me: >> I put an infinite value on my own life when it's someone else who is >> deciding whether to take it or not.
Julio writes: > You do not. Or, do you -- can you really -- spend an infinite amount > of labor time to extend your life? No! The most you can spend is a > portion of your (conscious) life time (eating well, exercising, etc.), > itself a subset of your overall life time. Therefore, you effectively > put a finite value on your own life. Note my clause that starts with the word "when" in the statement above. Julio's statements apply only if it is I who is making a decision about what to do with my own life. But in this case, I was talking about someone else making the decision _for_ me. My point is the same as raghu's earlier one: the value of a person's life depends on the point of view, just as the concept of opportunity cost is subjective. (From their point of view, the opportunity cost of my students going to college is different from that calculated from the perspective of their parents.) Note that Ford's decision to assign a specific value to my life in their calculations is paternalistic. Father Ford knows best what I'm worth! Usually money libertarians accuse the state of being paternalistic, but here's one of many cases where corporate capitalism is as paternalistic as its state. In a later message, Julio wrote: >I mean, not only not *you*, but no society would be able to spend an infinite >amount of labor time to extend your individual life either. What matters in >social c/b analysis is not how you individually "value" your own life, but how >society effectively values it, in terms of the amount of social labor time it >expects to spend to extend your life. < I wasn't expressing the point of view of society, which is a reasonable point of view but not the one I was presenting. Julio suggests that Marx's law of value applies to human life. I don't think so, since he was only talking about the value of commodities (items produced for sale or treated as if they were for sale). In a world where slavery has been abolished, a human life is a not a commodity and it isn't treated like a commodity. Rather, it's labor-power (the ability to work during a specific time period) that's treated as if it's a commodity. In general, this thread was about the _price_ of a human life rather than its _value_ in the Marxian sense. In the US, courts and corporations do not apply Marx's law of value. What they call "value" is a "price." in the later message, he continued: > I don't know whether an advanced communist society will be able to spend an > infinite amount of its labor time to extend the individual life of one of its > members. I'd think their total labor time fund would be limited and other > priorities would be pressing as well.< With (true) communism, the value of human life in _general_ would have to be decided democratically, which may or may not reflect the amount of socially-necessary abstract labor-time needed to produce it. But each individual would likely have a different opinion about their own lives. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
