What Is the Value of a Human Life?

Would you give up three pairs of pants to save a human life? How about that new stereo? What if you could give save a child from an early death by not dining out for the next few months?

Utilitarian philosopher and Princeton Professor Peter Singer offers a conservative estimate that by donating $200 to a charity that fights starvation and disease in sub-Saharan Africa, you can save one human life by saving a child from an early death. The U.N. estimates that 70 million people will die of the AIDS in the next 20 years alone. At present, the disease turns another child into an orphan every 14 seconds. We cannot put African AIDS patients ahead of our family members when we decide how to spend money. However, we can give up trivial possessions and unnecessary indulgences. Each person has to decide how much to donate to charity. Right now, Americans give far too little to help fight suffering abroad.

In great contrast to the price of an African life, the life of an executive at the Sanyo Corporation is worth $2 million. In August 1996, according to CNN, kidnappers in Tijuana, Mexico, released Mamoru Konno after his company paid the $2 million ransom they were demanding. In other words, his life is worth as much money as 10,000 African lives. When lives are put in stark terms of cash value—one life the victim of extortionists and the other the victim of cruel circumstance—the disparity in “value” is shockingly vast. How can one justify saving one life when one could save 10,000?

Global income disparity is just as great, with half the world’s population living on $2 a day. The gross domestic product per capita in America is just under $35,000. In other words, average Americans earn 48 times as much as people in the poorer half the world’s population. Corporate CEOs who make upwards of $100 million per year are worth as much as 14,700 people from the world’s poorer half.

American media sources ignore the thousands of Africans who die every day of AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and starvation. The media sustains the mindset that white American lives are more important than both black American and black African lives because of its biased coverage. When was the last time you saw CNN do a profile on an innocent black girl caught in the crossfire of a gang fight?

But maybe we place less value on anonymous deaths. If we can put a face and name to someone, we feel compassion and the urge to help. But I’ve got names: Richard Mubweka, Mildred Bwire Auma, Hanneac Mkwapada and Fela Kuti, all victims of an early death from AIDS, all as valuable to their families as Mamoru Konno. Surely, their families would have paid $2 million to save them, if they had been able to afford it.

AIDS is easily preventable with proper education. The U.N.’s Global AIDS Fund is sorely underfunded after it was introduced with much fanfare and promises from industrialized nations to contribute $10 billion each year. President Bush has pledged only $1 billion, and about $200 to $300 million of that is used domestically for research, leaving a paltry $700 to $800 million for global AIDS. Bush and Congress came up with $40 billion to fight the war on terrorism, and yet they say a 7.5 percent share of the AIDS fund is plenty generous to fight epidemics that kill six million people globally each year. (For perspective, the U.S. economy is 31 percent of the global economy.)

Even after people are infected with HIV, their lives can be extended greatly by taking antiretrovirals, or protease inhibitors. Unfortunately, these American-patented drugs are currently too expensive for patients in the developing world because we prefer to save pharmaceutical profits instead of human lives. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa have been declared in a “state of emergency,” which means they are legally allowed to breach patents and produce the drugs at little or no profit. However, they have been unable to find a company to do this.

Furthermore, patients in South Africa are forced to pay higher prices for the drugs than patients in India, because the country’s gross domestic product per head is six times as much as it is in India, and that is how our pharmaceutical companies decide prices. What the profit-maximizing accountants who designed the system didn’t take into account was that poor South Africans, not rich ex-colonists, are dying of the epidemic.

The American government must stop giving the cold shoulder to the world’s most deprived and desperate people. Of course domestic problems are important, but the U.S. government can eke out a few extra billion dollars from the super-sized military budget or the agribusiness-loving farm bill. As individuals and corporations, we can donate to the U.N’s Global Fund on AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (www.apathy-is-lethal.org), which is using all the money it gets to save lives. Or we can donate to OXFAM, another worthy organization that fights suffering and death in Africa and around the world. Singer recommends UNICEF, which specifically helps mothers and children. When you’re considering that new North Face fleece this winter, think about how much more your $200 could do elsewhere.

Nicholas F. B. Smyth ’05, a Crimson editor, is a government concentrator in Dunster House.