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Compensation for saving a life.

Thurlor

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Can a person receive financial compensation for saving someone else's life? For example, a percentage of their income until they die. Nothing is free. If I don't want to pay for my life to potentially be saved then I have an opt-out card (like organ donors) and no-one has to save me. The same logic would apply to doctors and surgeons.
 

Cognisant

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You save my life and I take out a contract on your life, nothing personal it's just cheaper for me that way.
 

Pizzabeak

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They used to do stuff like that but not that much anymore, like the lottery or other sweepstakes rewards and contests. You can’t just fixate on one aspect and try to make that the focus. You can’t compare it to public services or taxed civilities yet if there was a situation where someone needed help a reward is mostly optional, although assumed to be socially appreciated. It’s not a thing most people are accustomed to, so you won’t accomplish it. Bribery is the only option. People only make things not free through society, so it would just be something you would want.
 

rlnb

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Say A does something for B and we want to assign a monetary value to this act.
The following things must be taken into account:
  1. How much does it cost A to do it.
  2. How much is B willing to pay for this.
  3. Demand / supply dynamics

For simplicity let us ignore #3 and consider only #1 and #2. Let us consider two examples:
(i) A random person saves someone's life on the street by preventing an accident.
(ii). A doctor saves a patients life by performing a surgery.

In case (i), #1 is probably minimal. and #2 is very high.
In case (ii), #1 is substantial (we must account for the time , effort and the cost of the doctor going to med school etc. ) and #2 is same as in the previous case.

So, we can say that It might be OK to assign 0 value to the act of saving a life in (i) but not so in (ii)
 
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Being compensated for saving someone's life makes me feel uneasy.
 

The Grey Man

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Life is not a commercial good. The difference between a live body and a dead body is not one of degree, but of kind. No superadded quantity of energy or money will bring a mere aggregation of matter to life if it does not partake in the sui generis emergent form that identifies it as a discrete, atomic organism—centralized coordination. Frankenstein had to do a lot of work on shaping his creature to conform to his own image before he was ready for the lightning bolt.

Life is truly priceless for, unlike energy, it is not a conserved quantity or even a quantity at all. It is more like a Word, a single syllable that illuminates the Speaker in a flash, as it were.* The man who speaks of human life as a quantity that can be balanced against “commensurate” quantities of gold or goods is the man who forgets his own Father.

John 1:1 said:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

What a falling off was there from the Word that spoke Being to the words that speak of beings! Our words are not even the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave—they are the shadows of the shadows!

* Leibniz called it a “thundering of the divinity;” Kant called it the synthesis of the understanding; our scientists call it the collapse of the wave function. In all three cases, the referent is the same: a singular act of creation out of the nothingness of theoretical “possibility,” a miracle par excellence.
 

Black Rose

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A life is freely given.
It cannot be earned.
A life saved demands no compensation.
It is a sacred act keeping something alive.
 

Thurlor

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It seems obvious to me that I should value my life more than anyone else values my life. If I am not willing to compensate someone for saving my life (I opt out of the system) I must not value it very much. How can I expect someone else to value it more than I do?

It seems wrong to expect some sort of consideration from others that we aren't willing to apply to ourselves.
 

The Grey Man

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It seems obvious to me that I should value my life more than anyone else values my life.

Can one have values at all without being alive? And, if not, how can one decide whether one values being alive more than not being dead? How can you measure two objects against each other if the measuring stick can't move from one to the other?
 

Cognisant

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You're missing the point Grey, Thurlor's point is about setting a precedent.

It seems wrong to expect some sort of consideration from others that we aren't willing to apply to ourselves.
I don't expect to be paid (directly) for saving someone's life but if they opportunity presented itself I'd probably seize it because as a society of self interested individuals we (collectively) reward those who act to benefit others because we are said others. By showing favoritism to someone that saves your life I'm paying my dues to a sort of public insurance that ensures everyone's motivated to save lives (including mine) whenever possible.

Sweetening the deal by adding your own reward adds extra motivation but only if the person saving your life knows about it which would only be the case if you were someone famous and/or important.
 

The Grey Man

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You're missing the point Grey, Thurlor's point is about setting a precedent.

A precedent for mercenaries collecting taxes on other people for life for doing the decent thing and helping them in times of profound distress? I guess I find this idea repugnant, whereas assigning a monetary value to life itself is just absurd.
 

Cognisant

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Slavery was a big thing in biblical times so people evidently had a relative market value back then.
 

The Grey Man

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Because life is the condition of the possibility of value. You can't value life because it is precisely living, being an organism with a will of your own, that gives you the ability to value things at all. Break this organic structure down, and the will dissipates with it—there is no more central ego to decide whether being dead is not better than being alive after all.
 

washti

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Given that public somehow would be convinced to your solution and it would be pushed as bill. What happen if you save suicide life?
Who will pay you if you save life of broke person? Would they go into more debt and have to pay growing interest?
What happenes if person dies before paying you at all(I mean even first installment) does their family must pay it now ? And how much? What value in current economy in your country possess life or how would you quantify it? Would distinctions be nesessery? If yes then based on what parameters ?

I see more sense in reward in form of tax deductible.
Though there was an idea about giving bonuses to surgeons for saved lives in UK or Ireland - I read it somewhere.
 

Puffy

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-> A is trapped in a flaming building
-> B rescues A from the flaming building

Could A compensate B for saving their life? Sure, if they chose to and B wanted that. Could B demand A compensate them financially for their action? No, I don't think so.

If someone saved my life I'd feel a bit weird about paying them unless there was a specific reason for it. Like, if I found out they needed money for an important surgery or were about to lose their house and I had the money then maybe I might choose to help them out financially.

I feel in this kind of situation there's basically an unwritten moral code that says: "You've done me a massive favour. I will return the favour if / when I can."

I just don't think that has to be a financial obligation. In a way paying them demeans the favour, as it's like you've "written off" the favour and as a result this person won't be able to call on you when they need you.
 

Minuend

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A precedent for mercenaries collecting taxes on other people for life for doing the decent thing and helping them in times of profound distress? I guess I find this idea repugnant, whereas assigning a monetary value to life itself is just absurd.

I understand where you're coming from. But fact is, we do put monetary value on life. For instance, there's a limit to what type of surgery or medication we'd give someone. Say we'd have to put extreme strain on welfare or other economic means to save 1 person. Say we'd have to compromise other services like welfare, prison, unemployment etc to pay for the life bill of 1 person.

We do not sponsor large sums to allow individuals to seek treatment that might or might not work for them. Only rich people get to travel to wherever in the world to seek alternative treatment.

That is both reasonable and horrifying. We sacrifice to give more people the means to survive, but we also acknowledge the induvidual is not worth infinite amount of money and they will only get help to a certain degree
 

The Grey Man

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@Minuend I haven't been sufficiently clear. We do place value on other people's lives, but it is only a relative value, an extrinsic value. There is a limit to how much of our property we're willing to invest to save someone, but this is not because that person somehow isn't worth saving. It's because if we gave everything we had to save a life, we'd have nothing left over to do the other things that we want to do. We value people extrinsically because they are, to us, objects among many other objects, which we may value more or less. We value the appearance of people insofar as their presence makes us happier. The inner aspect of their being (consciousness), however, remains insusceptible to economic analysis.
 

ZenRaiden

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I think people are kind of cought in extremes of the issue for no apparent reasons. I mean we exchange stuff and services and we pretty much bend over when someone does the same thing for us in situations. We help each other and we usually return the favour as decent people and pretty much we are paying and buying stuff for a cost.

I mean monetary value is transefarable. There are people who of course dont have money, but they are sometimes willing to do a lot for having their life saved. Others maybe not, but who cares?

Bottom line is a lot of people want to live, but very few are willing to put their own life on the line to save someone elses skin. Much less if all they get for it is nice pat on the back.
 

Minuend

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I haven't been sufficiently clear. We do place value on other people's lives, but it is only a relative value, an extrinsic value. There is a limit to how much of our property we're willing to invest to save someone, but this is not because that person somehow isn't worth saving. It's because if we gave everything we had to save a life, we'd have nothing left over to do the other things that we want to do. We value people extrinsically because they are, to us, objects among many other objects, which we may value more or less. We value the appearance of people insofar as their presence makes us happier. The inner aspect of their being (consciousness), however, remains insusceptible to economic analysis.

I see what you mean. No argument from me there, I don't disagree
 
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