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Comment by knicholes | Hacker News Reader

If one considers Kant's categorical imperative, "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law," then also considers how they'd feel if they were go to visit a doctor who had cheated or is cheating, one certainly must draw the conclusion that cheating is indeed immoral and undesirable.

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I'd rather my doctor look up an answer in a medical textbook rather than "not cheat" and allow me to die in adherence to the noble idea that only the ideas we can keep in our long-term memory are worthy.

Rarely in real life will the situations not be open book exams. While coding, we have access to interactive/searchable docs, demos, tutorials, and of course SO and the likes. At work, we can chat with co-workers when we're stuck or have an idea but really feel like there's probably something better if more than one head was working on it.

a cheating doctor would prescribe / perform unnecessary drugs / procedures / surgeries for personal gain or out of carelessness.

This is basically how western medicine operates in the US to begin with.

That's blatantly untrue. The primary criticism to Western medicine is that is has a high cost because doctors are afraid of being sued for malpractice and order lots of unnecessary and invasive tests to confirm any diagnosis before ordering a treatment. It's basically the exact opposite of what you say, which when taken to the extreme is also problematic.

What about the opioid crisis? What about the Sacklers? Was all of that fiction?

That is simply not true. What you are ascribing to personal gain is just protecting against personal loss.

Ordering an extra test or an extra drug is mostly a doctor covering themselves from potential lawsuit.

You're delusional if you think physicians maliciously over-prescribing in the US is not a problem.

People are tremendously impacted, for good or ill, when prescribed pain medications, ADHD medications, anti-depressants, etc. Many of these people are harmed. Many of the doctors who caused them harm simply do not care.

No kidding. The slightest issue with a medication, and every doctor I have seen starts foaming at the mouth, "I can prescribe X to help with that."

Then before you know it, you have to take a pill to take a pill. Then down the road, you have to take a pill to take a pill to take a pill.

I'm no medical Calvinist either, but I am not sure that polypharmacy should be the end goal if it can be avoided.

to be fair - I also met doctors who appeared to be competent and afaict didn't take advantage of my situation.

Sure, plenty out there exist. However, it's not always the doctor but hospital admins that tighten the screws.

Doctors may care about treating patients, but hospitals only care about one thing -- money. Pressuring doctors into pursuing unnecessary treatments are one of many ways hospitals try to increase revenue.

Overprescription is a gigantic problem in the US. Most of that can be attributed to being overly careful, but many doctors are legitimately just prescribing treatments that are known to be unhelpful in expectation for personal gain. Knee and hip surgeries are common examples. They regularly degrade quality of life in recipients. We should be doing less, but then the surgeons that perform them would make less money.

So just your rental urgent care doc?

Double checking a book when figuring out treatment is not cheating, it is normal. Cheating for a doctor would be going with the feeling without double checking.

However, when learning for exam, it is cheating, because exams define minimum set of stuff that you should have in memory at that point.

Using reference works in the course of doing your job is not cheating.

Yes, if you're doing what the patient and the regulators want you to do, that ain't cheating.

but cheating indicates a lack of moral integrity, which might seep into the aspect of how they treat their patients.

eventually, the cheaters won't know what to look up...

Verifying a measurement isn’t cheating. The word exists because it is memory externalized.

So basically "do unto others" but phrased needlessly complexly?

Kind of, but no. This explains the “needless” complexity well, but it is complex:

https://philosophynow.org/issues/125/The_Golden_Rule_Revisit...).

More like: “act like you’d like everyone to act”

Meaning, don’t be a cheater unless you want to live in a society of cheaters. Slightly different meaning from “do unto others” which is about interpersonal reciprocity.

The Golden Rule operates at the small scale of an iterated prisoner's dilemma where two parties are directly interacting.

Kant's wording scales up to include the emergent properties of a society which operated according to that rule.

The Golden Rule doesn't cover cases like, "Should I throw this trash in a lake." because there's no concrete person being "done unto". Kant's rule does: Would you want to live in a world where everyone threw trash in the lake? Probably not.

Ok, then "be the change you wish to see in the world" but needlessly complex.

Whether the two statements are equivalent is a topic of some debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule#Differences_in_sit...

> Immanuel Kant famously criticized the golden rule for not being sensitive to differences of situation, noting that a prisoner duly convicted of a crime could appeal to the golden rule while asking the judge to release him, pointing out that the judge would not want anyone else to send him to prison, so he should not do so to others. On the other hand, in a critique of the consistency of Kant's writings, several authors have noted the "similarity" between the Golden Rule and Kant's Categorical Imperative, introduced in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (See discussion at this link).

Needless discourse. Everyone understands there must be caveats to the Golden Rule. People aren't so literal in their moral frameworks to care about the exact wording. It's not charitable to say "what about this extremely contrived situation where the rule doesn't apply!"

The Golden Rule conveys 99% of the idea. No one cares about the remaining 1% except for people who have time to waste. We get it. We get the point Kant is trying to make.

Kant was notorious for writing in needlessly complex German

The golden rule with gilded edges

Unexpected Kant, and relevant. Nice!

"Would you go to a surgeon who cheated their way through medical school?"

My reading of the application of Kant's imperative to this is different to yours. The "universal law" here would be "cheating on a test for Amazon" rather than "cheating on any test for any job".

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35887145.

Many people reject Kant's ethical philosophy.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. There are bits that are worth considering even without adopting everything he wrote in its entirety.

Arguments are decided on logic, not votes.

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