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This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how human lives are equated with the material. Ariel Colonomos explains the nexus between existential goods and material goods, and offers a normative discussion of the material valuation of human lives and the human value of material goods.
List of contents
- Introduction: The lives-interests nexus
- Part I. Pricing Lives before the State: Some Political Lessons from Shakespeare
- 1: The many merchants of Venice
- 2: Henry V: An all-too-human gambler
- Part II. The Calculating State: Hobbes's Hidden Pendulum
- 3: The challenge of measuring the measures: Proportionality
- 4: The challenge of weighing up the value of hostages
- 5: The challenge of deciding upon reparations
- 6: The challenge of pricing pandemics
- Part III. Patriarchalism and Philanthropism
- 7: A political theory of hostage-taking: Patriarchalism
- 8: A political theory of the victim: Philanthropism
- Part IV. Pricing Distant Lives
- 9: Lest we forget the future: The fallacy of temporal discounting
- 10: Out of sight, out of mind?
- Conclusion: Knowing who we are. Pricing lives and taking responsibility
About the author
Ariel Colonomos is Research Professor at CNRS and Sciences Po in Paris where he is affiliated with CERI. He has taught in the Political Science department at Columbia and at SIPA, and has held numerous visiting positions in the US. His work focuses on international relations and political theory, and his recent works include Moralizing International Relations (Palgrave, 2008), The Gamble of War (Palgrave, 2013), and Selling the Future—The Perils of Predicting Global Politics (Hurst/OUP, 2016), which received the ISA Ethics section book award.
Summary
This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how human lives are equated with the material. Ariel Colonomos explains the nexus between existential goods and material goods, and offers a normative discussion of the material valuation of human lives and the human value of material goods.
Additional text
a groundbreaking analysis thanks to its wealth of theoretical observations and empirical examples, but also to its innovative way of combining arguments taken from drama analysis, the history of philosophy, and religious doctrine, to develop an integrated theory of the negotiation dynamics of the value of human lives as part of the history of the (European) state.
