I did not, when I decided that the saga of Tyree Smith justified an ethics quiz, foresee that the story neatly dovetailed into a larger theme covered extensively by ethics alarms of late, the untrustworthiness of “experts” and the danger of blindly accepting their pronouncements, influenced as they too often are by ideological biases and political agendas. Longtime commenter Michael R., however (3, 425 comments since October 26, 2012!) managed to connect the dots.
Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Brain-Eating Cannibal”:
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This is why it is time to remove the monopolies these professional groups have on essential services. The psychiatrists and psychologists have a monopoly on confining people for mental illness and, in this case, releasing the criminally mentally ill. How many times have they failed in this? James Holmes (above), the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooter, is a good case in point. He had been banned from seeking psychiatric help because he was deemed too dangerous, but the very establishment that deemed him too dangerous to be around THEM, refused to sign papers that would let the police involuntarily confine him. At least they successfully determined he was a danger to those around him, they just refused to help the general public. We have them pushing puberty blockers and surgical sterilization on children with no evidence this will help. In fact, the actual ailments they suffer from were probably caused by the very ‘experts’ that get to decide the ‘treatment’.
Let’s look at medicine next. The medical associations regulate themselves and are calling for ideological conformity in all physicians. Anyone who disagrees about COVID masks, vaccinations, DEI, affirmative action, etc can’t be a physician. Pharmacists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they don’t agree with the physician’s treatment, or diagnosis, or they think the person looks sketchy. Medicine is an essential service. We can’t have such groups dictating if we can get care or not.
I’m sorry, but I think the legal profession is in the same boat. This is an essential service and the ideological constraints placed by the law schools and the licensing is putting an intolerable restriction on the law. During COVID, no labor attorney in my state was willing to take a case by employees who were being forced to take part in a drug trial, not one. In Hawaii, George Young had to sue the state himself because no lawyer would represent him. He did win initially in the 9th Circuit Appellate court, but lost once he got professional representation. The Supreme Court did side with him, but they sent it back down to the 9th Circuit, so the 9th Circuit could deny the existence of a right to bear arms outside your house again and make it go back to the Supreme Court in a perpetual motion cycle.
Don’t even get me started on public education.
So, these essential professions have made such a mess or regulation that they cannot be trusted anymore. We are going to have to end these ‘gatekeeping’ functions and try to find some way to still train such professions and keep them competent. Maybe we have to let everyone have a law school if they want one, anyone have a medical school if they want one, and we find a way to sort them out in the end. What if we let everyone take the bar exam if they wanted to? You might say “Well, the bar exam doesn’t do a good job of determining if you know how to be a lawyer”. This might be true, but the question then becomes “Then why is it used?”, and “Why don’t you use a test that does?”.
Ethics Alarms 
My only quibble is that it really isn’t fair to judge the expertise of a profession by counting its failures, if they’re being called upon to do hard things where non-experts would have no hope of success. Only NFL players lose the Superbowl. The question should be whether they do better than those outside the profession, and by how much.
Two thoughts:
First, I think one of the scariest moments in everyone’s life is the moment where reality crystalizes and you realize that all of those near-mythical beings, dripping with competence and authority, you looked up to while growing up (also known as adults) are just slightly older versions of you, flying by the seat of their pants and doing the best they can. It’s humbling. It’s the first step in taking your place in the wider world of responsibility.
And it’s one that some people never take.
Second, There’s an idea with First Aid in Canada: If you stop and help, that case is yours. There is no legal duty to provide first aid outside of the gulag that is Quebec, but if you start providing aid, you are legally obligated to continue administering aid until help comes. It’s a little more complicated than that, but the idea is that if you take a case on, then someone else who might otherwise have administered aid could see that you have it handled and move on. Therefore you aren’t just abandoning the person in need, you also theoretically interfered with other people who would have administered aid.
Which brings me to the topic: Why can’t we judge the expertise of a profession on their failures?
What are we supposed to do? Throw up our hands? Say “Well, they didn’t get it. They’re the experts. No one could have.” and resign ourselves to processes that don’t work ad infinitum? No, someone needs to be responsible, someone needs to step in the breach and take it on.
No. Professions are supposed to self-regulate. The entire premise, the deal, that we made with professions is that we would trust them, respect them, and reimburse them with scads of money, and in return they would be worthy of our trust. They would demonstrate this worthiness with professionality and results.
If they fail, they are accountable. Because They. Took. It. On.
They are responsible for their failures. But their failures don’t necessarily mean their expertise isn’t real. Every Superbowl, half the players lose. If that makes you think you these NFL guys attend any better at football than you are, you are quite frankly delusional. It seems likely that oncologists lose more patients than cosmetic surgeons, but only a fool would suggest that’s because oncologists are just really bad doctors.
Which is why I elucidated the rule that we compare the performance of experts against the performance of laymen. In psychotherapy, for instance, it turns out, evidence is surprisingly weak that the licensed clinicians with PhDs are any better at talking people through their problems than a sympathetic friend.
But that’s not what we’re talking about here. In this case, someone had been deemed such a threat to people that he was banned from seeking psychiatric help. The same profession that was willing to make sure they were never within 100 yards of James Holmes also refused to sign papers that would let the police involuntarily confine him.
I don’t even know what the medical metaphor even looks like. A doctor who takes penicillin for his throat infection but prescribes laryngectomies for everyone else? This is so incompetent that it’s hard to judge it as anything other than malice – I could do better than that, but I’m not in a position to, because I’m not a professional.
Bingo.
They have legal monopolies on their fields. They aren’t doing their jobs. Why is it not right to judge them? There has been a shortage of physicians in this country for decades and the medical community has fought any attempt to train physicians in the numbers needed. They have refused to allow people to be trained to provide the medical care society needs. Their monopoly isn’t from god and it needs to end.
As for your ‘non-expert’ point, I assume what you really mean is that the experts are so far above the average person that the average person’s opinion isn’t valid. Any mechanic with some training and a shop is going to have more success fixing a car than the average person, but if they only fix the car correctly 20% of the time, is that anything worth celebrating? Let’s look at education. Are you really going to tell me that ‘non-experts’ can’t criticize the abject and total failure of our education system? The schools are focused on indoctrinating children and alienating them from their families with typical grooming behavior. There are school systems that only have single-digit success rates in teaching students to the bare-minimum requirements. The system is failing to educate students in basic subjects, but they have a legal right to extract money from me at gunpoint to continue the system. The monopoly needs to end.
The last time I talked to an attorney about a contract, I had to remind him what a contract was. I have had to correct numerous physicians on my treatment for a variety of things, including suggestions while they were operating on me. During COVID, almost all the physicians insisted that the vaccines were FDA approved when they weren’t. I understand more about the specialized equipment on my vehicles than almost all mechanics. I agree the experts have more experience and widespread knowledge of the field, but to suggest that ‘non-experts’ have no right to criticize because they couldn’t possibly understand or have a valid point is complete garbage. An NFL starting quarterback is a 1 in 10 million type of person in skill and ability. They are so many standard deviations from average that, yes, the average person isn’t capable of performing at that level. Your average attorney or physician is, at best, a 1 in 10 type of person, or more likely, a standard deviation from average. The average person is more than capable of understanding what they do and what they should be doing. The average person is more than qualified to offer an opinion on the quality of the job such people are doing.
However, none of that was my point. Your objection is merely a redirection. My point is that these monopolies are failing to provide the services to the public they are obligated to for ideological reasons. If you look at my post, I didn’t bring up competency. When a person with a legitimate case can’t find an attorney to take the case because the field has become too politicized, the field needs to lose its monopoly. When a patient can’t find a physician to treat them because the field has decided that treating the patient doesn’t progress the political agenda of the field, or the patient is treated only in a way that is dictated by the current political landscape, the monopoly needs to go away. The second point is that these fields are using political ideology to exclude people from the fields, and that needs to go away as well. The big question is how do you train competent people in these fields without the control of the ideologically compromised groups we have today.
I think you’ve grosslt misunderstood my point. You can’t judge professions by their failures without comparison to how laymen would fare at the same task. When your mechanic fails to torque your lug nuts and the wheel comes off on the highway, that’s something a competent layman could have, would have done better. When a trauma surgeon fails to save a shooting victims with 17 gunshot wounds, that too is a failure, but would you pretend you could have done better?
And yes, it’s tangential to the larger point of ideological control masquerading under the guise of expertise. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid point out that it should simply be ignored.
And you’re deliberately avoiding his.
“You can’t judge professions by their failures without comparison to how laymen would fare at the same task.”
This is bizarre in the context of what he’s said. Of course you can. If a profession is empowered to take on a task, are educated specifically to take on that task, have a monopoly on that task, and are compensated to take on that task and fail utterly, then they failed. Severe gunshot victims aren’t brought to the nearest greasy spoon to seek help from the fry cook, they’re taken to a hospital. And sure, we don’t expect doctors to have a 100% success rate in treating gunshot victims, but if they take a look at the victim and refuse to treat them because they might get blood on their coat, or because they’re ideologically opposed to guns, then we can sure as hell judge them. I don’t think their malpractice insurance will even cover them in cases like that.
It’s even more bizarre when you consider that we could judge the cases we’re talking about against how laymen would approach the situation and get better results.
My rhetorical fry cook would probably be more useful than the ER doc even if all he did was apply pressure to the wounds, even if both would ultimately fail.
Look at the case you originally responded to:
“James Holmes, the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooter, is a good case in point. He had been banned from seeking psychiatric help because he was deemed too dangerous, but the very establishment that deemed him too dangerous to be around THEM, refused to sign papers that would let the police involuntarily confine him.”
How many laypeople, do you think, would have a hard time signing a paper that would confine someone that they believed presented a clear and present danger to themselves or others if they were empowered to do so?.
Using the other examples
“There are school systems that only have single-digit success rates in teaching students to the bare-minimum requirements.”
I think the average parent, if they had the time, could probably do a better job than the average teacher.
“The last time I talked to an attorney about a contract, I had to remind him what a contract was.”
I think the average person knows what a contract is.
“During COVID, almost all the physicians insisted that the vaccines were FDA approved when they weren’t.”
This information was Googleable.
And none of these points are refuted by pointing out that I can’t kick a field goal.
I was planning to write on this, but read the Comment of the Day… so never mind. Well done!