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Nothing more plainly reveals economists' astonishing insensitivity to the most basic aspects of the human condition than the way they treat matters of life and death. Since economic theory is defined for the most part by its method rather than by its subject matter, economists imagine that there is no subject to which this method cannot be applied profitably. The death of a person is just another topic for analysis, no less suitable than inflation or unemployment. It may nevertheless be the fatal stumbling block of economics, which brings it face to face with its own final collapse. We set out to illustrate this claim by revisiting the foundations of the economic calculus of the value of human life when the latter is dealt with as a statistical and/or counterfactual entity.