The social disvalue of premature deaths

Abstract

Much public policy analysis requires us to place a monetary value on the badness of a premature human death. Currently dominant approaches to determining this ‘value of a life’ focus exclusively on the ‘self-regarding’ value of life-that is, the value of a person’s life to the person whose death is in question-and altogether ignore effects on other people. This procedure would be justified if, as seems intuitively plausible, otherregarding effects were negligible in comparison with self-regarding ones. This chapter argues that in the light of the issue of overpopulation, that intuitively plausible condition is at best highly questionable. Unless the world is in fact underpopulated, the social disvalue of a premature death is likely to be significantly lower than the current estimates.