With the new cases of corona virus declining in many countries, authorities are grappling with the question of how far they should go in relaxing their lockdown requirements. In answering this question, the unpleasant quandary is this: “Do we relax the restrictions and face deaths that could be otherwise avoided or do we keep the restrictions and suffer additional economic damage?” Actually, the quandary can be refined to this question: “What amount of economic loss can a society accept in order to save an X number of human lives?”
There are at least two writings on this topic that I am aware of. One was an article in the New York Times of May 12. The other appeared a day earlier on the online news outlet Wired. * In the Wired essay we learn that the research to put a value on human life started in the consulting firm RAND in the early 1950s and then it became a topic of academic research all the way to our days. Initially, the US Defense Department had an interest to find how much it should spend on airplane equipment that could save pilot lives but would potentially doom the airplane. Later President Carter, and in short order Congress, mandated that new regulations should estimate the cost of saving lives.
Thomas Schelling (a 2005 Nobel Prize winner in economics) introduced the metric of Value of Statistical Life (VSL) by asking “How much money people are willing to accept to risk their own life.” A working estimate of VSL stands at between $9m and $11m in today’s dollars. Armed with this estimate, a president, prime minister or state governor can multiply the additional number of deaths expected from some opening up program by the VSL and compare the product to the expected incremental gain in GDP. If the economic gain doesn’t match the value of lost lives then you recalculate. All this sounds cynical and even inhumane, but it reflects the calculus behind public pronouncements of the kind “The people cannot keep seeing their livelihoods disappear.”
In the NYT article, we read that estimates of VSL differ across countries and even within countries, as for example in the US. Republican administrations apply lower VSL estimates whereas Democratic administrations apply higher estimates. This way, Republicans can limit the scope and severity of new regulations while Democrats aim for the opposite. The World Health Organization also has its way of deciding how much to spend on new health projects. The WHO estimates its VSL as GDP per capita multiplied by 3. If this product exceeds the cost of a health initiative that adds one year of quality life, the health project is approved.
Of course, this economic approach has its critics. A monetary estimate of VSL ignores the cost of enduring disruptions in everyday living and the cost of grieving. Uncertainty in mortality rates also makes the total cost of human lives unreliable.
OK. So much about the economic methods and the tendency economists have to use their “dismal science” to solve all kinds of problems. What do we know about human behavior in similar situations?
Kin selection from the theory of evolution explains that a mother would sacrifice her life to save her child and thus give her genes a chance to survive in future generations. So, let’s conduct a crude thought experiment. Let’s assume that relaxing lockdown restrictions would potentially kill only old people who are passed the procreation age. Would we accept opening up the economy to avoid an economic meltdown? We see that it’s not only economics that can pose cruel dilemmas. Actually, human behavior can lead to different decisions, depending whether your moral focus is on the means or the ends.
We have insights on this conundrum from the famous trolley experiments of Joshua Green of Harvard and his colleagues. A trolley has lost its breaks and will kill five people if it keeps moving on its tracks. You can pull a lever to send the trolley down different tracks but this will kill one person who is crossing those tracks. Will you pull the lever? In repeated experiments 60 to 70% of people said “Yes”, they would pull the lever. Then, they were asked whether they would push a person onto the tracks to halt the trolley and save five people. Now, only 30% said “Yes”. Green concluded that when you divert the trolley you have no intention to kill the passer-by. The passer-by just happens to be there; death is a side effect of the attempt to save five others. But pushing someone to his death is an act of intention. Therefore, intentionality makes the difference.
Furthermore, these experiments found that 30% of the respondents always acted as deontologists, consistently refusing to pull the lever or push the person while 30% acted as utilitarians, consistently willing to pull the lever or push the person. The deontologists found the means (killing one to save five) morally abhorrent; whereas the utilitarians found the end (saving five at the expense of one) morally acceptable. Such patterns of human behavior help us understand the present split between those eager to relax the restrictions in order to boost the economy and those unwilling to sacrifice more lives to that end.
But there are complications. Green argues that looking at the immediate ends (or consequences) to justify the means may fail us if we ignore the long-term consequences. In the case of the pandemic, for example, upon further reasoning, we may come to the conclusion that the means (relaxing restrictions) may not work to produce the desirable ends (economic gains). In this case, we risk sacrificing our moral principles for much less moral vindication than what we expect to find in the sought-after ends.
The other more insidious complication is the usual infringement of Us versus Them into our moral judgments. What if those who will be most exposed to potential infection are members of Them (for example, poor, immigrants and minority workers or residents of the Them states)? Or the vulnerable people may be those in distant locations toward whom we feel less kinship. Based on what we know about human behavior, we may be more inclined to pull the lever or push the person in those instances.
This is, I believe, our present predicament. Do we sacrifice additional human lives to avoid further devastation of livelihoods and the economy or do we look more carefully at the longer-run consequences lest we discover material and moral consequences that do not justify the immediate ends? How we proceed will depend on whether the deontologists or the utilitarians gain the upper hand.
* I want to thank a friend who brought the Wired essay to my attention.
Let's Reason 