The use of cost-benefit analysis in setting workplace health and safety standards commits us to treating worker health and safety as just another commodity, another individual preference, to be traded off against compet¬ing commodities. It treats health and safety merely as an instrumental value and denies its intrinsic value. Cost-benefit requires that an economic value be placed on one's life and bodily integrity. Typically, this would follow the model used by the insurance industry (where it is used in wrongful death settlements, for example) in which one's life is valued in terms of one's earning potential. Perhaps the most offensive aspect of this approach is the fact that since, in fea¬sibility analysis, health and safety is already traded off against the economic viability of the industry, a shift to cost-benefit entails that health and safety is traded off against profit margin. Since feasibility analysis is willing to compro¬mise standards to insure the viability of the industry, and since profitability is a necessary condition for viability, cost-benefit aims only to improve the profit margin. In effect, critics of feasibility are arguing that employee health and safety should be sacrificed to increase profits in an already (as guaranteed by the economically feasible criteria) profitable industry.