Cost-benefit logic could portray human extinction as welfare maximizing

Evidence

This unacknowledged shift from the individualist to the collectivist perspective can lead to absurd results, including the possibility that future generations can appear to be “better off” even when they have been rendered extinct. That is, because lives are monetized and traded along with all other resources, nothing within the standard costbenefi tanalysis framework excludes the possibility that it could appear to be welfare maximizing to kill off every single member of the human race, while the stock of capital that supposedly makes future generations “better off” continues to grow exponentially in bank accounts that will never be withdrawn. The fact that our wouldbe successors will never collect these funds suggests that our theory has exceeded the bounds of its competency; we have forgotten what John Ruskin called the “one great fact,” that “[t]here is no wealth but life.” — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 435

Categorization

• FICTION: The image of capital exponentially growing in bank accounts that will never be withdrawn is a haunting terminus for any story about self-dealing optimization.
• XREF: connects to: Discounting treats unborn generations’ lives as already in decline before they begin — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 410; Discounting sacrifices some future people for the benefit of others — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 433; Discipline founders once called discounting ethically indefensible and a polite expression for rapacity. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 446 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Corporate cost-benefit analysis can explicitly price human life against repair costs #expands (0.85)
• Robbins built value-free economics on the irrefutability of interpersonal utility claims. #expands (0.80) — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets, 114
• Environmental policymaking systematically discounts distant-future and foreign benefits against present domestic costs #qualifies (0.75) — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 562
• Advantageous comparison can reframe ecological harm as morally justified #corroborates (0.70) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2659