Rant of the Week

The Infinite Life

How many times have you heard someone say that-- "you can't put a value on human life". Yes, you can. Yes, we do. All the time.

We love to say it but we don't mean it ourselves. If the government proposed raising our taxes by 50% to pay for a ream of new hospitals, clinics, emergency ward staff, helicopters, and defibrillators, they would be tossed out of office at the very next election. We don't mean it.

120 We know that millions of people are starving to death at this moment in Darfur and Somalia. I don't think a single person in Canada has proposed increasing our aid to those people since the economy went into the tank. How can you possibly put value on a life?

120 What we mean is, "you can't put a limit on how much we want other people to pay for a human life that matters to us."

120 It is this kind of thinking that leads governments and individuals to spend huge sums of money on services and products that seem to protect life, when the same amount of money spent more wisely, on prevention, for example, would save far more human lives. It's that same old human impulse. When a section of road is unsafe because it is too "expensive" to build a proper bridge or change the angle of the curve or widen the pavement, we panic and buy more ambulances and end up spending more money than it would have cost to fix the problem in the first place.

Besides, the whole notion that you "can't put a value on human life" cuts two ways. In the case of a lawsuit against a corporation whose negligence caused a wrongful death-- might not a judge decide that it would be crass to aware a specific amount of money to a plaintiff, because, you can't put a value on human life.