetical scenario. Suppose, in the first-week runaway train situation, we had to choose between steering the train into the five strangers or turning it towards a single person who was a family member or close friend. Who would seriously kill the one instead of the five? I guess what I'm trying to say is that our lives are always worth more to ourselves and those close to us. I imagine this is probably true elsewhere in the world. Keddaw, you make great points. I have a question, though: do our financial and economic decisions reflect what we think is right, or do they sometimes reflect what we know to be not quite right but which we do anyway? I know in my case it is probably the latter. reply |
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| There are certain things in life where you cant put a price tag. Example... Health and responsibility. In the case of the ford, the company should have spent the money in making sure all cars are safe. ALL LIFE IS SACRED. If the company would have had lost money making the cars safer, then the designer of the car should answer to the executives for making the costly mistake that cost the company so much money. reply |
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| J.S. Mill argues that though one group of people may enjoy a base pleasure (such as in the gladiator example) the higher pleasure (and therefore the more valuable and weighty pleasure) is that which stimulates the highest human faculties, i.e. "high art". Therefore, killing the minority for the base pleasure of the majority does not further or better humanity in the long-run and so is not of greater value than the lives lost. To quote Mills "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied". It is better in the long-run for Romans to be without the base pleasure of watching Christians die a brutal death than for the Romans to be satisfied pigs. reply |
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| @Jelle NL Different states within the US place different values on life. Some states have the death penalty - no moral judgement, just a statement of fact. As for the Declaration of Independence, I'd just liek to point out that the formative documents of the US have placed the value of a black person at 3/5s that of a white person... Still, at least they recognised them as more than property. @Paperball We do tend to value things closest to us most, for example when the Boxing Day tsunami hit the newspapers usually had how many local people had died in it with the total (100,000!!!) as a footnote. Our decisions tend to reflect what we think is best for us (Adam Smith's invisible hand) rather than some higher ideal. @ALL LIFE IS SACRED Nonsense! All car companies could make their cars almost impenetrable in an accident, but it ruins styling, performance and fuel economy. We, as consumers, do not want that, we want style, speed and good gas mileage. Plus, you also have to take into account the trade off between safety (less people dying in car accidents) and gas mileage (less people dying from global warming). @J.S. Mill Currently I think we'd agree that the utilitarian argument has shifted from the greatest total pleasure to the least total harm. Thus the pleasure gained by spectators at the Colluseum would be outweighed by the harm caused to the participants. This is why boxing has gloves and rules and even cage fighting has referees. reply |
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