On the value of human life...

Economics is a humanitarian subject: it is just a collection and formalisation of human sense. But in order to make it useful, we have used maths to quantify what previously was thought to be unquantifiable, and this has brought many advances in the subject, both in terms of practicality, as well as theoretically, with the development of mathematical economics. One of the biggest dilemmas faced within the subject is to quantify the value of human life. Would looking at the amount people donate to save lives a good place to start to look at what the true value is?