Putting a Price on People's Lives and Getting a Good Bargain

In his book What Money Can't Buy, Michael Sandel (2012, 3–5) gave a number of compelling examples showing how, today, almost everything is up for sale. If one is so inclined, one can buy the right to immigrate to the United States ($500,000), the services of an Indian surrogate mother to carry a pregnancy ($6,250) or access to the carpool lane while driving solo ($8). Not only can one buy almost anything, but one can also make money in rather unusual ways. One can, for example, serve as a human guinea pig for a drug safety trial ($7,500), work for pay line-standing companies on Capitol Hill as some lobbyists are unwilling to queue up themselves ($15–25 per hour) or buy life insurances on the lives of strangers, and potentially make a fortune if one is lucky when betting on the misfortune of others.

Such an environment gives a whole new meaning to what the Roman dictator Appius Claudius Caecus once said, ‘fabrum esse suae quemque fortunae’, that is, ‘every man is the artisan of his own fortune’ (Sallust 1921, 445). In fact, one can be the artisan of one's fortune by renting out space on one's forehead to display commercial advertising or by exhibiting oneself on some ‘reality’ television programmes. This is certainly not what any Roman meritocrat would have envisioned as an appropriate way to amass riches. Such phenomena are problematic, one could think, especially when we not only put a price on some unusual activities, but on human lives as well. This would be to go too far, one could argue. It would go against our understanding of human dignity following Kant.

Immanuel Kant (1993, 40) indeed told us that ‘everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity’. That one should be respected for one's own sake is a cornerstone of our modern societies, enshrined in our laws and constitutions. We can find such a conception of dignity, for example, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.