> Casually weighing human life against economic cost is not acceptable in what we might call a civilized society.
The reality is quite different. We accept a risk of death to ourselves and others in everything we do. You do it, too. Everything. You even risk death by doing nothing.
You could say "if it cost $1b to save this life, we should do it". But how many lives could be saved at $1b each before we run out of money? Then what? And what about the lives that could have been saved at $1m apiece?
If someone not willing to give up all of his assets to save someone else's life, is he uncivilized and morally wrong?
> You could say "if it cost $1b to save this life, we should do it".
This a common, yet unrealistic, hypothetical. In reality, of course, death is inevitable regardless of the economic costs. Past a certain point everybody, so far, has died. The amount of things that we can do in order to prevent any given death doesn't scale with the economic cost, past a certain (quite low) point. Spending 1B on a person won't get you 1000 times better 'medical stuff' than spending 1 million; therefore, a trade-off of e.g. one life for 1B vs 1000 lives for 1m is illusory.
In practice all societies have limited resources. My position is, however, that those limited resources, in the case of an acute health crisis, should be focused as much as possible on mitigating that crisis, without having primary concern for the economic costs.
The reality is quite different. We accept a risk of death to ourselves and others in everything we do. You do it, too. Everything. You even risk death by doing nothing.
You could say "if it cost $1b to save this life, we should do it". But how many lives could be saved at $1b each before we run out of money? Then what? And what about the lives that could have been saved at $1m apiece?
If someone not willing to give up all of his assets to save someone else's life, is he uncivilized and morally wrong?