Many highly costly laws, policies, or devices designed to safeguard the public from lethal
hazards are defended on grounds that “if it saves just one human life” it is worth
whatever it costs. Powerful as the moral and emotional appeal of such pronouncements may be,
they cannot withstand scrutiny in a world where scarce resources
have alternative uses. One of those alternative uses is saving other human lives in other ways.
Few things have saved as many lives as the simple growth of wealth. An earthquake powerful enough
to kill a dozen people in California will kill hundreds of people in some less affluent country
and thousands in a Third World nation. Greater wealth enables California buildings, bridges,
and other structures to be built to withstand far greater stresses than similar structures can
withstand in poorer countries. Those injured in an earthquake in California can be rushed far more
quickly to far more elaborately equipped hospitals with larger numbers of more highly trained medical
personnel. This is just one of innumerable ways in which wealth saves lives. Natural disasters of all
sorts occur in rich and poor countries alike—the United States leads the world in tornadoes,
for example—but their consequences are very different. The Swiss Reinsurance Company reported
that the biggest financial costs of natural disasters in 2003 were in the United States,
Canada, and France. But that same year the biggest costs of natural disasters in human lives
were all in Third World countries—Iran, Algeria, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.1 Given the high
cost of medical care and of such preventive measures against disease as water treatment
plants and sewage disposal systems, Third World countries likewise suffer far more from diseases,
including diseases that have been virtually wiped out in affluent countries. The net result is
shorter lifespans in poorer countries. There have been various calculations of how much of a rise in
national income saves how many lives. Whatever the correct figure may be—X million dollars to
save one life—anything that prevents national income from rising that much has, in effect,
cost a life. If some particular safety law, policy, or device costs 5X million dollars, either
directly or by its inhibiting effect on economic growth, then it can no longer be said to be worth
it “if it saves just one human life” because it does so at the cost of 5 other human lives.
There is no escaping trade-offs, so long as resources are scarce and have alternative uses.
More is involved than saving lives in alternative ways.
There is also the question of how much life is being saved and at how much cost. Some might
say that there is no limit on how much value should be placed on a human life.
But, however noble such words may sound, in the real world no one would favor spending half the
annual output of a nation to keep one person alive 30 seconds longer. Yet that would be the logical
implication of a claim that a life is of infinite value. When we look beyond words to behavior,
people do not behave as if they regard even their own lives as being of infinite value. For example,
people take life-threatening jobs as test pilots or explosives experts when such jobs pay a high
enough salary for them to feel compensated for the risk. They even risk their lives for purely
recreational purposes, such as sky-diving, white-water rafting, or mountain climbing.