The moral question at issue here is enormous: “How much is a human life worth?”
If we are willing to trade risk to human life for expected economic benefit, it requires us to engage in a sort of analysis employed by utilitarians – moral philosophers who believe in promoting the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people – and also to put a price on human health. This may sound shocking, but people do this every day: Insurance actuaries, military strategists and traffic planners routinely face difficult questions on how much a human life will “cost.”
But if we consider it moral to keep cars on the roads, while also understanding that approximately 40,000 people die in traffic accidents in the U.S. every year, we had better be confident in our calculations. According to the utilitarian, if the numbers change, the moral calculus could flip. Continue reading.