The Price of Life

It is often said that human life is priceless. No amount of money or other goods equals the value of a human life. The only justification for not preventing the loss of a human life when one can do so is that it would result in the loss of even more lives. In short, only human lives can be balanced against human lives. The philosophical locus classicus for this view is Immanuel Kant's claim that human beings have a dignity but not a price. By 'price' he did not mean a merely monetary value but an equivalence. "Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent."'1 Thus, the claim that human lives are priceless is not merely that no monetary value can ethically be placed upon them, but that no exchange value of other goods can be placed upon them. A distinct but correlated claim is that all human lives are of equal value. The pricelessness of human life does not imply that all lives are of equal value. Some lives might be more priceless than others just as some infinities are greater than others. However, it does make plausible their having equal value. If no price or value can be assigned to lives, there is no obvious basis for comparative judgments of their value, and they should be treated equally. Contrarily, if human lives do have a price, it is a priori unlikely that all have the same value or price. The issues of whether human lives have a price, and if so, what it is, constantly recur in bioethics and social policy generally. The distinction between ordinary and extraordinary lifesaving treatment