How precious can human life be? There are six billion people on the planet!

This is part of a rant that I wrote a while ago, updated and adapted:

"The value of a human life is beyond any reckoning". This argument easy to refute.

Thousands of people die in road accidents every year caused, for instance by simple things like tiredness, boredom or clumsiness on someone else's part. One death is too many! The value of a human life is beyond any reckoning! ! Good grief, we'd better ban the automobile right away

It is not in any dispute that inhaling smoke increases your chances of getting cancer. A certain number of deaths are caused each year by each coal-fired power station in each city. One death is too many! The value of a human life is beyond any reckoning! Good grief, we'd better shut down the electricity! Likewise the emissions from motor vehicles are carcinogenic. There are many more examples like this.

What is patently obvious is that a certain number of deaths per year are acceptable to our society, as a price for progress or convenience. You may not feel comfortable with it right now, but in general it doesn't bother us - we accept that we are all mortal, and everyone has to die sometime. Implicit in the structure of our society is the assumption that the value of a human life (which will end anyway, no matter what anyone does), is not beyond reckoning, and that the shortening of a certain number of lives is an acceptable price.

You can prolong a life, but you can not save it. In the long run the survival rate drops to zero. Quality, not quantity.

You may argue that civilisation saves more lives that it shortens, but we do not aim our civilisation at prolonging the most possible lives. If that were the case, no scrubber on that power station would be too expensive. All the time, we collectively take decisions along the lines of "we estimate that the new model car's exhaust will kill 3 people per year per million cars. We are willing to spend one million dollars to reduce that, but not two million."

We take a similar decision about the risk vs. cost to our own lives every time we go bungee-jumping or smoke a cigarette. We do not behave as if our own lives were of infinite value. We behave as if we are mortal. All rather obvious if you think about it.

A human life has a finite value. The calculus of the value of human life is so commonplace that we don't even notice it.

One death is too many and The value of a human life is beyond any reckoning are fine-sounding rhetoric, but are without any connection to the real world whatsoever. If you are truly principled and and truly believe this, then why not start by giving up your car and your use of electricity, or otherwise accept that the death toll is acceptable to you?

This is another fine nodeshell rescue you've gotten us into!

bol points out the wise words of Bill Hicks: "having sex and having a baby is no more a miracle than eating food and having shit come out of your ass". Though it must be said, there's a lot more to parenthood than just having a baby.

Jongleur claims that according to the US government, the value of a human life shouldn't have a monetary value placed upon it, but when it is unavoidable, $1,600,000 is the value to use. For a US citizen.

When I was twelve years old I had the unique privelege of taking a specialized college science course, which was geared for children of my age but covered many of the scientific topics that twenty-something college students learn.

One day, about three weeks into the course, I walked into the lab and saw that the professor had set out several vats of different-colored liquids, gases and pyrex boxes containing elemental solids. Nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, mercury... a few other elements that the human body is composed of, all in proportion to how much of each element could be found in the average adult human body. Each container had a sticker on it, the price tag, as dictated by the supplier from whence these elements were bought. At the far end of the table upon which all of this stuff sat was a folded card, like a tiny tent of paper, and on that piece of folded paper, standing up like a marquee, was the sum total of each price. It read:

"The cost of human life, in raw materials: $83.72"

We sat down, mentally chewing that rather difficult modicum of fact, and most eyes stayed fixed in rapt awe on that little card, which seemed to unravel the mystery we had all considered at one time or another. The professor, I don't recall his name now, came into the lab and silently surveyed the room and our curious gazes at this perplexing display. Finally, he picked up the card, showed it to us and said:

"This is what the human body is worth, if you were to go out to the store and purchase the materials necessary to build one. But there's more to it than that, isn't there? You can't just take these things, mix them up in a bowl, slap them in the oven and, nine months later, wind up with a human being. It takes much more than that. These items must be arranged in a certain way, at the molecular and cellular level, and manipulated to a degree that it would boggle the mind. Genetics, cellular mitosis, osmosis, molecular replication... these are some of the processes by which a human body develops." He waved to the elements behind him. "All these things are inert, by themselves, but something is added to make them dynamic and singular. Kids, I'm going to tell you this once and once only: the human body is cheap, dirt cheap in the grand scheme of things, but the quality that gives a human body life is something neither science nor money can ever measure. You're here to learn how science works and how it can be applied to learning how things work, but it can only work up to a certain point. At that point, we must stop and wait for science to catch up. The saying that life is precious is true only in that the human experience which validates that life is invaluable. We cannot put a price on experience. You can pay for some experiences, but that is only a fiction of economics. Life is more than just your body and mind. And science cannot even begin to comprehend where life begins and where it ends. That task is best left for the philosophers and dreamers. If you came here looking for answers to life, then you're paying a significantly steep price for answers that will get you nowhere. Or, at least, your parents are."

I was twelve and I was copying what he'd said like a mad man, word for word. I kept it and stuffed it in a box, only to discover it years later, when I was in my mid-twenties and living in Winston-Salem.

Life is not worthless, nor is human life. The human body, though, is cheaper than a TV set.