This week Miroslav Volf and philosopher John Hare (Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School) discuss New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s fundamental question behind reopening the economy from COVID-19 lockdown, “How much is a human life worth?”
Why we should go to such great lengths, sacrificing so much, to save a single human life? What about humans gives us dignity? How should we approach the dilemmas posed by incommensurable values, where there’s no agreed upon standard for comparison? How can we better frame the question of the value of human life by observing the life of Jesus?
Show Highlights
- “My conviction is that human life doesn't have a price. And I take this from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who distinguishes between the dignity human life has, and price. And dignity is, he says, incommensurable worth."
- "Jesus came to be with us: Emmanuel. And that's what we have lost. We can't be with each other. … I think what we've learned through this is: A good human life is one that has physical contiguity with other humans."
- "Often we speak as though we're balancing the value of the human life against the $30,000 [a stat mentioned in the conversation]. But balancing is a metaphor where you have commensurable units. You've got a balance of two pans with weights going up and down, and they're commensurable with each other. ... Dignity is incommensurable worth.
So, I don't want to say that a human life is worth $30,000. Actually I don't think it's worth $10 million either. But it is true that we have to rank goods
as a matter of public policy."
- "I was for some years working on the staff of Congress, and public policy decisions often came down to this question of comparing goods. I think a Christian has has something to say about this, and it is, Miroslav, part of your work, that you've been thinking about what a good human life is like. One of the ways to look at that is to look at what the life of Jesus was like. And that gives us a sense of what's important, what matters. It doesn't answer all the questions, but it does give us a map as it were, of how we should think about what is more important and what is less."
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