Problem
How much money should be spent on reducing air pollution?
The US Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, tried to answer this question with a cost-benefit analysis.
It asked, how many lives would be saved by cleaner air, and how much was each life worth?
It set the value of a life at $3.7 million, except for people older than 70, whose lives it valued at only $2.3 million dollars.
Lying behind the different valuations was a utilitarian idea.
Saving an old person's life produces less utility than saving a young person's life because the young person has longer to live, and therefore, more happiness still to enjoy.
Advocates for the elderly did not agree. They protested what they called the senior citizen discount.
• What do you think?
• Was the agency right or wrong to assign a monetary value to human life?