ABSTRACT
Before beginning that project, however, it is necessary to put forward the two competing standard views and explore why they do not adequately address the issue. This will be done in the next section of the chapter. Once these two views have been summarised, it will be necessary to explore how and why they fail. That will require the use of an example life. One approach to that is to present a hypothetical life for consideration. For the purposes of this paper that will be insufficient as one of the claims that will be made is that the variety and complexity of life must be accounted for in any valuation of life. A new hypothetical example will not suffice for these purposes. Instead, an example chosen from cinema will
provide a more fully developed example for our purposes. The character chosen as our example is George Bailey, the protagonist played by James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life (dir. Frank Capra, 1946). After discussing the character of George Bailey in relation to the two standard views, it will be necessary to explore how a third competing view which is more inclusive provides a greater insight into why the life of George Bailey is as important as it is. The final section of the chapter will look at what impact this new valuation method may have for legal decisions which rely, at least to some extent, upon the valuation of life.
