Abstract
There are some things in life that cannot be valued in terms of money. One of these is death. It is true that Hamlet did a CBA of staying alive when he weighed up ‘…the whips and scorns of time, the pangs of despized love, the laws delay’, and so on, against the fear of the awful experiences one might have when one has ‘shuffled off this mortal coil’. But he did not try to put a monetary value on the components of his balance sheet.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Sunstein, 2014:51.
- 3.
Kant, I. 1785/1964.
- 4.
See important discussion of this aspect of the valuation of life in Lukes, S, ‘On Trade-Offs Between Values’, in Farina, F, Hahn, F, and Vanncussi, S, Ethics, Rationality and Economic Behaviour, pp. 36–49. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996.
- 5.
In Wright versus British Railway Board, 1983, quoted in McGregor on Damages, 16th edition, 1997:1,696,
- 6.
McGregor, loc.cit.
- 7.
I am indebted to my colleague at UCL, Hugh Goodacre, for drawing my attention to the fact that William Petty used a similar calculation for the value of a person’s life in the 1670s to 1680s, and even employed a discount rate in his method of calculation of 6% in most cases, a rate that would not be unusual in the contemporary world.
- 8.
Incomes that they may derive from, say, interest or dividends or pensions, do not count since they do not add to national income. They are just transfer payments from some members of society to others that are not in exchange for anything that the people in question currently add to society’s output.
- 9.
See a full discussion of these methods and of their weaknesses, as well as of Broome’s challenge to the usual justification given for them, in Hargreaves Heap, S., et al., 1992, The Theory of Choice: A Critical Guide, Blackwell, Oxford.
- 10.
Mishan, 1971a:694.
- 11.
- 12.
See, for example, Kahneman, 2011.
- 13.
Broome, 1985:262.
- 14.
- 15.
More accurately, the ratios of the marginal utilities are equal to the ratios of the prices of the goods in question.
- 16.
Satyamurti, 1987:12.
- 17.
Sunstein, op.cit:90.
- 18.
Sunstein,Ibid:89.
- 19.
Sunstein, ibid :123.
- 20.
Sunstein, ibid :104. William Petty’s estimates in the 1670s to 1680s are that the ‘net output’ of an Englishman was about £80 as compared with that of an Irishman of about £60 or even lower in some cases.
- 21.
Aldred, 2009:156ff.
- 22.
This case is forcibly argued in Crisp, 2004.
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Beckerman, W. (2017). The Price of Life. In: Economics as Applied Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50319-6_14
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