Contrary to popular belief, there's nothing unethical about attaching a price to a human life: it's a very uncomfortable question, and I think there ought to be some disagreement on what the number should be...
But money is fundamentally just a unit of value. We use it to compare the value of different things. We can use it to convert between labour (someone's time, which is a fraction of one's life) and goods and services. We can also use it to measure lives: 5 statistical lives lost is worse than 1 statistical life lost, all else being equal. We can also use it to weigh years lost to disability, etc.
Note that this doesn't mean things always have a fair price, and it says nothing about whether money is fairly allocated in society. And it certainly doesn't mean that people can be replaced with money. None of this is the point.
As a thought experiment, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is a human life worth more than nothing, or zero dollars? (I hope you will say yes)
- Is a human life worth more than 20$? (I hope you will say yes)
- Does a human life have infinite value? I hope you will agree that this is not the case: if it was, then we would be justified in sacrificing all of the world's resources combined, in order to save a single life. The paradox is that this would come at the cost of all other lives, which is clearly nonsensical. Even a pharaoh's life, or a king's life, is not normally considered to be worth the combined lives of all of his subjects, from the perspective of modern society. Lives have some non-zero, but finite, economic/social "value".
- Is there a fair price, in dollars, for an hour of labour or work? If there is, then you accept that there is some conversion factor between a fraction of a human life, and some amount of dollars.
Putting a price tag on a human life is something that is so important, that we ought to discuss it more often. Whether we put the price too high, or too low, is often what explains political disagreements on the provision of public goods and services. We do ourselves a great disservice by not forcing ourselves to come up with a concrete number, or by not being honest about what our numbers are. We should challenge each other's assumptions and ensure we put a fair price on it, and ensure that this price is based on the things that matter to us as a society.
Judges, actuarial scientists, and economists, all do it explicitly. Nobody agrees on a specific number, but they all pick a number. The rest of us? We do it implicitly, whether or not we're aware of it, every day of our lives. The problem is that our value judgments and our choices, especially if they are not conscious, are often not self-consistent.
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See also:
- https://fee.org/articles/marginalism-and-the-morality-of-pri...
- https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-government-agen...
- https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230963-100-put-a-pr...
- https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/get-honest-about-the-price-of-...
- http://justiceharvard.org/lecture-3-putting-a-price-tag-on-l...
- https://www.porchlightbooks.com/blog/changethis/2020/all-liv...
- https://muse.jhu.edu/article/18688/pdf