Valuing Life_ A Plea for Disaggregation

2004] VALUING LIFE 427
respect for whatever preferences people happen to have, but also
social conditions that allow preferences to be developed in a way that
does not reflect coercion or injustice. With respect to some risks, the
relevant preferences are nonautonomous; consider the fact that many
women face a risk of male violence under circumstances in which they
believe that little can be done and hence adapt.
In the context of ordinary regulatory policy, however, this
objection has more theoretical than practical interest. Typically
regulation involves the reduction of low-level mortality risks (say,
1/50,000). Much of the time, there is no reason to believe that the use
of informed WTP (say, $100) is a product of adaptive preferences.
When people’s WTP does appear to result from adaptive preferences,
however, the judgment about the easy cases must be revised.
b. Inadequate Information and Bounded Rationality. A closely
related objection would point to an absence of information and to
bounded rationality. As I have stressed throughout, people have
difficulty dealing with low-probability events. 158
If people are not
aware of what they might be gaining by regulation, their WTP can be
too low. Perhaps the availability heuristic will lead people to
underestimate the risk. If people cannot recall a case in which some
activity produced illness or death, they may conclude that the risk is
trivial even if it is not. Or perhaps the same heuristic, and probability
neglect, will lead people to exaggerate risks, producing a WTP that is
wildly inflated in light of reality. And if people are unable to
understand the meaning of ideas like “one in fifty thousand,” or to
respond rationally to such ideas, then there are serious problems with
relying on WTP.
It is also possible that people’s WTP reflects excessive
discounting of future health benefits. If workers are ignoring the
future, or applying an implausibly high discount rate, then there is a
good argument for setting aside their WTP. In the context of global
warming, for example, the temporally distant nature of the harm
might well lead to insufficient concern for a potentially catastrophic
risk. The same is true for less dramatic risks that people face in their
daily lives. Young smokers, for example, probably give too little
attention to the health harms caused by smoking. Those who choose a
158. See, e.g., Jolls et al., supra note 131, at 1519 (“People sometimes . . . underestimate the
likelihood of low-probability or low-salience events because these threats simply do not make it
onto people’s ‘radar screens.’”).