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their burned-out villages for the dubious safety of refugee camps. This has been well documented. And yet the world looks away. The events in Darfur are the latest in a long list of mass murders since World War II to which powerful nations and their citizens have responded with indifference. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power documents in meticulous detail many of the numerous genocides that occurred during the past century. In every instance, American response was inadequate. She concludes: “No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on” (Power, 2003, p. xxi).

The UN general assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948 in the hope that “never again” would there be such odious crimes against humanity as occurred during the Holocaust of World War II. Eventually some 140 states would ratify the Genocide Convention, yet it has never been invoked to prevent a potential attack or halt an ongoing massacre. Darfur has shone a particularly harsh light on the failures to intervene in genocide. As Richard Just (2008) has observed, “we are awash in information about Darfur. . . . [N]o genocide has ever been so thoroughly documented while it was taking place . . . but the genocide continues. We document what we do not stop. The truth does not set anybody free. (p. 36) . . . [H]ow could we have known so much and done so little?” (p. 38).

AFFECT, ANALYSIS, AND THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIVES

This brings us to a crucial question: How should we value the saving of human lives? An analytic answer would look to basic principles or fundamental values for guidance. For example, Article 1 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” We might infer from this the conclusion that every human life is of equal value. If so, then—applying a rational calculation—the value of saving N lives is N times the value of saving one life, as represented by the linear function in Figure 4.1.

FIGURE 4.1 A Normative Model for Valuing the Saving of Human Lives (Every Human Life Is of Equal Value)

FIGURE 4.2 Another Normative Model (Large Losses Threaten the Viability of the Group or Society)

An argument can also be made for judging large losses of life to be disproportionately more serious because they threaten the social fabric and viability of a group or community (see Figure 4.2). Debate can be had at the margins over whether one should assign greater value to younger people versus the elderly, or whether governments have a duty to give more weight to the lives of their own people, and so on, but a perspective approximating the equality of human lives is rather uncontroversial.

How do we actually value human lives? Research provides evidence in support of two descriptive models linked to affect and intuitive thinking that reflect values for lifesaving profoundly different from those depicted in the normative (rational) models shown in Figures 4.1 and 4.2. Both of these descriptive models demonstrate responses that are insensitive to large losses of human life, consistent with apathy toward genocide.

FIGURE 4.3 A Psychophysical Model Describing How the Savingof Human Lives May Actually Be Valued

THE PSYCHOPHYSICAL MODEL

There is considerable evidence that our affective responses and the resulting value we place on saving human lives follow the same sort of “psychophysical function” that characterizes our diminished sensitivity to changes in a wide range of perceptual and cognitive entities—brightness, loudness, heaviness, and wealth—as their underlying magnitudes increase.

As psychophysical research indicates, constant increases in the magnitude of a stimulus typically evoke smaller and smaller changes in response. Applying this principle to the valuing of human life suggests that