Many people look on human life as something almost beyond value, something intrinsically precious. To them the idea that life is equated with or reducible to some monetary value is an anathema. Others will insure their lives for a sum more closely related to what they feel they can afford than to what they, their relatives, or their dependants consider their true value.
Some people find it necessary to place a value on human life in order to make decisions regarding the amount of money to spend to avoid an accident or death. Engineers, who install median barriers on motorways for instance, must have a value for life so that they can compare the cost of providing protective measures with the benefits achieved. The benefits are the human life or limb saved converted to a monetary value. Doctors and health care providers find themselves making similar decisions.
One method used to calculate the value of human life is to consider the average life expectancy of those who are likely to die in an accident and their potential to earn a living over their remaining life span. The potential to earn is a measure of the potential of the person to contribute wealth to society. Of course, many people contribute to society without earning money. To allow for this and to take account of those who are net receivers from, rather than contributors to, society the average income of all people including non-earners is used with future earnings discounted back to present value.
This approach has the drawback of producing a value for life that seems far too low for many people. The surviving dependants of a money earner or a home manager who has died as an innocent victim in an accident are often surprised to learn that a life has such a low value. The potential future earnings of a family money earner may well exceed the value of life calculated by this method. The users of motor vehicles and therefore road accident victims are often the more affluent members of society and sometimes also the greater contributors thus increasing the difference between the perceived value of life of the accident victims and the value calculated.
An alternative to this approach is to consider that the contribution to society of money earners is double their earnings. Taking double the earnings for a working life and adding the cost of upbringing and education produces a much higher value of life. Non-earners are considered equal in value to earners. In Australia the value of life is further broken down into age groups and sex.
Another approach to the value of life is to try to measure the value of life perceived by individuals. People are surveyed to find their opinions on the amounts of money they would be personally prepared to contribute toward an increase in safety. The value of life is then derived from this. If the probability of an accident is low, a small contribution by each individual to safety will produce a relatively high value of life. In response to a survey of this type, people push up the value of life as they project their feelings for the need to protect themselves and close relatives. These surveys measure the stated willingness of people to part with their money but not their actual preparedness to do so.
The figures derived by the last two methods are at the upper end of the possible value range of human life. Because of the high value put on life, it is not long before the value becomes known and people tend to believe that the value set is the value of all and any human life. In New Zealand, the public have become aware of a figure of two million dollars and many people feel delighted to hear that they are worth so much. In practice, it would take seventy-four years for the average income earner, who earns just $27,000 a year, to earn this sum.
While the methods used to calculate the high values of human life may be questionable, politicians are prepared to adopt the high values to justify expenditure in response to public pressure to provide safety improvements on some high profile projects such as motorway median barriers.
This figure of two million dollars cannot be considered the absolute value of all human life. Politicians are prepared to use a high monetary value for life to avoid certain accidents that they would find politically undesirable and consequently demand an input into when and where the public money is to be spent. Using a high value of life means that more projects can be justified and may cause a mismatch between justifiable projects and available finance. The high figure cannot be used in all circumstances as there is often insufficient money available.
When it comes to spending the money we find that local input, political decision-making, or media interest are all factors. If a particular safety problem has received a high public profile, it is likely to receive precedence over other projects with higher benefits that have not attracted the same media interest. These low profile projects are then neglected because of the lack of finance.
Using a higher value of life has allowed motorway medium barrier construction to be justified. These barriers carry out the important function of protecting innocent people travelling the other way from being hit by an oncoming car that has crossed the medium as well as protecting those who crossed the medium because of their own folly.
Barriers to prevent vehicles going off the side of the motorway are harder to justify as the risk to life is often smaller. Some recently installed examples near Wellington are of interest. Crash barriers are installed to prevent cars, perhaps driven by intoxicated drivers, falling into the entrance-ways to pedestrian subways but are not long enough to protect innocent pedestrians on the approaches to the same subways. Other barriers prevent cars from going down banks but there is no barrier to prevent cars from entering a school playground! It seems that the designers will protect motorists who run off the road from their own folly but do not consider pedestrians or school children to have any value as they do not contribute directly to the available funds!
In New Zealand, road improvement projects designed to save life are given no greater priority than projects that just save petrol. For a project to be authorised the benefits must be five times greater than costs. This unusually high ratio by world standards has been set because of the shortage of money available for roading work. If money was not an issue work should be done whenever benefits exceed costs. Other countries use much lower ratios and may simply require that benefits exceed costs by a small margin.
New Zealand?s accident rate is high by international standards but many worthwhile and otherwise cost justifiable life or accident prevention projects that might save lives are not being done because of the shortage of funds. When an accident does happen a motorists is usually found to have been at fault and is blamed for the accident and may face court action.
People are often surprised to learn that the value of their life may vary during the day or according to the mode of travel. For instance, in Britain the value of a life is considered to be five million New Zealand dollars while travelling by train but one and a quarter million while travelling by road! While working in some industries it is two and a half million. This variation occurs because of the variation in peoples? expectation of safety at different times. The higher the safety level expected the higher the value of life. Rail travel is safer than road travel, people expect it to be and say they are prepared to contribute more to the maintenance of this safety. When it comes to paying a higher price for their rail ticket they may not be so prepared to spend the money and choose instead to take the more risky road option. Incidentally, the greatest risk to the safety of rail travellers in New Zealand is the threat of the train being hit by a motor vehicle at a level crossing.
London Transport executives, under pressure to lift safety levels to even higher levels after the fire at Kings Cross underground station, have suggested to the Government that if the Government expects higher safety levels on railways than are provided by other transport modes then the Government should provide the additional funds. A response is still awaited.
Road accidents are frequent and widely dispersed. Most accidents result in few casualties, and most escape media attention. Rail accidents are much less frequent but when they do happen they may be spectacular and although they seldom result in higher numbers of casualties, they attract more media attention. The result has been close attention to individual accidents and avoidable causes in the rail industry with a resultant steady increase in safety levels over most of the twentieth century. A similar response to accidents in the air industry has resulted in air travel, once considered very risky, improving steadily so that it is now safer than road travel and comparable to or safer than rail.
The frequency and wide dispersal of road accidents has often meant that little action is taken because of any individual accident. Recognition of a significant number of accidents at a single location or involving one model of vehicle may produce some response. Steady improvements are, however, being made as a result of international awareness of safe vehicle and road design, but road travel continues to lag behind the other transport modes.
Another approach to safety is to look at individual incidents and accidents as they happen, and find the immediate and basic causes. Once recognised, causative factors may be eliminated if the expenditure can be justified, using a value of life calculation. The solutions found for one incident may be applied elsewhere, thus avoiding similar incidents. Many solutions, like moving a sign that obstructs views at an intersection, are low cost and can provide very high levels of benefit.
This approach, which requires people with special skills, differs from past practice where the person sent to investigate an incident was a law enforcement officer with a prime objective to find who was at fault. It seeks not to blame or judge but to find a way of making the incident less likely in future. In practice, it is easier to investigate every rail and air accident than to investigate every road accident. Road accident investigators place a higher reliance on statistics and only investigate those spots that have a significantly higher accident rate than normal.
A railway example of the change in thinking that comes with this approach occurred in Sydney. Suburban trains travelled with the doors open and the people who fell out were considered to be just careless. An incident involving a person known to the Railway management led to the realisation that even careful people can be jostled out and rethinking resulted in the doors being closed and accidents of this type almost eliminated.
As the causes of accidents are eliminated and safety improves we can expect to see the value of life increase and the need for available funds reduce.
The concept of the value of life may also be used in medicine. In medicine, the doctor deals with only one individual at a time and must make decisions on the treatment provided for that person. This differs from the transport situation where those involved in accidents cannot be predicted and average values of life are necessary. In theory, each patient can be given an individual value of life and this can be used as a limit to the value of treatment. Human rights legislation prevents discrimination against the aged and in medicine this prevents the use of average calculations based on age, instead each person must be considered individually.
Some doctors may not realise that they are making decisions based on the value of life but heart surgeons who refuse surgery to patients that refuse to give up smoking; those who have refused expensive operations using scarce resources to criminals convicted of heinous crimes; those who have put limits on the treatment available to the elderly and others with short life expectancy; are all making decisions based on their perceived value of the patient?s life. Problems may occur when a doctor working without the benefit of an objective means of measuring the value of life allows personal prejudice, perhaps not consciously so, to colour his judgement and, without realising it, to undervalue a person?s life. It is equally possible to over-value an individual?s value of life causing distortions in the expenditure of available funds.
Finally, we can perhaps say that deciding a real value of life is a rather intangible thing. At best we can set a value of life for use in calculations to decide where to spend available money to preserve life. Careful consideration of incidents can result in the identification of low cost improvements that can significantly reduce future accident rates. Money spent on many small projects may give greater total benefit than larger sums of money spent on high cost and high profile safety improvements.
It is difficult to set a single value of life that will meet the requirements of all circumstances and a range of values may be appropriate. What the value of life gives us is a form of objective decision-making to enable priorities to be set for the expenditure of available funds. We need to be alert to the possible distortions that may occur to the objective process when pressure groups, media interest, and political considerations become involved. r
Iain Middleton is editor of
New Zealand Humanist.