Life is invaluable, right? So, one could say that, by killing someone, killers are stealing something invaluable (i.e., priceless). What is the right justice to serve in this case? To be just and completely fair, do we have to take something invaluable from them in return?

Some think that this invaluable thing should be their lives as well, so they take it away from them (i.e., capital punishment). Others think that their lives could be taken away temporarily by putting the killers in a small isolated word (i.e., prison). How do you choose correctly what to take from killers in return for what they took from their victims, which is their invaluable lives?

The problem is that life cannot be returned to the victim, nor any other thing of the same value can be returned to the victim’s family (unless everybody agree in their beliefs of the afterlife). However, saying that life is literally invaluable would allow the victims to claim that they can be compensated with whatever they ask for. Saying that life is invaluable is the same as saying that the value of life is infinite, so the value of what the victims can ask for in return could be anything. In order to understand how to be completely just in compensating the victims for the loss of life, we have to sit down and admit that life does have a value; a finite value, that is.

The value of life is a subjective thing. The value of one’s own life may, indeed, be relatively infinite as it could be more important to oneself than anything else. But that isn’t always the case. If it was, then nobody would sacrifice their lives for any reason. The value of other people’s lives is also similarly subjective. If the victim is dead, the closest people to the victim are the ones who will demand compensation, but the compensation would then depend on those people’s valuation of the life of the victim, which is often lesser than the victim’s valuation of his own life.

In addition to that, life does not have the same value at every moment. Some people value their lives much more than others. Some moments in life are extremely filled with joy and activity, and others are just dull. But everybody is going to die sooner or later, so unless your life has moments which have an infinite value, your total life must have a finite value since its duration is finite (unless you’re immortal, of course). So to summarize, the value of life is really subjective and dynamic.

The subjectivity of life’s value is a major discussion in moral philosophy. The most well-known framemwork is utilitarianism, in which the value of life is measured based on its contribution to overall happiness or societal welfare. On the other hand, we have deontological ethics, which posits that actions have inherent goodness, and so their morality should be judged based on this inherent quality rather than its consequences. In particular, Kant argues that inherent goodness can only ever come from good will, so that a well-intentioned action is inherently good even if it brings trouble, whereas a “lie”, in the the sense of deceiving, is inherently bad even if it brings good to everyone. These two views are interesting in their own right and both make sense, despite being opposed in some scenarios. The value of someone’s life can be measured based on their contributions (utilitarianism) or based on an inherent value regardless of their actions (deontology).

Consider the following two scenarios: Suppose that criminal A (old, male) raped and killed a young woman who has a high potential to do great things for society and is enjoying her life to the fullest. Next, suppose that criminal B (young, female) raped and killed an old worthless piece of shit who have contributed absolutely nothing for society, or, even worse, have done horrible things to society. Then, should we REALLY treat criminals A and B equally, given that they commited the same crime? Should we serve them the same justice (e.g. same number of years in prison)? What if criminal A killed the young woman by accident and the rape was just a false accusation? What if the same happened for criminal B?

Think about the above scenario carefully. If you were to be presented with these two cases on different occasions and contexts, I bet you would be thinking “Criminal A should be sentenced for life and raped daily in prison”, and maybe “Criminal B should be served justice… but we should investigate further because something weird is going on.” Not only is the value of life subjective, it is contextual. The narrative and the situation play a role in the subjectivity.

Justice is about achieving a good balance between fairness and regulation. Fairness is achieved by compensation to victims and regulation is achieved by punishment to wrongdoers (e.g., to prevent more future wrongdoings). More generally, justice can be seen as trying to achieve a robust equilibrium of people’s utilities, including future/expected utilities. Thus, in this sense, universal justice should take into account everybody’s valuation of everybody’s lives simulataneously. The fair valuation of life should achieve the most stable utilities. Theoretically speaking, this is all good, but there remains the challenge of measuring utility, which manifests as the subjectivity of people’s valuation of life.

We do have a standardized notion of utility (income, value of assets, health benefits, family, job, education, etc). However, this always come at the cost of being unfair to those at tail of the distribution on which this standardized notion of utility is inaccurate. Consider quality-adjusted life year (QALY) or the Value of Life, for example. Yes, the value of (statistical) life is an actual thing, which is also euphemistically denoted as the value of preventing a causality (VPC), and—guess what—it has an equation. And yes, many people criticized these measures and were offended by them, despite their overall utility.

The people at the tails—those offended by measures that work well on the average—should greatly benefit from a case-by-case, decision making system. I was surprised to realize that this was already a thing, which goes under the (fantastic) name algocracy. Another layman term for it is “government by algorithm”. This concept came out somewhat recently (around 2013). In general, a personalized justice algorithm should take into considerations more details about the case to make a more informed decision on the sentence. Actually, in the US, there is something called Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), which is “a case management and decision support tool developed and owned by Northpointe (now Equivant) used by U.S. courts to assess the likelihood of a defendant becoming a recidivist”, but it has been (expectedly) criticized for reinforcing racial bias and unfairness to underrepresented minorities. This is a an interesting real-life use case that can benefit from a personalized approach, especially to those at the tail of the distribution (i.e., underrepresented).

In conclusion, the value of life is meaningless without context, and you can’t measure the value of life meaningfully and without offending someone (i.e., at the other end of the tail). It is why we have judicial and economic systems as part of the government because they serve as a foundation for the country’s beliefs in what is just and fair and what actions to take. This might seem quite obvious, but this conclusion is much deeper than I thought.