[ExI] value of a human life, was RE: Same Sex Marriage (was Re: Call To Libertarians)

[Stefano Vaj]

On 28 February 2011 20:08, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> My (admittedly
> uneducated) estimate would run to somewhere in the order of 600 to 6000
> murders per year over cocaine, so that for every 100 to 1000 kilos of
> cocaine you hold in your hand, someone has been killed, even if we ignore
> the practical difficulty of holding a ton of cocaine in one's hand.

Might depend on some technical defect of your exoskeleton... :-)

> If we use that criterion  to tackle the difficult ethical question regarding
> the dollar value of a human life, I would start with the estimate that
> cocaine is worth (well it was when I was a teenager) about 100 bucks a gram,
> and there has been inflation but simultaneously far more new suppliers from
> what I hear, so let me use 100 US bucks a gram, so a human life is worth
> between 10 million and 100 million bucks.

Why, cocaine seems to involve a substantially higher amount per capita
than the cost of hiring a killer, or of administering a death sentence
in the US (let alone in China or Iran).

-- 
Stefano Vaj