At 01:46 PM 20-10-01, Ken Hanly wrote: >The Israelis are a long way from reaching the kill-ratio of the US and its >allies in Afghanistan--excluding the homeland toll-- but they are working on >it. How do cost-benefit analyses work in these situations? Are enemy deaths >given positive values and allied deaths negative values? How about innocent >enemy deaths? Innocent allied deaths?
I have come across discussion of the value of human life in books on CBA. It is mentioned that, in war, enemy lives have a negative value. But the general thrust is, to my mind, rather sinister even in a peacetime context. Various methods of valuing human life are recognised, e.g. calculations from the level of expenditure on safety improvements, and these are quite separate from what courts of law award. But the unspoken implication, which I dislike, is this: if a project has a positive NPV even allowing for the costs of expected fatal consequences (a negative externality valued by one or other of the various methods) it is then OK to go ahead with it and cause those deaths. My students do not seem to notice this implication. They notice that the "economists' approach" differs from the "moralists' approach" (each of these being monolithic) and their duty is to be economists. Sad. Best wishes Michael Yaffey
