What is a life worth? Total contribution to the economy? The health and commercial values of individual organs and tissues recoupable after death? Or subjective means like societal contribution, inherent dignity, and religious worth?
Frankly, none of the above seems comprehensive enough to assign a number to a life. Though one’s tangible earnings and contributions may seem quantifiable, some undeniable requisites of humanity—morals, family, and cultural significance—may never attain an appraised value.
This task became even less feasible when 2,977 lost lives needed concrete, quantified compensation after September 11, 2001.
Over thirty-three months beginning in the winter of 2001, Kenneth R. Feinberg, a pro bono Washington lawyer specializing in mediation and alternative dispute resolution, presided over roughly 900 hearings. There, families of those killed on September 11 came to tell him, one by one, who they had lost. He was appointed Special Master of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund (VCF), a position that tasked him with determining the compensation for victims’ families. This assignment meant leaving each hearing having converted a husband, daughter, or firefighter into a check. In 2005, one year after the VCF closed, he asked this exact question in the title of his book: “What is life worth?”
In his book, Feinberg explained that to make the process of the VCF as efficient and consistent as possible, he devised a formula that multiplied a victim’s projected lifetime earnings, subtracted any insurance or pensions the family would have received, and added a fixed sum for suffering. By contractually stripping victims’ families’ ability to sue if they chose to receive from the fund, it shielded airlines and other companies responsible from the legal crisis.
However, the VCF drew harsh public criticism not just for shielding private firms but also for seemingly preferring high-income, high-status individuals, as the formula directly tied compensation to a victim’s income and job. Families understandably felt as though their lost ones received unequal valuations: a family who lost a broker may have walked away with millions while a family who lost their newborn child left with significantly less. Yet without this formula, how was the government supposed to quantify a human life?
Perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Can one even give a human life a price? The instinctive tendency to say “no” is correct yet incomplete: it fails to distinguish between pricing a loss and pricing a life, a difference that the VCF and the public also failed to understand when they collapsed them into one resolution.
When a court awards damages to a widow, the court—rather than appraising the lost husband—values what she and her children have been deprived of: a finite, calculable amount of income and support.
When the Boston government decides whether to create safety barriers for a new highway, the government evaluates the costs and benefits using the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL), an economic measure of how much people are willing to pay to reduce small risks of dying. In the United States, VSL amounts to $7–13 million per person, a figure derived not from any moral judgment about human worth but by using the average extra wages a worker demands for small additional risks.
The same logic extends beyond transportation policy. When the VSL informs a public-policy decision, when hospitals allocate a scarce drug, or when insurers set a premium, a number must be attached to mortality because the alternative involves making a bad, invisible trade-off. If a society has no way to evaluate how to allocate scarce resources to each place, the society cannot save anyone at all.
While a loss can and should be assigned a tangible worth, a life cannot be valued holistically using any quantitative measure. Kant’s moral philosophy argues that the righteousness of one’s action should be judged not by its consequences but by its conformity to moral law. Indeed, this method of thought becomes applicable to undermining what the VCF seems to quantify; while one may have contributed a considerable sum of money to society in their lifetime, we cannot determine the impetus that propelled the action.
The fundamental premise of assigning values to human lives is simply cruel to the families of the victims. When the broker’s family receives substantially more compensation than the newborn’s family, the VCF disregards the emotional weight a lost life carries for the family and treats people with greater fortune as more valuable than others with equally important lives. No family would want to hear that their loved one is worth less than anyone else simply because of the loved one’s lack of social standing and personal assets.
The VCF for 9/11 went wrong because it took a formula built to answer the first question—how much has this family lost?—and presented it as though it also answered the second—how much was their loved one’s life worth? In turn, the public interpreted the disparity between the broker and the newborn as a ranking of the dead rather than a measure of lost income, the latter being entirely defensible. Realizing this mistake, Feinberg, in his final report issued in November of 2004, wrote that if he had the choice again, he would pay every family the same amount, an action which he did when he administered the fund for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
If we cannot stop putting a number on lives, then we should clarify what every number represents. A payment can either compensate dependents, or it can say to a family that their loss was seen and counted equally alongside every other—not both at the same time. When another catastrophe comes, the system in place will be tested not for its arithmetic but rather for the clarity with which it communicates to society that the check represents what was taken from them and never for whom it was taken. Because life is priceless.