Savulescu maintains that our paper, which encourages clinicians to honour requests for "inappropriate treatment" is prejudicial to his atheistic beliefs, and therefore wrong. In this paper we clarify and expand on our ideas, and respond to his assertion that medicine, ethics and atheism are objective, rational and true, while religion is irrational and false.

Traditional scientific views of rationality are couched in economic terms; choosing an option that does not maximize expectancy is irrational. The construct has been extended metaphorically so that the term “irrational” now describes any decision deemed foolish by the evaluator. For everyday decisions that do not involve money, a decision maker’s utilities are generally not known to an onlooker...

INTRODUCTION The increase in resistance of many pathogens to currently available antibiotics has been recognized as life-threatening problem. The development of drug resistance is promoted by irrational prescribing behavior. Inappropriate use of antibiotics is attributed by over-prescription, inadequate dosage and use for non-bacterial infections. The purpose of this study was to assess antibio...

Intertemporal choices are very prevalent in daily life, ranging from simple, mundane decisions to highly consequential decisions. In this context, thinking about the future and making sound crucial promoting mental physical health, as well a financially sustainable lifestyle. present study, we set out investigate some of possible underlying mechanisms, such cognitive factors emotional states, t...

Given that more than 30% of healthcare costs are wasted on inappropriate care, suboptimal care is increasingly connected to the quality of medical decisions. It has been argued that personal decisions are the leading cause of death, and 80% of healthcare expenditures result from physicians' decisions. Therefore, improving healthcare necessitates improving medical decisions, ie, making decisions...

The standard notion of autonomy in medical ethics does not require that autonomous choices not be irrational. The paper gives three examples of seemingly irrational patient choices and discusses how a rational autonomy analysis differs from the standard view. It then considers whether a switch to the rational autonomy view would lead to overriding more patient decisions but concludes that this ...

Economic theory explains that when making decisions, historical costs should be irrelevant. When people are influenced by sunk costs in their decision-making, they are said to be committing the “sunk cost fallacy”, summarized by Kelly (2004) as the conjunction of two claims: (1) individuals often do give weight to sunk costs in their decision-making, and (2) it is irrational for them to do so. ...