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Valuing Foreign Lives, Arden Rowell, Lesley Wexler

Georgia Law Review

Should government actors allocate scarce domestic resources to protect the lives of foreign persons? This Article argues that foreign life valuation poses distinctive psychological, philosophical, social, political, and economic challenges, and analyzes current U.S. practices of foreign life valuation in light of these challenges. After identifying multiple possible methods of foreign life valuation, we suggest that the best default valuation method would allocate domestic resources according to domestic willingness to pay to protect foreign lives.