Rick McGinnis:

The 9/11 terrorist attacks thrust a lot of questions that were lingering in the background two long decades ago to the forefront. Like what does revenge mean when your attacker isn’t a country? And what do you do when pursuing revenge makes you the caretaker of places and people that war has destabilized and devastated?

It has taken us 20 years to realize that the people in charge of exacting revenge for 9/11 had no answers to those questions. Only a handful of people realized this at the time, and we ignored them to our discredit.

Another question forced into the centre of public debate was “What is a human life worth?” – one as old as humanity itself, and one that the Netflix film Worth, released for streaming just before the 20th anniversary of the attacks, imagines as a sort of courtroom drama without the courtroom.

The film begins with testimony – a mother appearing before the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, describing her anger with God and her country, and having no body to recover. “If somebody took your child and blew them up,” she asks, “how do you go on from there?”

From here we meet Kenneth Feinberg, a lawyer teaching a class, asking the question “What is life worth?” and forcing his reluctant students to venture an answer. As played by Michael Keaton, Feinberg is a precise, unsentimental man and more than a bit obsessive compulsive, his massive CD collection of opera recordings indexed with an actual card catalogue.

Feinberg is a real person, a Massachusetts-born lawyer who worked as chief of staff for Ted Kennedy before making his reputation with liability litigation cases involving asbestos and Agent Orange. Shortly after meeting Feinberg onscreen we see him witness the attack on the Pentagon through the window of a commuter train, after which he volunteers himself to Congress for pro bono work on whatever response the government will be forced to enact to prevent a crippling avalanche of lawsuits from the families of the victims of the attacks.

It’s a selfless offer, prompted by the certain knowledge that he’s probably the person best equipped to deal with the legal challenges presented by the existence of something like the Fund. What’s less certain is whether he’s able to deal with the emotional and moral challenges of this heart-wrenching business; to be sure, it’s doubtful whether any mere human would be up to the task.

While hardly unprecedented, nothing had ever been ventured with the scope of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. That was because the potential economic damage from thousands of individual lawsuits by survivors and victims’ families – against the airlines, the government and its intelligence agencies, the owners of the World Trade Center, the New York police and fire departments and whoever else could be served with papers – could cripple the American economy alongside all the other damage inflicted by the terrorist attacks.

Looked on uncharitably, the Fund was an admission by all of the potential defendants that they were guilty, but that the legal costs of going to court with corporations and government entities would punish the survivors and families as much if not more than the defendants no matter who won or lost. Such is the real state of modern justice.

Effectively, the purpose of the Fund was to shift the question from “Who is to blame?” to “How can we make this go away?”

For the purposes of a movie, the story of Feinberg and the Fund was simplified in countless ways, starting with the real Feinberg being at the University of Pennsylvania law school teaching a class when the first plane hit the towers, learning about the subsequent attacks while rushing home to Washington D.C. which was much less cinematic.

Keaton’s Feinberg has a foil – Stanley Tucci as Charles Wolf, a New Yorker widowed by the WTC attacks who sets up a website attacking the legitimacy of the Fund, which acts as a magnet for survivors and families unwilling to submit to the diminishing, even humiliating ritual of the elaborate forms and mathematical formulas that will award them the economic value of their son, daughter, wife, husband, mother, father or partner. In Worth, Keaton’s job is to win over Tucci and his families.

In What is Life Worth? The Unprecedented Efforts to Compensate the Victims of 9/11, the book Feinberg wrote in 2005, Wolf and his “Fix the Fund” website play a much less central role – at least in hindsight, after Feinberg and the Fund had paid out over $7 billion to 97 per cent of the claimants eligible for compensation.

Facing the task ahead of him, Feinberg recalls that he “refused to exercise Solomonic judgment in calibrating individual degrees of pain and suffering and emotional distress. Who was I to determine whether the victim had been killed instantly when the planes hit the World Trade Center or had died a slower death from suffocation, burns, or the collapse of the Towers. Juries were required to make such distinctions in the courtroom; I would not. Not only was such a task impossible, but any attempt at it would fuel family divisiveness and discontent.”

And yet Feinberg would inevitably be obligated as the Congressionally appointed “special master” of the Fund to do precisely that; the sixth chapter of his book is titled “Solomon’s Choices.”

Evaluating the array of victims with claimants to the Fund, they roughly sort into a class system: stockbrokers from WTC headquartered firms like Morgan Stanley and Cantor Fitzgerald on the top, firefighters and police officers in the middle, and service workers in the Towers’ restaurants and custodial services, some of them undocumented workers, on the bottom. Feinberg never tries to ignore the simple truth that families from one group will inevitably get awarded much more than those in another – often much more.

Families pleading their case to Feinberg and his associates argued for victims’ worth based on both economic and moral value, and Feinberg tried hard to avoid being influenced by their arguments, especially the latter. “The fund was notvaluing the moral worth of those murdered on 9/11,” he writes. “I reaffirmed this whenever I met publicly with families at community meetings or privately with a particular claimant. Instead, I emphasized the requirement of need, which was linked directly to financial circumstances.”

Ultimately, Feinberg stuck to “my original goal of minimizing the number of very large and very small payments while narrowing the overall gap between the wealthy and those of modest means. Social engineering, yes – but designed to carry out what I believe Congress intended and what the American people wanted.”

Based on the percentage of claimants who signed on to the fund and received payouts, it’s hard to deny that Feinberg was successful, according to his interpretation of what he was meant to achieve as the Fund’s special master. His success was acknowledged, and since the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, he has had a similar role in cases involving the BP oil spill, the sexual abuse scandal at Penn State, the 2014 GM auto recall, the Sandy Hook school shooting, the Volkswagen emissions scandal, and sexual abuse compensation from the Archdiocese of New York, among others.

Since Congress had no intention of seeing any significant number of lawsuits go to trial, and with the certain knowledge by victims’ families and survivors that the costs of a lawsuit might leave them with a pittance if successful, or broke if not, it’s worth assuming that Feinberg and the Fund were always going to achieve their goals.

There were some critics of the Fund and even families who argued that every claimant should have received an equal lump sum, democratizing loss, and taking a short cut around questions of economic and moral value. But that was never going to happen in a modern state that is obliged for spreadsheets and statistical purposes to calculate the worth of its citizens on a strictly economic scale, at all times except on election days.

It’s a calculus that’s very contemporary, but it would have made sense in a pre-modern world where rulers were presumed to have moral justification for their wealth and power, and the ruled were at their most valuable during harvest time and war. Probably the only time in history where we escaped this brute formula was when religious conviction took political shape and informed movements that affirmed universal rights and fought slavery – a span of a few decades roughly bracketing the founding of the American Republic.

The Fund may have achieved the compromise it was designed to fulfill, but it confirmed that we have optimum value as taxpayers and wage earners, and our economic value as citizens diminishes the closer we get to being very old or very young. (Looked at this way, it’s not surprising that the unborn are considered to have no value at all.)

As a lawyer and public servant, Feinberg was focused on his task. But the Solomonic role forced upon him revealed certain truths that undermine the whole idea of the Fund – like the idea that life is a thing beyond value.

In a stretch of his book where he discusses the religious faith of many claimants – tested, affirmed and sometimes destroyed by the losses of 9/11 – he writes about the “pervasive sense of frustration and helplessness” in the process, and to the “disconnect between a life lost and the inadequacy of mere compensation.” He quotes one claimant who’s deputized to speak for many others:

“Whatever award we receive will obviously never come close to the worth of our son. To be perfectly honest, the whole matter of victims’ compensation if ghoulish and repulsive. We are in a no-win situation. Whatever we receive is not enough. The only way we win is if you had some magical power to bring (him) back.”