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In toxic torts, if the defendants' negligence is confirmed, the court's ruling is a punishment translated into monetary amounts, which the plaintiffs are compelled to accept. However, past exposure to toxic substances might continue to cause damage after the judgment, not only among the plaintiffs, but also among their descendants, making an exact measurement of the total damage inflicted almost impossible. A ruling or out-of-court settlement is therefore necessarily a compromise between the obligation to end the dispute and deliver some kind of justice for the victims and the radical uncertainty inherent to toxic torts. In the case of the electronics industry, due to the numerous chemicals to which workers are exposed, the uncertainty of health hazards is particularly high. This article proposes a framework for the valuation of exposure to toxicants, to address both the necessity and the limits of monetary compensation. It is based on a ten-year participating observation of the collective lawsuit launched by more than a thousand former employees of RCA plants in Taiwan, as well as thirty-five in-depth interviews of the plaintiffs following the High Court and Supreme Court decisions. Keywords Toxic torts ▪ compensation ▪ valuation studies ▪ sociology of moneyAcknowledgements: Interviews with the plaintiffs would not have been possible without the generous assistance of He-yun Liu, Kuang-wan Ho (Hsiao-wan) and Nien-yun Liu. I am, of course, indebted to the interviewees who spoke so frankly about their lives. In conducting these interviews, I was lucky to have the precious help of my research assistants Yi-ying Tsai and Joyce Min-chiao Chang. Instrumental in the elaboration of the argument were discussions with Hsin-hsing Chen, Yi-ping Lin, Kim Fortun and the plaintiffs' lawyers, in particular Fang-chun Chu and Steven Chou, as were the responses to my presentations of different drafts at the 4S and STS conferences in Taiwan and South Korea, the latter thanks to Jeong-ok Kong. The suggestions of Jongyoung Kim, two anonymous reviewers and the journal editors were decisive in improving the initial manuscript, and Rebecca Fite was a constant adviser at all stages of editing.

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