ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with what is presented here as a case of pure experience of ordering. It takes as its site for analysis a 2011 European Court of Justice ruling against the possibility of insurers using sex as a category for discriminating between lives. Suffice to say for the moment that as a sovereign decision, the effects of the ruling have become the first legal intervention since the passing of the 1774 Gambling Act in Britain on the principles for practising insurance. The Act stipulated that for insurance to be licit it had to be clearly distinguished from gambling, a practice that was then taken as a moral vice. The chapter then offers some reflections on the politics of valuation at stake in the ruling and their implications for the understanding of life insurance. Finally, it concludes with some ideas on what the emerging order of insuring lives tends to look like after the ruling came into force in 2012.
