“On a personel level, there is no limit to how much my 3 year old daughter is worth to me. I don’t even posess the skills to describe her worth.”

Good point, because to me she is worth nothing. If I were to find out that she had died, it wouldn’t cause me one second of concern. I would be much more affected by an injury to the stray dog that sleeps on my back steps every day.

So one measure of “worth” is the biological connection between couples and their offspring.

Everyone is someone’s child, but the rest of us don’t care.

Was almost stopped dead in the gym today, listening to Radio Open Source’s wonderful episode on the value of human life. Aside from being horribly inappropriate listening when you’re on a cross-trainer, this episode featured Feinberg, Singer and Hirs…

I was glad that Feingold and Rabbi Hirschfield briefly called him on it. This is another case of putative “good ends� justifying whatever means necessary to achieve them. History is full of examples of this type thinking. The atrocities committed throughout human history were all a result of some form Utilitarianism. Hitler, for example believed that the extirpation of “undesirable� types of human beings (Jews, Catholics, Gypsies, Homosexuals, physically impaired, etc.) was for the greatest good, the “desirable� (Aryan) types remaining would enjoy a much improved situation. Pol Pot believed that eliminating the educated and intellectual class (potential troublemakers in his view) would be for the good of his regime.

How is “good� to be decided? Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s nuking was supposedly good for saving potentially thousands of Allied lives. I doubt that the civilian recipients of such a Utilitarian decision would agree. The supposed good of foisting democracy on Iraq is worth however many American and Iraqi lives as it takes and in the end come to naught (as Noam pointed out, a democratically elected Shi’a majority could (would likely) vote to ally with or become part of Iran or vote to become a Theocracy.)

If a widow can convince Feingold to give her more than someone else gets then she has marshaled a greater value by persuasion. Meting out compensation based on potential for earnings over a lifetime for a dead person is fallacious (insurance companies take note – what someone would have earned is meaningless because they are dead.)

Potential is just that potential – until it is actualized, it is in the subjunctive (if it were then it would be but as it isn’t it ain’t) – everything has the potential to increase its value but unless the value is increased it is unchanged. In binary parlance it is Zero until it is One. Almost something is still nothing.

I don’t believe in luck, accidents, or victims – innocent or otherwise. I believe everyone is responsible for everything that exists in their experience and by these lights everyone gets what they create and everything is truly fair, so for what it’s worth, a life is worth what it’s worth. Obviously we place relative values on those closest to ourselves but they are our personal values as oolitic notes (which are idea constructs buoyed by emotional weight, opinions and predilections) and the people of our affection while of incalculable emotional value are intrinsically worth very little.

On a personel level, there is no limit to how much my 3 year old daughter is worth to me. I don’t even posess the skills to describe her worth.

But when one thinks about a world with finite resources, in which it is possible to burn through millions of dollars in heath care costs, the problem is much more nuianced.

In fact, judging from a public policy vantage, isn’t it unrealistic and in fact irresponsible _NOT_ to at least attempt to quantify these values of people?

AND VOTE

Another question that I’ve been thinking about is they way we value elderly versus children at least when it comes to health care resources. Why do we devote so much resources to elderly, especially during the last stages of life, via programs like Medicare? Wouldn’t it make more sense to devote at least some of those resources towards universal health care for children? I guess this would be an interesting topic for another show…

So your cat is you (although your cat might not agree)