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Correspondence to Dr Doug Hardman, Psychology, Bournemouth University, Poole, BH12 5BB, UK; [email protected]
In my recent article, Pretending to care, I argue that a better understanding of non-doxastic attitudes could improve our understanding of deception in clinical practice.1 In an insightful and well-argued response, Colgrove highlights three problems with my account: (1) that my definition of deception is implausible because it does not involve intention; (2) that my definition of non-deceptive care is too narrow; and (3) that I conflate questions of deception with questions of normativity.2 I concede that Colgrove’s definition of non-deceptive care is better; although, as Colgrove himself notes, his definition still accommodates instances of clinical care which are non-doxastic and non-deceptive. I also concede that it is important not to conflate questions of deception with questions of normativity. For the sake of brevity, however, in this reply I focus on the first problem.
In noting correctly that my broad definition of deception in medicine—introducing or sustaining a patient’s false or erroneous belief—does not require intention, Colgrove argues that this view has ‘absurd implications’. To illustrate his point, he describes a (somewhat unusual) clinical situation in which a patient with type 2 diabetes believes that if their physician says they need to monitor their blood sugar then that proves that all physicians are pawns for Big Pharma. Colgrove then goes on to show that, in this situation, even if the physician merely makes the reasonable statement that the patient needs to monitor their blood sugar, by my definition they are deceiving the patient because they have sustained a false belief. Colgrove argues that this sets the bar...