The political valuation of life A comment on W . Kip Viscusi ’ s
نویسنده
چکیده
Squaring life with money was never, in any society, a simple affair. Even in our highly commercialized world, the valuation of human existence through pecuniary means continues to be surrounded by all kinds of moral prohibition. Thus institutions dealing in the monetary commensuration of life (or death) often need to carry out a considerable amount of symbolic work before they succeed in making their business acceptable. It is through such cultural elaboration, for instance, that companies proposing life insurance policies (insurance policies tied to the life of an individual) and, later, viatical settlements (the purchase of life insurance policies for a cash fee, typically from owners with shorter life expectancy) were able to obtain social approval for their activities (Zelizer 1979; Heimer 2003; Quinn 2008) or that a partial market for human tissue finally developed in the US (Healy 2006). But other similar trades are still illegal today. Yet it is also true that dollars and life (as well as, correlatively, death) get mixed much more often than we are willing to recognize. In advanced industrial societies, the process of monetary commensuration is often controlled by large, bureaucratic organizations endowed with what Max Weber (1978) called rational-legal authority. Public policy agencies and courts but also corporations or insurance companies concerned with risk management routinely rely on economic methodologies to compensate relatives for a personal loss, chart courses of action in health or environmental policy, or choose between programs of workplace safety. Under their influence, the highly moral and emotional boundary between life and death has undergone a rationalistic conversion, which has both managed to keep the moral issues hidden and permitted a pragmatic expansion of economic calculus to promote various public or corporate goals.
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تاریخ انتشار 2009