Main description:

On August 5, 2010, a cave-in left thirty-three Chilean miners trapped underground. The Chilean government embarked on a massive rescue effort that is estimated to have cost between ten and twenty million dollars.
There is a puzzle here. Many mine safety measures that would have been more cost effective had not been taken in Chile earlier, either by the mining companies, the Chilean government or by international donors. The Chilean story illustrates a persistent puzzle: the identified lives effect. Human beings show a greater inclination to assist persons and groups identified as those at high risk of great harm than to assist persons and groups who will suffer - or already suffer - similar harm but
are not identified as yet. The problem touches almost every aspect of human life and politics: health, the environment, the law.
What can social and cognitive sciences teach us about the origin and triggers of the effect? Philosophically and ethically, is the effect a "bias" to be eliminated or is it morally justified? What implications does the effect have for health care, law, the environment and other practice domains?
This volume is the first book to tackle the effect from all necessary perspectives: psychology, public health, law, ethics, and public policy.

Contents:

Acknowledgments ; Contributors ; I. Glenn Cohen, Norman Daniels, and Nir Eyal, Statistical versus Identified Persons: An Introduction ; Part I: Social Science ; Chapter 1 ; Deborah A. Small, On the Psychology of the Identifiable Victim Effect ; Chapter 2 ; Peter Railton, <"Dual-Process>" Models of the Mind and the <"Statistical Victim Effect>" ; Part II: Ethics and Political Philosophy ; Chapter 3 ; Dan W. Brock, Identified vs. Statistical Lives: Some Introductory Issues and Arguments ; Chapter 4 ; Matthew Adler, Welfarism, Equity, and the Choice Between Statistical and Identified Victims ; Chapter 5 ; Michael Otsuka, Risking Life and Limb: How to Discount Harms by Their Improbability ; Chapter 6 ; Nir Eyal, Concentrated Risk, the Coventry Blitz, Chamberlain's Cancer ; Chapter 7 ; Norman Daniels, Can There Be Moral Force to Favoring an Identified over a Statistical Life? ; Chapter 8 ; Caspar Hare, Statistical People and Counterfactual Indeterminacy ; Chapter 9 ; Marcel Verweij, How (Not) to Argue for the Rule of Rescue: Claims of Individuals versus Group Solidarity ; Chapter 10 ; Michael Slote, Why Not Empathy? ; Part III: Applications ; Chapter 11 ; I. Glenn Cohen, Identified versus Statistical Lives in U.S. Civil Litigation: Of Standing, Ripeness, and Class Actions ; Chapter 12 ; Lisa Heinzerling, Statistical Lives in Environmental Law ; Chapter 13 ; Johann Frick, Treatment versus Prevention in the Fight against HIV/AIDS and the Problem of Identified versus Statistical Lives ; Chapter 14 ; Till Barnighausen and Max Essex, From Biology to Policy: Ethical and Economic Issues in HIV Treatment-as-Prevention ; Chapter 15 ; Jonathan Wolff, Testing, Treating, and Trusting