Department of Political Science, School of Business and Social Sciences, Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination (CEPDISC), Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Bioethics. 2023 Sep;37(7):662-667. doi: 10.1111/bioe.13190. Epub 2023 Jun 21.
We often show a greater inclination to assist and avoid harming people identified as those at high risk of great harm than to assist and avoid harming people who will suffer similar harm but are not identified (as yet). Call this the identified person bias. Some ethicists think such bias is justified; others disagree and claim that the bias is discriminatory against statistical people. While the issue is present in public policy and politics, perhaps the most notable examples can be found in medical ethics such as in ICU triage decisions made during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Rule of Rescue, as the application of the identified person bias is sometimes called, states that spending large amounts of resources rescuing identifiable individuals who are in imminent danger is justified. In this paper, I show that our distorted attitudes toward time play a role in identified person bias. I claim that ICU triage decisions are better explained by a preference to treat people sooner rather than later, which is at least partially due to near bias (positive events are to be preferred to be near rather than distant), than by a preference to treat identified lives over statistical lives. Thus, another bias, near bias, is involved in the reasoning behind the identified person bias and the Rule of Rescue.
我们往往更倾向于帮助和避免伤害那些被认为有遭受严重伤害高风险的人，而不是帮助和避免那些将会遭受类似伤害但未被识别（出）的人。我们将这种倾向称为“已识别个体偏见”。一些伦理学家认为这种偏见是合理的；而另一些则不同意，认为这种偏见是对统计人群的歧视。虽然这个问题在公共政策和政治中存在，但也许最值得注意的例子可以在医学伦理中找到，例如在 COVID-19 大流行期间进行的 ICU 分诊决策。有时将这种已识别个体偏见的应用称为“救援规则”，该规则指出，花费大量资源来拯救那些处于迫在眉睫危险中的可识别个体是合理的。在本文中，我表明我们对时间的扭曲态度在已识别个体偏见中发挥了作用。我认为，对 ICU 分诊决策的解释更好的是，人们更倾向于尽早治疗患者，这至少部分是由于近因偏见（人们更喜欢近处的积极事件，而不是远处的），而不是更倾向于治疗已识别的生命而不是统计生命。因此，另一种偏见，即近因偏见，涉及到已识别个体偏见和救援规则背后的推理。
