We were taught as part of our CS curriculum that "often, the refusal to assign a dollar value to a human life results in it being terribly undervalued."
There is no such reluctance to do this in law. I think in philosophy classes, professors feel shy about acknowledging the humdrum reality of insurance, the tax code, and our regulatory bodies continuously assigning dollar values to human lives. It feels good and makes you look like a better person to say things like "the value of a single human life cannot be expressed in money terms." Perhaps this is the case, and what the companies and the governmental bodies are really valuing is the economically meaningful activity associated with a person and not the totality of their person.
Babies are worth a lot of money even at a low imputed earning potential just because they have so much life to live.
