Fund’s task: calculate worth of a human life

  • Ellen Goodman / Boston Globe columnist
  • Tuesday, January 8, 2002 9:00pm
  • Opinion

BOSTON — It’s hard to conceive of a more offensive question to put to a mourner. Imagine offering your condolences to a widow and then asking, "By the way, how much was his life worth?"

We don’t need to be taught that it’s morally repulsive to look at people as merchandise with individual price tags. When confronted with such math, we are likely to retreat into cliches: Life is priceless. You cannot calculate the worth of a human being.

Nevertheless, it’s time to take out the calculators.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks, Congress approved the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund as part of the airline bailout bill. The fund was born of very mixed parentage. On one side was the impulse of generosity and sympathy for the victims’ families. On the other was the attempt to protect the airlines from lawsuits.

Now every family member and every citizen can log on to a Web site — www.usdoj.gov/victimcompensation — and find out just how much the government values the mother, father, son, daughter, husband, wife who died in these terrorist attacks.

How much for a single 30-year-old earning $25,000? $470,878. How about a married 40-year-old earning $225,000 with two children? The sum of his parts: $3,246,723.

This is not the first time we’ve put a price tag on a life. In every wrongful death suit, a jury is asked to compensate for loss of income and for pain and suffering.

"Everyday someone slips and falls in a pothole or is killed in an accident or has a chunk of brick fall on them," says Kenneth Feinberg, the special master of this fund. "The community, in the form of the jury, does it every day in courtrooms all over the United States."

But this is the first time the community of taxpayers is compensating for terrorism.

The Sept. 11 attack brought death to financiers and firefighters alike. When planes struck the twin towers and the Pentagon, it didn’t matter if you were in first class or coach.

The first, easy impulse to distribute money equally comes up against questions. Does the widowed mother of four need more than the widowed father of one? How do you compensate for the loss of very different sized paychecks?

So a country based on the idea that we are all created equal, but living with a wide economic disparity, wrestles again with equality and difference. The fund’s three-part formula is a balancing act of money and values.

Part I calculates a number based on the victims’ differences — in earnings, age and family size.

Part 2 offers compensation for what is truly incalculable: pain and suffering. After listening to bitter exchanges about who had suffered the most — a widow married 35 years or a widow married six months, a man who had died instantly or slowly — Feinberg wisely valued all suffering equally at the same amount: $250,000.

Part 3 then subtracts the last variable — who had life insurance? A pension? Social Security? — and arrives at a final figure.

It’s no wonder that Feinberg, the man assigned to make thousands of judgments, describes his job this way: "Ten percent lawyer, 50 percent priest or rabbi, 40 percent shrink."

When all the numbers are in, the families may receive an average of $1.6 million out of a fund expected to reach $6 billion. But the actual compensation, he says, will run from zero to millions.

It’s no surprise that the numbers have prompted cries of unfairness from so many different directions. Why benefit those with higher salaries? Why penalize families who had life insurance? How do you figure one person’s future earnings against another’s?

Families of victims from Oklahoma City, PanAm 103, even of anthrax, are asking why lives lost in one terrorist attack are more worthy of a fund than those of another? And as the news spreads, some ordinary citizens, happy to pay the mortgages of the 9/11 families, are bewildered to discover that many mourners will become federally funded millionaires.

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund was pushed through Congress at warp speed. Call it a social welfare program or a liability settlement. It was designed in part to offer families enough so they will sign away their right to sue the wounded airline industry — a questionable case at best.

Now, this hasty effort, this dubious precedent, presents us with a vast and uncomfortable ethics case as we all watch human life translated into the coin of the economic realm.

What’s fair? What’s right? A fund, however carefully calculated, can only offer a flawed measure of life and loss. There is no fairness when life has proved so grotesquely unfair.

So in the end the cliche has become an ironic mathematical fact: Life actually is priceless.

Ellen Goodman can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or send e-mail to EllenGoodman@Globe.com.

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