Against Sacrifice

This book is directed at the sort of raw utilitarian approach to making hard choices in public life which uses in one form or another the idea of the cash value of a human life. This arises with the use of so-called QALYs in Health Economics and spending caps in Health and Safety at work. These are often forced choices, forced by ethical decisions taken at the centre but then outsourced to the harsh frontiers of ethics. They go hand-in-hand with pernicious attitudes which blame the victims or thinks of them simply as collateral damage. The ethics of war should not be used in peacetime, with loaded words like “proportionality”. The response should be to value life itself and the human qualities of empathy and imagination, requiring us to listen to the narratives of victims. The best option is to remove the hard choices wherever they occur but if that is impossible give generous and swift compensation.