Valuing Life_ A Plea for Disaggregation

440 DUKE LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 54:385
Professor John Broome, for example, notes that under one approach,
an American life is worth ten or twenty Indian lives, a judgment that
he deems “absurd.” 189
As a result, some analysts, including the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have opted for a
worldwide VSL of $1 million, a choice that seems quite arbitrary and
potentially harmful to people in rich and poor nations alike.
The issue raises important dilemmas. How should global
institutions assess the monetary value of human lives? What are the
monetized costs of ten thousand worldwide deaths from global
warming, deaths that include eight thousand people from poor
countries and two thousand from wealthy ones? The discussion thus
far suggests that there is no sensible abstract answer to these
questions; it is important to know what, in particular, the answer is
for. If a general question is asked, outside of any particular context,
about the monetary value of a stated number of deaths in 2020, it is
best left unanswered (except perhaps with laughter). The appropriate
assessments of VSL, and variations across countries, depend on their
intended use. If disparate numbers are meant to identify the actual
monetary values of human lives, and to suggest that people in Canada
are “worth” much more than people in Argentina or that poor people
are “worth” less than rich ones, the numbers are ludicrous as well as
offensive.
It is possible to go further. If the disparate numbers are meant to
suggest the appropriate amount that donor institutions should spend
to reduce mortality risks, they make little sense. The fact that a poor
person in a poor nation would be willing to pay $1 to eliminate a risk
of 1/10,000, whereas a wealthy person in a wealthy nation would be
willing to pay $100, cannot plausibly be used to defend the view that
189. See Broome, supra note 182, at 957 (noting that this conclusion is a product of “a
money-metric utility function to represent a person’s preferences,” an approach that Professor
Broome rejects). In the easy cases, I suggest that a money-metric utility function is not absurd,
and it is not quite absurd in the hard cases either. See INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON
CLIMATE CHANGE, supra note 188, at 483:
The VSL is generally lower in poor countries than in rich countries, but it is
considered unacceptable by many analysts to impose different values for a policy that
has to be international in scope and decided by the international community. In these
circumstances, analysts use average VSL and apply it to all countries. Of course, such
a value is not what individuals would pay for the reduction in risk, but it is an “equity
adjusted” value, in which greater weight is given to the WTP of lower income groups.
On the basis of EU and US VSLs and a weighting system that has some broad appeal
in terms of government policies towards income distribution, Eyre et al. (1998)
estimate the average world VSL at around 1 million Euros (approximately US$1
million at 1999 exchange rates).