Moral luck, agent regret and the doctor as drug.

There was a screech of rubber, a bump and a crunch and I turned around to see lots of people screaming – a stopped car and a frightened woman stepping out of the driver’s seat. There was nobody lying in the road, no sign of damage. I imagined for a moment that someone had been running across the road, caught a glancing blow and then run off again. People were still shouting and crying,

“There’s a little boy under the car!”

My heart stopped.

Where’s Billy?

I suddenly realised my four year old wasn’t with me.

“There’s a little boy under the car!”

“Oh no! please God, no!, Not Billy … please, no!”

Healthcare professionals are particularly prone to moral luck and agent regret.

“What is the drug you use with patients all the time?” “The doctor is the drug[1]” M. Balint 1952

Professional identity is particularly strong in doctors and medical students[2] [3], and perhaps more than our non-medical peers we assimilate this into our personal identity. With this, comes an enhanced sense of moral responsibility; we cannot avoid thinking that we are morally responsible for what happens to our patients.

This spectrum of moral responsibility is intrinsic to our underlying constitution and moral predispositions. The efforts of lawyers, ethicists and moral philosphers[4] to impose definitions seem far removed from experiences like those described above and our self-imposed moral standards.

It is not only our attachment to our professional identity, but the nature of our work that makes us vulnerable to moral luck and agent regret. For example,

We might judge a doctor who fails to ask a patient about allergies (as we all have done at least once) before administering penicillin more harshly if the patient is allergic and suffers a fatal anaphylactic reaction than if the patient is not allergic and not only suffers no harm, but also recovers from their infection. Our judgement of a doctor whose patient suffers an irritating, but non-fatal allergic reaction might fall somewhere in between. In none of the cases did the doctor ask about allergies, so the only significant difference is in how the patients responded to the drugs.

Intuitively there is something worrying about the idea that moral judgement or moral standing depends on factors outside our control. One immediately obvious problem is that the degrees to which factors are within someone’s control are easily contested. If we take any case of a patient who died while receiving active medical treatment, then the multiple decisions that led to the interventions before their death, described by way of example here[5], could always have been different. Likewise I could have held Billy’s hand when I crossed the road and the driver could have driven more cautiously. To different degrees, depending on a multitude of factors, moral luck and ‘agent regret’ will always come into play.

For philosopher Thomas Nagel⁴ there are four types of moral luck,

1.        Resultant Luck: “luck in the way one’s actions and projects turn out.”
2.       Circumstantial Luck: the luck involved in “the kind of problems and situations one faces”
3.       Causal Luck: “luck in how one is determined by antecedent circumstances.”
4.       Constitutive Luck: the luck involved in one’s having the “inclinations, capacities and temperament” that one does. (Nagel, 1993, 60)

Healthcare professionals are vulnerable to ‘resultant luck’ because the way things turn out in medicine can be life or death, or to a lesser degree, in the relief or worsening of our patients’ suffering or disability. We are at risk too, of ‘constitutional luck’ because we are faced with sick patients in pressured situations. Increasingly under-resourced, we are forced to work without sufficient support or rest. Our inclinations, capacities and temperament lie on a spectrum which is determined by our genes and upbringing as much as our training and professionalism. For doctors and other healthcare professionals, moral luck is an unavoidable part of the job.

We are most at risk when we are most emotionally involved with our work, and it is unsurprising therefore that psychiatrists and GPs present to organisations like the Practitioner Health Programme most frequently, needing help with our own ‘agent regret’ which can lead to depression and substance abuse as we try and fail to cope with it or blank it out.

The demands for more compassionate, patient-centred, empathetic care in the aftermath of well publicised cases where this was lacking, like Mid Staffordshire Hospital, pay little or no regard[6] [7]to just how much moral responsibility healthcare workers already feel and what can, or more importantly, cannot be done about it.

If we are to become more empathetic and take greater moral responsibility for our patients, something few people would disagree with, then we must appreciate that how much it affects us and our patients depends to a significant and under-appreciated degree, on luck.

The car reversed and there lying in the road, trembling, crying and terrified was Billy. He had been knocked flat on his back and went right between the wheels. When I asked him later what happened, he said, “It was magic daddy, the car went right over me and I’m not dead”

Further reading

[1] Edlund M. The Doctor is a Drug. Psychology Today. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-rest/201103/the-doctor-is-drug (accessed 26th March 2014)

[2] Sinclair S. Making Doctors. An institutional apprenticeship. Berg Publishers. 1997

[3] Wessely A. Gerada C. When doctors need treatment: an anthropological approach to why doctors make bad patients. BMJ Careers 12 Nov 2013

[4] Moral Luck. Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy

[5] Berry P. 5 days of escalation creep. Illusions of Autonomy blog. http://illusionsofautonomy.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/5-days-a-tale-of-escalation-creep/ (accessed 26^th March 2014)

[6] Zulueta P. Compassion in Healthcare. Clinical Ethics December 2013 vol. 8 no.487-90

[7] Campling P. The last thing the NHS needs is a compassion pill. BMJ Blogs May 13^th 2013