As I began to say in this week’s blog response, I was somewhat sickened by the Lomborg reading. It discouraged me to think that we are so limited to our help because, being an optimist, I normally like to think that we have the capability to satisfy everyone’s concerns. I guess that when I start thinking about that I know it’s a little crazy… there are soooooo many problems out there, how could we even begin to solve them all? In that sense, I can now find Lomborg’s ideas reassuring. He has come up with a method to solve these problems in a logical manner: prioritization.
Even though I realize that prioritizing the world’s problems can be positive now (some thanks to Rachel’s post, which I would recommend reading because it is very cheerful and uplifting), I still am uncomfortable with putting off issues that may seem less important. It’s nice to know that there was a lot of thought put into the prioritizing of Copenhagen Consensus project and there was a clear method behind their logic. However, how can we ever really say that one problem is more important than another? Who are we to make that decision? Maybe those questions are irrelevant because prioritizing has to be done, but still my point is that we should be very careful to put one problem over the other.
Something that I also really really did not like about the article is the value that we put on people’s lives. It’s awful to think that one person’s life is more valued than another person’s life even though I may have subconsciously known this already. Not only does it bother me that different people were given according values due to their citizenship, but it bothered me that human life had to be valued in the first place. Why must we always put a dollar sign to things? Was this factor absolutely necessary in prioritizing?
This article was kind of a realistic slap in the face for me… so even though I’m bothered by these various things, I realize that they are sensible. As I titled my last post, if only the world was fair….
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I'm a little surprised at how many people found Lomborg's methods "revolutionary". Prioritizing one's pressing issues is nothing new; indeed, it is a central concern of every major national budget. Though I like his Wilsonian "Brain Trust" technique, gathering the best and brightest minds for the job in one place, it seems futile to me to compile a list of prioritized concerns when there are no special circumstances at work. As I see it, the demand for solving certain problems changes as the situation on the ground does, so devising such a list during peacetime and relative stability seems unneccessary, since the actual amount of money being put into such problems will not change as a result of the Copenhagen Consensus.
"Why must we always put a dollar sign to things?"
Not that I think life is anything you can put a dollar amount on, there's no other way for man to place a value to something that can be universally understood.
I am surprised to state that I agree with Jasmine about anything philosophical/political (as much as I love her), but here you go: Jasmine is absolutely right in saying that assigning a dollar value to a life is something of a necessary evil. We have two options. First, we could consider how much each life is worth, and act upon that knowledge, and weigh such things heavily. Second, we could not assign a dollar value to a life, and consider each life to have infinite value. If we follow the second option rather than the first, however, what we will see is a dramatic fall in effective change. It is the more humanistic option to consider lives to have a limited value, given the increased capacity for positive change resultant of that mindset.
Post a Comment