What makes something valuable? A painting may remain overlooked for centuries before selling for millions after its creator’s death. People have been owned, traded, or inherited, and a dog can be assigned a price.

The easy answer is that value is subjective. One man’s trash, another man’s treasure. Right? We don’t all want or need the same things, so value is just a matter of preference with a price tag.

But price and value are not the same thing. Price tells you what people are willing to pay. It does not tell you what something ought to be worth. And that difference matters. Because if value is only preference, then there is no stable way to explain why some things should never be treated as mere commodities. Slavery was once widely accepted and efficiently priced. Calling it wrong requires more than pointing out that preferences have changed.

So what is value then? I see it as a measure of importance. And price as our attempt to translate that importance into numbers. It’s a common language that lets us trade, compare, and exchange. For most things, this works well enough. A Rimowa suitcase costs ten times more than a generic one that does the same job. Difference isn’t function, but it’s about showing status and identity. Relative importance, priced accordingly. The system is imperfect, but it remains in place.

The problem starts when we move from things to living beings.

A dog in a pet shop has a price tag. It feels wrong when you think about it, though we don’t do anything about it. It feels wrong because a dog isn’t just a thing with features and a function. It can suffer. It can feel fear and attachment. It has, in some sense, a stake in its own existence. And we sense, even if we can’t articulate it, that this puts it in a different category than a suitcase.

But then, why is a fish cheaper than a dog? We price them both. And most of us feel, without quite admitting it, that a dog’s life matters more than fish’s. That intuition isn’t random. It follows how much a creature can actually experience - how much it can suffer, or want, or be afraid. The more of that a creature has, the more wrong it feels to reduce it down to a number.

But sometimes we don’t have a choice.

Picture a mother having to make a choice whether sacrificing one daughter is better than having them both die. Conjoined twins, and a surgery that can only save one. Implicitly or explicitly, a calculation is being made. Not out of cruelty, but of necessity. And that’s what makes it the hardest version of the problem. Pricing life isn’t always something we can opt out of by being more ethical. Sometimes reality forces the question.

The scenario I’m talking about really happened.¹ In 2000, a British court authorised the separation of conjoined twins, Jodie and Mary, knowing it would kill Mary. The judges admitted the decision was exceptionally difficult. Their conclusion wasn’t that Mary’s life was worth less than Jodie’s. It was narrower than that: without separation, both would die within 3-6 months. The surgery wasn’t framed as choosing one life over another, but as choosing one life over none. Even under extreme pressure, the court avoided saying one life was more valuable than the other, even though the outcome depended on treating them as if one were.

And yet a calculation was made. A life ended. Whatever language you use around it, that is what happened.

So, is there a way to measure value objectively? No. And I don’t think there ever will be. A number can tell you what someone was willing to pay. It can’t tell you what something was worth. And the difference between those two things is where the complexity of this subject lies.

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