Putting a specific value on human life is important in many contexts and forms part of the basis for many political, administrative, commercial, and personal decisions. Sometimes, the value is set explicitly, sometimes even in monetary terms, but much more often, it is set implicitly through a decision that allows us to calculate the valuation of a life implicit in a certain rule or a certain resource allocation. We also value lives in what looks like a completely different way when we evaluate whether a particular life is being or has been lived well. Both of these ways of valuing are done from an outside or third-person perspective, but there is also a third way of valuing a life which is from the first-person perspective, and which essentially asks how much my life is worth to me. Is there any connection between these different ways of valuing life, and if so what is the connection between them? This paper provides an account of John Harris’ analysis of the value of life and discusses whether it can bridge the gap between first-person and third-person evaluations of the value of life, and whether it can do so in a way that still allows for resource allocation decisions to be made in health care and other sectors.

The heart of prospect theory is the value function, proposing that the carriers of value are positive or negative changes from a reference point. Daniel Kahneman observed that if prospect theory had a flag, the value function would be drawn on it. The function is nonlinear, reflecting diminishing sensitivity to magnitude. When describing how human lives are valued, the function exposes profound incoherence. An individual life is highly valued and thus vigorously protected if it is the only life at risk. But that life loses its value when it is one of many endangered by a larger tragedy. Beyond this insensitivity, the function may actually decline when many lives at risk become mere numbers. The more who die, the less we care. Implications of this deadly ‘arithmetic of compassion’ for understanding and managing the risk from nuclear weapons are briefly discussed.

A life of the mind can be lived only by creatures who know that they have minds. We call these creatures “persons,” and currently, all such persons THAT we know OF are “alive” in the biological sense. But are there, or could there be, either in the future or elsewhere in the universe, creatures with “a life of the mind” that are not “alive” in the sense that we humans usually understand this term today?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the media provided daily coverage of this unprecedented crisis in the history of the 21st century. Some topics, such as how the virus affected older adults, were widely covered. The way in which COVID-19 was documented evoked a ‘tragedy’ narrative through consistent reporting about the suffering it was causing and the deleterious consequences it had on specific populations, including residents of long-term care homes (LTC). This article explores how reports on COVID-19 in LTC homes in a national newspaper (The Globe and Mail) fuelled a tragedy discourse that modulated the value of life of older adults living in those environments. We used critical discourse analysis and analysed 74 articles focusing on older persons residing in LTC homes in two Canadian provinces (Quebec and Ontario) during COVID-19. This article offers a brief overview of the notion of tragedy and how the discourse of tragedy is intertwined with humanitarian crises, life and death, and the value of life. Our findings revealed the construction of three types of tragedies that shape our societal values around life and death in LTC: the tragedy of the threat to life, the tragedy of the unfortunate (old, vulnerable and lacking in agency) and, finally, the tragedy of historical neglect and abandonment. Our findings suggest that the nature of reporting on life and death in LTC homes during the COVID-19 pandemic provoked a sense of fear and pity for a passive other. Re-thinking what gets reported in the media, including whose voice is represented/missing and how tragedy narratives are balanced with contesting stories, could elicit more sentiments of solidarity and action rather than reinforce pity, distancing and immobilisation.

We examine the effects of the postulated metric on the measurement of well-being, by comparing, in the (income, lifetime) space, two indexes: the equivalent income index and the equivalent lifetime index. The conditions under which the equivalent lifetime index exists are more restrictive than the ones under which the equivalent income index exists, but it is possible to define an alternative equivalent lifetime index, based on two reference income levels, for which the non-existence problem is less acute. Those indexes are also shown to satisfy different properties concerning interpersonal well-being comparisons, which can lead to contradictory rankings. While those incompatibilities arise under distinct indifference maps, we also explore the effects of the metric while relying on a unique indifference map, and show that, even in that case, the postulated metric matters for the measurement of well-being.

In many situations choices must be made that will have an impact on the welfare of companion animals. Often one of the options will be to euthanase the animal in question. The way in which one views this option will depend not only on one's assessment of the quality of the animal's life (or the lives of other affected parties), but also on how one values an animal life as such. Clearly, a companion animal may be valued by a human being or by another animal. A dog's death may affect its owner's quality of life (QoL), or it may affect the QoL of other animals in the household. But does the life of an animal have any value other than that? Is anything lost, for example, when a dog that lived with a sole owner, now deceased, is euthanased? Conversely, would anything be gained if the dog were re-homed (apart from the potentially positive contribution to the new owners' QoL)? More generally, in prolonging, or refraining from ending, the life of an animal, is it thereby ensured that something of value persists? There seem to be three main views on this matter. The first is that animal life has no value in itself. The second is that animal life has value to the extent that the life in question is worth living for the animal. The third view is that the life of an animal has a value that exceeds what is ‘in it’ for the animal in question. The view one accepts here will have a dramatic impact on one's attitude to many of the choices to be made about the treatment of companion animals — choices in which one must balance quality of life against, as it were, quantity of life. So the heart of the matter is not only quality of life. It is also value of life. Unfortunately it may prove much more difficult to agree about the value of animal life than it is to agree about the significance of animal welfare.

Proportion responding (PR) is the preference for proportionally higher gains, such that the same absolute quantity is valued more as the reference group decreases. This research investigated this kind of proportion PR in decisions about saving lives (e.g., saving 10/10 lives is preferred to saving 10/100 lives). The results of two studies suggest that PR does not stem from an overall tendency to choose higher proportions, but rather from faulty deliberative reasoning. In particular, people who display PR are less likely to engage in deliberative reflection as measured by response time, the Process Dissociation Procedure, the Cognitive Reflection Test, a numeracy test, and a task assessing denominator neglect. This association between faulty deliberation and PR was observed only when choosing the highest proportion was non-normative because it came at the expense of absolute gains (e.g., saving 10/10 lives is preferred to saving 11/100 lives). These results help to make sense of discrepant findings in previous research, pertaining to how PR relates to biased reasoning and decision making.

According to Burri (2020), a major reason why suicide is often irrational lies in the option value of life. Remaining alive is valuable because this allows for a larger menu of options, and the possibility of committing suicide in the future adds further value to the act of remaining alive now. In this note, I represent life as a trust game played by two selves – the young self and the old self – and I argue that the possibility to commit suicide in the future can encourage committing suicide now, against what the theory of the option value of life predicts.

This article explores how staff in French public hospitals are indirectly involved in the governing of migration through healthcare. It unpacks the construction of differentiated values of life assigned to specific categories of vulnerable (authorised and unauthorised) migrants according to their perceived un/deservingness in context of budgetary restrictions. This context emphasises tensions between medical and administrative staff in the decision-making process regarding access to healthcare. The analysis rests upon empirical data (participant observations and semi-directed interviews) gathered in ‘healthcare access units’ located in public hospitals. Perceptions of un/deservingness lead to both healthcare rationing and healthcare denial and are built upon entangled criteria related to both migration status and budgetary concerns. These mechanisms reveal the administrative and budgetary dimensions that underlie the perceptions of health-related un/deservingness, which is linked to the costs of healthcare: the higher the costs, the less likely patients are to be designated to be deserving of healthcare.

Vaccines, when available, will prove to be crucial in the fight against Covid-19. All societies will face acute dilemmas in allocating scarce lifesaving resources in the form of vaccines for Covid-19. The author proposes The Value of Lives Principle as a just and workable plan for equitable and efficient access. After describing what the principle entails, the author contrasts the advantage of this approach with other current proposals such as the Fair Priority Model.

The risk of dying in fires in nursing homes is six times the risk of dying in fires at home in Sweden. One way to reduce this risk is to install fire sprinklers. This study measures the benefits using value of full lives, life years and quality adjusted life years (QALYs) for deaths and injuries. The results show that sprinklers are cost-effective in newly built nursing homes no matter what value of life is used. However, if sprinklers are installed in already existing buildings, they are cost-effective only if the value of a statistical life is used.