A Dilemma for Utilitarians

[randomusername]

In this case my assumption would be thag the doctor tried to kill the patient and got extremely unlucky

[scotttimbrell]

A bad plan that works is still a bad plan.

[tomjames]

“There’s this wonderful thought experiment called the rash doctor. So this doctor has a patient with this massive rash…”

[MM-vset]

The doctor did the right thing in the same way that a broken clock is right twice a day. He's right post-hoc, but took an incredibly unecessarry risk for little probability of return.

[johns]

I don't understand how this is a dilemma or how it's related to utilitarianism. That's like asking if a drunk driver made the right choice to drive home just because he made it safely. We assess choices BEFORE they are made.

[miguelangelguillenhernande]

A rule utilitarian would say "A Pill A policy would have most patients killed, a Pill B policy would have most patients cured, so Pill B is the right choice, Pill A is the wrong choice"

[reedclippings]

Utilitarians often say that you can have blameless wrongdoing, this is simply blameworthy rightdoing.

[ambiguouslyfuckedup]

as a rule consequentialist: the doctor did the wrong thing, because that decision if made a rule would lead to immense suffering.

[Thomas-otei]

That's not a dilemma. It's attempted murder.

[ScalarYoutube]

If you shoot someone and don't kill them, but instead manage to perfectly hit a terminal tumour that would've killed them otherwise, you'll still get done for attempted murder.

[habe]

How is this a dilemma? I can’t imagine a utilitarian ever saying that the doctor did the right thing.

Such a blatant disregard for the health of the patient should have them stripped of their ability to practice medicine. The doctor getting lucky doesn’t change that.

[deuslapis]

I find this pretty simple.

Bad actions can have good outcomes. We call an action bad if, as the general rule, the action will have a negative outcome.

[Gigano]

No he didn't, because the doctor does not know the actual outcome untill it happens. He can only act on the information given to him before he starts treatment. Given that information, the doctor is taking a massive and unnecessary risk. There is an alternative option that is much more likely to yield better results, so the doctor should have gone with that instead.

[Jimbojo]

Obviously let the patient make an informed choice. The doctor made the wrong/unerhical choice but not due to the root assumption of the proposition.The flaw in this argument is that its a false dichotomy.

[SomeSomething]

"I only treat patients when there is something at stake"

[chimp]

I can't imagine any utilitarian who wouldn't conclude that Pill B was the better option. And tbh, I think the best way to do this, is tell the patient what those pills do and let them decide.

[watermelonprom]

Utilitarianism isn't just about Maximizing Pleasure but also Minimizing Suffering... Imagine how that doctor would have felt if the patient had actually died... The extreme risk of death is too much to gamble with... The safer option not only maximizes Pleasure but also Minimizing Suffering even though it's not complete subsistence of Pleasure or a complete lack of suffering... I think that the majority of people forget that the Minimization of Suffering is just as important as the Maximization of Pleasure

[brunolevilevi]

Morally things should be evaluated on their expected value, not the actual outcome. If you play russian roulete on someone else its immoral regardless if they survive bc of the high rsk. Legally we should treat someone that drunk drived and killed someone more harshly than someone who just drunk drived, but morally whether you kill someone should be irrelevant to your thought process, the odds of you doing it are what matters

[thomasfisher]

I think in this case you should acknowledge there are two kinds of ways of interpreting the "right" thing to do. I'm not sure what to call them, so I'll call them the "realised correct action" and the "predicted correct action".

The doctor took the worse of the two options in terms of the predicted outcome. In the sense that a utilitarian will always have imperfect knowledge in the real world, a utilitarian should always take the action with the better predicted outcome. The doctor, in this case, unless he had access to some hidden information, took the action with the worse predicted outcome.

However, his decision lead to the best possible situation being realised. We could also say the we now realise his decision lead to the best outcome. The doctor took the action with the better realised outcome.


That being said, with the knowledge the doctor had (assuming he knows only what we know), the doctor made the wrong decision. If any doctor finds themselves in the same situation, they should choose pill B.

I think this prompts thought about the application or use of ethics. I think the primary purpose of ethics is to help us make moral decisions in the future. The use of ethics to retroactively judge previous actions is useful only so far as it allows us to better understand what actions lead to what outcomes, and how to avoid bad outcomes.
And so, even if we consider that the doctor's decision was "good" in retrospect, this is unhelpful for determining what is "good" in future, and therefore a less important or practically relevant way of considering things.

[davidfrey]

The answer is no. The doctor didn't do the right thing. A broken clock is right twice a day, but you still don't want a broken clock.