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Michael Cook Editor BioEdge

After a month of false leads and dashed hopes, it is time to question whether the search for the lost Malaysian Airlines flight 370 is worthwhile. This is the question posed by Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, recently.

Cohen is being deliberately provocative, but since the cost of the search will probably be hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s a utilitarian question worth pondering. He points out that US$100 million (a very conservative estimate of the cost) could save 52,192 life years if the same amount were spent on vaccinating children.

No governments have asked this question; they are blindly determined to find the plane and learn the fate of the 239 people on board. Cohen lists a few of the reasons why: to learn what went wrong to prevent future incidents, to bring closure for relatives, and to satisfy the voyeuristic instincts of media consumers.

To these should be added: ingratiating themselves with China (most of the passengers were Chinese) and promoting regional cooperation in a dangerous area of the world.

Cohen says that this may just be an example of our bias toward identifiable lives over “statistical lives”, a point often made by Peter Singer. There is certainly more than a germ of truth in this, but something tells me that there is more to it.

Ultimately, the only excuse for the existence of governments is defending the common good. A government which is indifferent to the welfare and emotional needs of its citizens will not last. Disaster victims have been treated so abominably in the recent past in China that the new President, Xi Jinping, is probably desperate to portray himself as a defender of his restless citizens’ rights. His government’s stability may depend on it. That may be the strongest reason for continuing the search.