Life expectancy, which is no more than the aggregation of mortality rates reflecting past biographical conditions, has been since the seventeenth century the most usual way of apprehending the inequality of lives by demographers, epidemiologists and economists. But can the inequality of lives be reduced to a statistical fact and paradoxically to a probability of dying? Based on two research projects, one on the fate of migrants trying to reach Europe, the other on the situation of Palestinians during the present war on Gaza, I want to propose a distinct analysis of the value of life using various criteria of evaluation integrating quantitative and qualitative information about the living and the dead.

Didier Fassin is Professor at the Collège de France, where he holds the Chair Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, in the School of Social Science. At the the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales where he is Director of Studies, he founded Iris, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute on Society. Anthropologist, sociologist and physician, he has conducted research in Senegal, Congo, South Africa, Ecuador, and France, focusing on moral and political issues. Recipient of the Gold Medal in anthropology at the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and of the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, he is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Academia Europea. Former Vice-President of Doctors Without Borders, he is currently the President of the French Medical Committee for Exiles. He edited or coedited thirty collective volumes and authored twenty-three books, translated in eleven languages, including Life. A Critical User’s Manual (Polity), Exile. Chronicle of the border, with Anne-Claire Defossez (Polity, 2024) and Moral Abdication. How the World Failed to Stop the destruction of Gaza (2025).