A utilitarian ethic that sacrifices a few for the many is troublesome. That was the defense of the doctors at Nazi's Nuremberg. The ruling went against them, but I see a reliving of history. One of the basics of psychology is to identify criminals and social outliers and help them fit in. Counsel those that haven't figured how to cooperate with others in a constructive way. They seem to have given up and told society to accept all behavior as equal and worthy of admiration. Some doctors are accumulating data on political views, criminal background in the family, financial capability, for which they have begun to determine whether or not to provide medical care services.
Philosophically, the views of this vary wildly according to the whens, wheres, whys, and whos. Logical behaviorism has the only real guidelines in this area, and those are even rather general and can only be applied to very specific situations with any strength.
Of course, most of us are aware of what an appeal to authority is. However, there are both fallacious and valid appeals to authority. In order to avoid a fallacious appeal to authority, one has to established that: 1] The authority is an expert on the topic being discussed, and 2] The authority's expertise was intended to address the details of the topic in question, or is at least relevant to the topic.
The other means by avoiding a fallacious appeal to authority is to indicate that your authority is just being used to further an hypothesis and shouldn't be taken as a justification for any type of implied truth.
For example, it would be valid to cite Einstein as an authority on gravity. It would be fallacious to cite him as an authority on theology, even if he often talked about theology because that was not his expertise. And yet we often see a lot of quotes about his views on religion, which were entirely biased and only intended to express his own personal viewpoints, not any history or doctrine in regards to actual religious practice.
The problem at root with the use of experts is that people often fail to make a distinction between the expert's profession and their personal ideologies. What their area of discipline establishes versus what they personally believe. We also tend to over-inflate the intelligence of people just because they are exerts in a particular field.
This is why during the Nazi era, eugenics was mistakenly believed to be an actual science developed by "smart" people when in fact it was merely an ideological belief of some "experts" who pretty much made the entire thing up so support their particular preconceived notions. And many of them were not even scientists.
In this same vein, we have controversies over vaccines in which some doctors express their ideological beliefs over whether vaccines or safe or not, versus doctors who just express the facts of vaccine research. Many people view these beliefs and facts as having the same merit, when they clearly do not. And they usually do so, according to a bias for what they are willing to believe and what they are not. If a person thinks vaccines are unsafe, they will be prone to believing the ideology more so than the facts. So it is necessary for us to ask ourselves, what has been claimed and what has been verified by the experts?
Or as the skeptics put it, "question everything, even that which you hold to be true." Just make sure your questioning doesn't reach the point that you are simply ignoring reality. The other extreme.
The fault ultimately does not lie on the experts, but on those who believe the experts beyond just what the facts say. And of course, this gets rather complicated when dealing with much softer sciences such as psychology where most of the conclusions are formed thought a type of consensus (agreement) rather than any real evidence. But we also see this in the hard sciences, as well.
For example, scientists who dabble in the panpsychism hypothesis are taken at totally credible when making statements about how consciousness is a property of matter just because they are scientists and they believe this. However, there isn't a single scientific fact in existence that actually supports this hypothesis. And just because a scientists says something doesn't automatically make it science. Same with doctors and medicine. Or lawyers and law. Or logicians and logic. One is a person and the other is a field of knowledge. And people are not always bastions of truth just because they are experts.
We should pay attention to facts or evidence that experts produce. We should not pay as much attention to the opinions of experts that is not based on such facts or evidence.
As for doctors reporting parents for not opting for expensive treatments for their child, I tried to find examples where doctors were either wrong in this case, or trying to force people to pay for unnecessary treatments. I didn't find any worth mention example. In fact, this isn't even legal. The same thing often happens in education business; expensive schools equal good education.
In pretty much most of the cases I could find in a general search, the parents were refusing to opt for the procedure for their child because they simply didn't believe the doctors for various reasons—religion seemingly being the most popular. They preferred to try to pray the illness away.
It seems that in most cases in Western countries, if a patient can't afford a procedure for a child, the doctors will just perform it anyway if it's life threatening. The patient may then face a great deal of financial difficulties, and that is entirely wrong and something broken about their health care system. Even worst, in Indonesia, they will just let you child die without any choices presented before.
Philosophically, the views of this vary wildly according to the whens, wheres, whys, and whos. Logical behaviorism has the only real guidelines in this area, and those are even rather general and can only be applied to very specific situations with any strength.
Of course, most of us are aware of what an appeal to authority is. However, there are both fallacious and valid appeals to authority. In order to avoid a fallacious appeal to authority, one has to established that: 1] The authority is an expert on the topic being discussed, and 2] The authority's expertise was intended to address the details of the topic in question, or is at least relevant to the topic.
The other means by avoiding a fallacious appeal to authority is to indicate that your authority is just being used to further an hypothesis and shouldn't be taken as a justification for any type of implied truth.
For example, it would be valid to cite Einstein as an authority on gravity. It would be fallacious to cite him as an authority on theology, even if he often talked about theology because that was not his expertise. And yet we often see a lot of quotes about his views on religion, which were entirely biased and only intended to express his own personal viewpoints, not any history or doctrine in regards to actual religious practice.
The problem at root with the use of experts is that people often fail to make a distinction between the expert's profession and their personal ideologies. What their area of discipline establishes versus what they personally believe. We also tend to over-inflate the intelligence of people just because they are exerts in a particular field.
This is why during the Nazi era, eugenics was mistakenly believed to be an actual science developed by "smart" people when in fact it was merely an ideological belief of some "experts" who pretty much made the entire thing up so support their particular preconceived notions. And many of them were not even scientists.
In this same vein, we have controversies over vaccines in which some doctors express their ideological beliefs over whether vaccines or safe or not, versus doctors who just express the facts of vaccine research. Many people view these beliefs and facts as having the same merit, when they clearly do not. And they usually do so, according to a bias for what they are willing to believe and what they are not. If a person thinks vaccines are unsafe, they will be prone to believing the ideology more so than the facts. So it is necessary for us to ask ourselves, what has been claimed and what has been verified by the experts?
Or as the skeptics put it, "question everything, even that which you hold to be true." Just make sure your questioning doesn't reach the point that you are simply ignoring reality. The other extreme.
The fault ultimately does not lie on the experts, but on those who believe the experts beyond just what the facts say. And of course, this gets rather complicated when dealing with much softer sciences such as psychology where most of the conclusions are formed thought a type of consensus (agreement) rather than any real evidence. But we also see this in the hard sciences, as well.
For example, scientists who dabble in the panpsychism hypothesis are taken at totally credible when making statements about how consciousness is a property of matter just because they are scientists and they believe this. However, there isn't a single scientific fact in existence that actually supports this hypothesis. And just because a scientists says something doesn't automatically make it science. Same with doctors and medicine. Or lawyers and law. Or logicians and logic. One is a person and the other is a field of knowledge. And people are not always bastions of truth just because they are experts.
We should pay attention to facts or evidence that experts produce. We should not pay as much attention to the opinions of experts that is not based on such facts or evidence.
As for doctors reporting parents for not opting for expensive treatments for their child, I tried to find examples where doctors were either wrong in this case, or trying to force people to pay for unnecessary treatments. I didn't find any worth mention example. In fact, this isn't even legal. The same thing often happens in education business; expensive schools equal good education.
In pretty much most of the cases I could find in a general search, the parents were refusing to opt for the procedure for their child because they simply didn't believe the doctors for various reasons—religion seemingly being the most popular. They preferred to try to pray the illness away.
It seems that in most cases in Western countries, if a patient can't afford a procedure for a child, the doctors will just perform it anyway if it's life threatening. The patient may then face a great deal of financial difficulties, and that is entirely wrong and something broken about their health care system. Even worst, in Indonesia, they will just let you child die without any choices presented before.
