The value of a life
From Replacing Guilt, “The value of a life”:
If you have money and want to save lives, you had better put a price on life.
Lives should be treated as priceless, but it’s instrumentally rational to assign a value to a life in order to effectively do the most good. The gap between the value and the price is a measure of the difference between the universe that is, and the universe that should be.
Flashcards
What is the setup for the button thought experiment?
Imagine a button which, when pressed, picks a random number between one a million. If that number is one, it kills a randomly selected person. How much money would someone have to pay you to press that button?
Why should you press the button that has a one in a million chance of killing someone for $10$$?
Because you can save roughly 10 people for every one person that is killed.