It feels quite icky to do this, but it is necessary when making policy decisions.
Every day, governments and corporations decide to spend (or not spend) X amount of dollars to save Y number of lives. Does it make sense to spend some money on infant mortality prevention, vs research on cancer types that only really old people get? What about seatbelt laws? Or pollution prevention?
Ideally, we would rationally spend our limited money on providing the best life for the most people. Not that this actually happens for a variety of reasons.
If we are to get the best value for our money, then we need to assign a value to human life in terms similar to disability-adjusted life years (DALY):
https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...