costs, funeral costs, and the victim pain and suffering, the agency arrived at $200,000 per fatality. If the jury objection was to the price tag, not the principle, a utilitarian could agree. Few people would choose to die in a car crash for $200,000. Most people like living. To measure the full effect on utility of a traffic fatality, one would have to include the victim loss of future happiness, not only lost earnings and funeral costs. What, then, would be a truer estimate of the dollar value of a human life A discount for seniors When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tried to answer this question, it, too, prompted moral outrage, but of a different kind. In 2003, the EPA presented a cost-benefit analysis of new air pollution standards. The agency assigned a more generous value to human life than did Ford, but with an ageadjusted twist: $3.7 million per life saved due to cleaner air, except for those older than seventy, whose lives were valued at $2.3 million. Lying behind the different valuations was a utilitarian notion: saving an older person life produces less utility than saving a younger person life. (The young person has longer to live, and therefore more happiness still to enjoy.) Advocates for the elderly did not see it that way. They protested the enior citizen discount,�and argued that government should not assign greater value to the lives of the young than of the old. Stung by the protest, the EPA quickly renounced the discount and withdrew the report.14 Critics of utilitarianism point to such episodes as evidence that cost-benefit analysis is misguided, and that placing a monetary value on human life is morally obtuse. Defenders of cost-benefit analysis disagree. They argue that many social choices implicitly trade off some number of lives for other goods and conveniences. Human life has its price, they insist, whether we admit it or not. For example, the use of the automobile exacts a predictable toll in human livesore than forty thousands deaths annually in the United States. But that does not lead us as a society to give up cars. In fact, it does not even lead us to lower the speed limit. During an oil crisis in 1974, the U.S. Congress mandated a national speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour. Although the goal was to save energy, an effect of the lower speed limit was fewer traffic fatalities. In the 1980s, Congress removed the restriction, and most states raised the speed limit to sixty-five miles per hour. Drivers saved time, but traffic deaths increased. At the time, no one did a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the benefits of faster driving were worth the cost in lives. But some years later, two economists did the math. They defined one benefit of a higher speed limit as a quicker commute to and from work, calculated the economic benefit of the time saved (valued at an average wage of $20 an hour) and divided the savings by the number of additional deaths. They discovered that, for the convenience of driving faster, Americans were effectively valuing human life at the rate of $1.54 million per life. That was the economic gain, per fatality, of driving ten miles an hour faster.15 Advocates of cost-benefit analysis point out that by driving sixty-five miles an hour rather than fiftyfive, we implicitly value human life at $1.54 millionuch less than the $6 million per life figure typically used by U.S. government agencies in setting pollution standards and health-and-safety regulations. So why not be explicit about it If trading off certain levels of safety for certain benefits and conveniences is unavoidable, they argue, we should do so with our eyes open, and should compare the costs and benefits as systematically as possibleven if that means putting a price tag on human life. Utilitarians see our tendency to recoil at placing a monetary value on human life as an impulse we should overcome, a taboo that obstructs clear thinking and rational social choice. For critics of utilitarianism, however, our hesitation points to something of moral importancehe idea that it is not possible to measure and compare all values and goods on a single scale. Pain for pay It is not obvious how this dispute can be resolved. But some empirically minded social scientists have tried. In the 1930s, Edward Thorndike, a social psychologist, tried to prove what utilitarianism assumes: namely, that it is possible to translate our seemingly disparate desires and aversions into a common currency of pleasure and pain. He conducted a survey of young recipients of government relief, asking them how much they would have to be paid to suffer various experiences. For example: ow much
