“My favorite anecdote along these lines—though my books are packed at the moment, so no citation for now—comes from a team of researchers who evaluated the effectiveness of a certain project, calculating the cost per life saved, and recommended to the government that the project be implemented because it was cost-effective. The governmental agency rejected the report because, they said, you couldn’t put a dollar value on human life. After rejecting the report, the agency decided [i]not[/i] to implement the measure.”
Does anyone know of a citation for this? Because I’d really like to be able to share it.
I found this really, really, hilarious until I realized that, according to Eliezer, it actually happened and killed people. Although it’s still hilarious, just simultaneously horrifying. It sounds like somebody misunderstood the point of their own moral grandstanding.
(on the other hand, I suppose a Deontologist could in fact say “you can’t put a dollar value on human life” and literally mean “comparing human lives to dollars is inherently immoral”, not “human lives have a value of infinity dollars”. To me as a consequentialist the former seems even stupider than the latter, but in deontology it’s acceptable moral reasoning.)
“My favorite anecdote along these lines—though my books are packed at the moment, so no citation for now—comes from a team of researchers who evaluated the effectiveness of a certain project, calculating the cost per life saved, and recommended to the government that the project be implemented because it was cost-effective. The governmental agency rejected the report because, they said, you couldn’t put a dollar value on human life. After rejecting the report, the agency decided [i]not[/i] to implement the measure.”
Does anyone know of a citation for this? Because I’d really like to be able to share it. I found this really, really, hilarious until I realized that, according to Eliezer, it actually happened and killed people. Although it’s still hilarious, just simultaneously horrifying. It sounds like somebody misunderstood the point of their own moral grandstanding. (on the other hand, I suppose a Deontologist could in fact say “you can’t put a dollar value on human life” and literally mean “comparing human lives to dollars is inherently immoral”, not “human lives have a value of infinity dollars”. To me as a consequentialist the former seems even stupider than the latter, but in deontology it’s acceptable moral reasoning.)