To be fair thaumaturgy, even economists regularly append values onto 'priceless' things. For instance (this excerpt taken from Freakonomics):
> "Consider the effort to save the modern spotted owl from extinction. One economic study found that in order to protect roughly five thousand owls, the opportunity costs -- that is, the income surrendered by the logging company and others -- would be $46 billion, or just over $9 million an owl."
This is followed by a list used by the state of Connecticut in determining the amount of compensation allocated to work-related incidents - a specific value for the dismemberment of each body part.
The OP's point wasn't that this habit of affixing values is ethical, or even wanted, but that it is possible. You are arguing that 1) this is ridiculous and 2) it is not wanted.
The first is not true because thought experiments usually are ridiculous (hence the qualifier 'if') and even if this were not so, as the Freakonomics example shows, there are certain instances in real life where you would have to put a dollar value on a 'priceless' transaction in order for things to work.
And the second is also mistaken because, while something may not be nice to think about, that fact doesn't detract from the fact that it can be done, and is done, sometimes for good reason.
Quoting the figure that way is really strange. The relevant thing isn't the cost per owl alive now but either the cost per owl potentially alive now and in the future (probably with some discount rate) or the cost for the species considered as a whole.
Imagine three alternative worlds. One is ours. One has 10x as many spotted owls currently alive. One has 1/10 as many. In all of them, the owls will (all) go extinct unless we spend $46bn. Does it really make sense to say that in one case the cost is $900k/owl, in another it's $9M/owl, and in another it's $90M/owl? Is there any plausible belief about the value of these owls that would say we should be willing to pay 100x more to prevent extinction in the case where there are 50k of them rather than 500?
(It would probably make sense to pay some more when the population is larger. Larger population now means (a) probably larger populations in the future if extinction is averted and (b) better prospects that avoiding extinction now really will avoid extinction for longer. But I don't see any reason to think that either of these is simply proportional to the present population, or anything like it.)
> "Consider the effort to save the modern spotted owl from extinction. One economic study found that in order to protect roughly five thousand owls, the opportunity costs -- that is, the income surrendered by the logging company and others -- would be $46 billion, or just over $9 million an owl."
This is followed by a list used by the state of Connecticut in determining the amount of compensation allocated to work-related incidents - a specific value for the dismemberment of each body part.
The OP's point wasn't that this habit of affixing values is ethical, or even wanted, but that it is possible. You are arguing that 1) this is ridiculous and 2) it is not wanted.
The first is not true because thought experiments usually are ridiculous (hence the qualifier 'if') and even if this were not so, as the Freakonomics example shows, there are certain instances in real life where you would have to put a dollar value on a 'priceless' transaction in order for things to work.
And the second is also mistaken because, while something may not be nice to think about, that fact doesn't detract from the fact that it can be done, and is done, sometimes for good reason.