Context: I have been following @Richard_Ngo’s recentwriting about consequentialism and virtue with some interest, though the thoughts below aren’t directly responding to anything in particular that he has written.
I think it’s uncontroversial around here to say that the field of medicine as a whole is under-performing and inadequate relative to what it could be—many people are getting sub-optimal treatment and health outcomes, and lots of questionably-useful research is produced and cited, vs. what’s theoretically / technologically possible given the collective resources spent on healthcare and research. Without getting into the specifics of what the failures and inadequacies of medicine are here though, I think it’s interesting and maybe informative to view them through the lens of a systemic failure of virtue ethics.
By virtue and virtue ethics below, I mean (what I think is) a relatively standard conception of virtue—acting in accordance with principles that are generally regarded as good, noble, pro-social, etc. according to one’s culture, in-group, and beliefs, with room for judicious flexibility based on experience and context, in contrast to deontology or consequentialism.
Richard lists “common-sense virtues like integrity, honor, kindness and dutifulness”, but I think it is fair to take a slightly more expansive view on what can be classified as a virtue in medicine: respect for and universal adherence to established procedure, loss aversion, and safety-ism are generally viewed negatively around these parts, but they are important operating principles in various medical systems. I claim that these are relatively central examples of virtues by the definition above - practitioners who adhere to them are typically regarded as good, virtuous, and following “common-sense” by the general public in both abstract terms and when applied to concrete situations. They’re more narrow than, say, “integrity”, but they’re still general and flexible enough to guide decision-making and evaluation in many different contexts.
And medical professionals and systems mostly do live up to their stated principles, so the problem is not a lack of virtue by individual participants—it’s that the field as a whole has settled on the wrong virtues, with no good mechanism for self-correction. An unusually careful, analytical, and consequentialist thinker might notice in the moment that the virtues of medicine I listed sometimes conflict with deeper and more general virtues of kindness and integrity when put into practice and applied strictly, but I don’t think that happens often enough for virtue-based decision-making to succeed in medicine.
Medicine as an example of a failure of virtue ethics?
Epistemic status: kinda half-baked / not-confident claim
Context: I have been following @Richard_Ngo’s recent writing about consequentialism and virtue with some interest, though the thoughts below aren’t directly responding to anything in particular that he has written.
I think it’s uncontroversial around here to say that the field of medicine as a whole is under-performing and inadequate relative to what it could be—many people are getting sub-optimal treatment and health outcomes, and lots of questionably-useful research is produced and cited, vs. what’s theoretically / technologically possible given the collective resources spent on healthcare and research. Without getting into the specifics of what the failures and inadequacies of medicine are here though, I think it’s interesting and maybe informative to view them through the lens of a systemic failure of virtue ethics.
By virtue and virtue ethics below, I mean (what I think is) a relatively standard conception of virtue—acting in accordance with principles that are generally regarded as good, noble, pro-social, etc. according to one’s culture, in-group, and beliefs, with room for judicious flexibility based on experience and context, in contrast to deontology or consequentialism.
Richard lists “common-sense virtues like integrity, honor, kindness and dutifulness”, but I think it is fair to take a slightly more expansive view on what can be classified as a virtue in medicine: respect for and universal adherence to established procedure, loss aversion, and safety-ism are generally viewed negatively around these parts, but they are important operating principles in various medical systems. I claim that these are relatively central examples of virtues by the definition above - practitioners who adhere to them are typically regarded as good, virtuous, and following “common-sense” by the general public in both abstract terms and when applied to concrete situations. They’re more narrow than, say, “integrity”, but they’re still general and flexible enough to guide decision-making and evaluation in many different contexts.
And medical professionals and systems mostly do live up to their stated principles, so the problem is not a lack of virtue by individual participants—it’s that the field as a whole has settled on the wrong virtues, with no good mechanism for self-correction. An unusually careful, analytical, and consequentialist thinker might notice in the moment that the virtues of medicine I listed sometimes conflict with deeper and more general virtues of kindness and integrity when put into practice and applied strictly, but I don’t think that happens often enough for virtue-based decision-making to succeed in medicine.