in your eyes, what price is a life worth? (2) What are your thoughts about Greer’s breakdown of what a human being is worth in terms of chemicals? (

The Price of Life

“All the arts we practice are but apprenticeship. The big art is our life.” — M. C. Richards

Overview

What’s a life worth? It is said, “At any price a life!” Do you agree? In our need to understand our world we sometimes impersonalize our world, and with it, our own very lives. We put a price on everything, sometimes pricing ourselves right out of the market, right out of our values, and right out of our lives. Read the following New York Times commentary by journalist William R. Greer and discuss in-group and class your thoughts. Since this module is about “Biology and Psychology, I thought it might be interesting to have as the purpose of this exercise: Life! To help you assess how you value life–yours and others—read on. What in fact is a life worth to you? At what price a life? That is your assignment. To prepare better for discussion, you may wish to first review the debriefing questions at the end of this exercise.

When a construction crane fell on Brigitte Gerney last month as she walked along Third Avenue, pinning her for six hours, the city leaped into action. Hundreds of police officers rerouted traffic throughout the Upper East Side. Two cranes were brought from other boroughs to lift the one that had fallen. Doctors from Bellevue Hospital set up a mobile hospital at the construction site. Emergency Services rescue workers risked their own lives to save hers. Once she was freed, the police halted traffic for 30 blocks along Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive to speed her trip to the emergency room.

No city official questioned how much the rescue effort cost the city, or whether saving Ms. Gerney’s life was worth the price. To do so would have been unthinkable. “There’s no point where you say that’s too expensive,” said Lieut. Thomas Fahey, speaking for the New York City Police Department.

And yet putting a price on human life is a common activity among life insurance companies, airlines, courts, industries, and agencies. The Federal Government routinely calculates the value of a life, having been required to do so by law: Executive Order 12291 issued by President Ronald Reagan in February of 1981. Ordinary citizens make much the same determination, albeit unconsciously, when they choose small cars over larger ones, take jobs hundreds of feet below the ground for higher pay, or buy inexpensive houses in a flood plain instead of more expensive ones in safer areas.

The fact that Americans put a price on human life, the processes for making such valuations, and the ways in which the results are used raise questions about our society: Is this necessary? What are the ethical and moral considerations? Given the answers, where does human life stand in this society’s scheme of things?

People have been calculating worth of their lives and the lives of others for as long as archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians can document human existence. “It may be thought to be an aberration of our institutional values, but it’s not at all unique in the course of humankind,” said Kenneth Korey, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College. “In tribal and band societies, for example, we find indemnification for the loss of a life that involves property transfers. How else can those groups set straight the fabric of the society when it is distressed by the disorder of a murder?”

The Aztecs in the 15th century created an elaborate system of compensation for injuries and deaths; so did the Code of Hammurabi of ancient Babylonia. In both ancient and medieval law, a compensation, or sum of money, was paid by a guilty party to satisfy the family of the person he injured or killed. Indeed, in Old English the word “wergild,” meaning “man’s price,” referred to the amount paid to the king, who had lost a subject; to the lord of the manor, who had lost a vassal; and to the family of the deceased.

But there is a fundamental difference, many social scientists say, between calculating the value of a life to compensate for its loss, a common practice throughout the centuries, and determining whether it is worth saving, a practice growing more common today.

“We cannot argue that in our society human life has gained in value or that we cherish life more than primitive people did,” said Robert Zeitlin, an archaeologist at Brandeis University. “I think looking back at our society thousands of years from now, people will regard some of the things we do with absolute horror, the fact that we knowingly allow people to die from environmental hazards, for example.”

Some philosophers say that the value of human life is infinite or incalculable. “Individual human beings are utterly irreplaceable,” said Dr. Daniel Callahan, Director of the Hastings Center, a nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to ethical issues in medicine and biology. However, insurance agents, economists, legal experts, scientists and agency administrators are assigning life values ranging from a few dollars to many millions of