Thursday, November 15, 2012
Privatizing Prisons and Calculating the Value of Human Life
On Wednesday, we talked about the second chapter in Sandel’s book that examines utilitarianism. One of the examples we used was privatizing prisons. I will admit that this is not an issue that I have ever spent much time thinking about. However, I found the arguments for and against it very thought provoking. Some of the pros we came up included compensatory justice and preparing prisoners for the real world. In terms of compensatory justice, the idea was that society has to pay for people to be in prison so prisoners should do work. Also, working could help prisoners to adjust to their life after prison. The cons were slightly more complex. The issue was raised about the effectively in the punitive and rehabilitative aspects if work is introduced into the mix. Also, if having prisoners work would turn into profit interests maintaining a prison population if businesses become dependent on prisoner workers. One of the last issues we touched on concerned the possible objections raised if one were to defend their defense of not privatizing prisons because it takes away the rights of the prisoners and forces them to work. This objection is particularly interesting. People have very different views on how prisoners should be treated. This led us to the question of can the value of human life be calculated and can these evaluations be used to calculate utilitarian calculus. So, can the value of a human life be calculated? We brought up examples of life insurance and car insurance and cases where victims will sue for being hurt on somebody’s property. But is the money paid supposed to be to compensate for the injury or death? It seems like the sum paid is supposed to function to fill in for the loss of income due to the injury and other aspects that were affected. This question also leads to a discussion of the idea of “an eye for an eye.” So we circle back to the question, can a human life be calculated? If so, how and is every human life worth the same in the sense that they are all lives?
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Following Kant, Human life has an absolute, intrinsic worth. Nothing can devalue said worth, not even the individual her/himself. And all human life is given this value, the same value. But this is just Kant.
ReplyDeleteHammurabi's Eye-for-an-Eye is the closest thing, I think, people have come to placing any real value on a human life. And what a badly flawed value system it is.
As far as insurance goes, it's not so much about the value of a life or injury, but the costs to correct an injury for the persons/materials. For example, car insurance covers car costs in the case of an accident. So not only is the person's medical bills supposively being looked out for, but her/his property is, too.