Valuing Lives You Might Save

Why do governments fail to intervene to prevent genocide and other mass atrocities? We examine this question with reference to prospect theory, one of the foundations of behavioral economics. When people rely on their moral intuitions, they behave according to prospect theory’s value function, which implies that the importance of protecting an individual life diminishes as the number of lives at risk increases. In some cases, intuitive valuation of the collective threat may actually decrease as the number of lives at risk increases, which undoubtedly contributes to failures to respond aggressively to mass atrocities. Understanding this failing of moral intuition should help to inform the development of new institutional mechanisms concerned with atrocity prevention. Such new mechanisms are necessary to force us to pursue the hard measures needed to combat massive human rights abuses. Accordingly, we propose several policy recommendations and institutional designs to improve international decision-making in this arena.