But what if the doctor is confident of keeping it a secret? Well, then causal decision theory would indeed tell her to harvest his organs, but TDT (and also UDT) would strongly advise her against it. Because if TDT endorsed the action, then other people would be able to deduce that TDT endorsed the action, and that (whether or not it had happened in any particular case) their lives would be in danger in any hospital run by a timeless decision theorist, and then we’d be in much the same boat. Therefore TDT calculates that the correct thing for TDT to output in order to maximize utility is “Don’t kill the traveler,”5 and thus the doctor doesn’t kill the traveler.
This doesn’t follow the spirit of the keeping it secret part of the setup. If we know the exact mechanism that the doctor uses to make decisions then we would be able to deduce that he probably saved those five patients with the organs from the missing traveller, so it’s no longer secret. To fairly accept the thought experiment, the doctor has to be certain that nobody will be able to deduce what he’s done.
It seems to me that you haven’t really denied the central point, which is that under consequentialism the doctor should harvest the organs if he is certain that nobody will be able to deduce what he has done.
It might be better if doctors could make hard choices like this and keep it absolutely secret, but it’s nearly impossible to contrive. As long as most people strongly disapprove of that sort of action, and people who want to become doctors do not have overwhelmingly different inclinations, and the training itself does not explicitly advocate for that sort of action, the vast majority of doctors will not take the organ harvester side in the dilemma, even in circumstances where they think they can get away with it (which will be rare,) and those are the basic minimum requirements to pull it off without people guessing.
A society where the public didn’t mind doctors harvesting the few to save the many would probably be considerably better off, but that would require the thoughts and actions of the entire society to be different, not just the doctors within it.
Following consequentialist ethics doesn’t mean that you should behave as you would in the highest possible utility world, if that doesn’t increase utility in the world in which you actually find yourself.
The world we find ourselves in would never expect the doctor to cut the guy up. Few people are doing that consequentialist math. Well, maybe a few long thinkers on this site. So, the supposed long view as reason for not doing it is baloney. I think on that basis alone the experiment fails to come up recommending the conventional behavior it’s trying to rationalize.
We would never expect the doctors to cut the guy up, but hardly any doctors would cut the guy up. Doctors are drawn from the same pool as the rest of society, so society’s expectations of their behavior are pretty much on point.
In a world where doctors were likely to cut the person up, the public would also be a lot more likely to expect doctors to cut the person up.
This doesn’t follow the spirit of the keeping it secret part of the setup. If we know the exact mechanism that the doctor uses to make decisions then we would be able to deduce that he probably saved those five patients with the organs from the missing traveller, so it’s no longer secret. To fairly accept the thought experiment, the doctor has to be certain that nobody will be able to deduce what he’s done.
It seems to me that you haven’t really denied the central point, which is that under consequentialism the doctor should harvest the organs if he is certain that nobody will be able to deduce what he has done.
It might be better if doctors could make hard choices like this and keep it absolutely secret, but it’s nearly impossible to contrive. As long as most people strongly disapprove of that sort of action, and people who want to become doctors do not have overwhelmingly different inclinations, and the training itself does not explicitly advocate for that sort of action, the vast majority of doctors will not take the organ harvester side in the dilemma, even in circumstances where they think they can get away with it (which will be rare,) and those are the basic minimum requirements to pull it off without people guessing.
A society where the public didn’t mind doctors harvesting the few to save the many would probably be considerably better off, but that would require the thoughts and actions of the entire society to be different, not just the doctors within it.
Following consequentialist ethics doesn’t mean that you should behave as you would in the highest possible utility world, if that doesn’t increase utility in the world in which you actually find yourself.
The world we find ourselves in would never expect the doctor to cut the guy up. Few people are doing that consequentialist math. Well, maybe a few long thinkers on this site. So, the supposed long view as reason for not doing it is baloney. I think on that basis alone the experiment fails to come up recommending the conventional behavior it’s trying to rationalize.
We would never expect the doctors to cut the guy up, but hardly any doctors would cut the guy up. Doctors are drawn from the same pool as the rest of society, so society’s expectations of their behavior are pretty much on point.
In a world where doctors were likely to cut the person up, the public would also be a lot more likely to expect doctors to cut the person up.