At 01:57 PM 8/17/01 -0400, you wrote:
>It is arbitrary
>because spending or causing someone to spend, say,
>a million dollars to save a life might not be the
>best use of the million, from the standpoint of
>saving lives. I could cause Dow Chemical to spend
>a million for some kind of pollution reduction
>measure that saves x lives, or I could tax them
>for that amount and save x+y lives of some other
>folks. A socialist government would have to make
>decisions like this, even more so than a capitalist
>one. It sounds insane, but there really is an
>optimal number of plane crashes.
right (though I hope I'm never on one of those optimal planes). Does it
make sense to set up an entirely different standard (besides dollars and
cents) for these decisions, i.e., to balance lives saved vs. lives lost
(assuming, at least as a first approximation, that all lives to be of equal
value) where no dollar value is attached to those lives?
>If calculation is not feasible in these areas, a
>defensible alternative is not obvious. Decisions
>will still have costs in terms of resources and
>human lives. Making them "democratic" is not likely
>to help in these terms either.
however, getting rid of the class bias in these decisions would be a major
step forward...
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
