Thinking and Deciding

360 DECISION ANALYSIS AND VALUES
of the value of human life itself. He argues for three main attributes. One concerns
experiences, the second concerns personhood — the other things that make human
beings special, such as plans, projects, and ongoing relationships with other people
— and the third concerns the values the people have for other people’s lives, including
those that arise from their personal attachments. Infants, fetuses, non-human
animals, and some severely debilitated adult humans lack personhood attributes to
some degree. Life for them has value largely because of the experiences it contains
(and for early fetuses, not even that). It makes sense to add up the experiences over
time. When a normal adult dies, however, more is lost than the stream of future experiences.
The persons plans, projects, and relationships are disrupted. This affects
the second attribute. For infants and fetuses, the third attribute — the attachment of
the parents — is typically involved as well, but not the second. We could thus think
of the value of life as rising with increasing age during childhood and then falling
again in adulthood, as life expectancy becomes shorter.
In sum, estimates of the monetary value of life are at best crude approximations.
The true tradeoff between money and life depends on the duration and quality of the
life in question, the age of the person, and also on the feasible alternative uses of the
money. If the money to save lives will be taken from expenditures on education for
the poor, then life might have a lower value than if the money came from a tax on
fountain pens costing over $1,000.
Teaching decision analysis
Decision analysis has been taught routinely to business and medical students and to
military officers for several years. Training in basic decision analysis is sometimes
included as part of courses in thinking (see Wheeler, 1979). Although few formal
evaluations of the effectiveness of decision-making courses have been made, wordof-mouth
reports suggest that students of expected-utility theory or MAUT seldom
use these methods later in their decision making, unless they become professionals
in the field. The study of formal methods, however, may help these students to avoid
many of the errors that characterize informal decision making in others. It may also
help them understand formal analyses carried out by others, even when these are
only reported in the press.
We have evidence that it is possible to teach decision making to children and
adolescents. For example, Kourilsky and Murray (1981) reported on a program designed
to teach “economic reasoning” to fifth- and sixth-grade children, in part in the
classroom and in part through a seminar for parents. Economic reasoning essentially
involves making tradeoffs among potential outcomes, considering what one might
do with the money other than spend it impulsively. The program increased the use of
economic reasoning by parents and children, and they were reported to be satisfied
with the economic decisions that they made.
Feehrer and Adams wrote a curriculum for a unit in decision making as part
of an eighth-grade program designed to increase intelligence (Adams, 1986). The