Hippocratic Paradox and Irrational Consensus: A Mathematical Behavioral Analysis of Medical Decision-Making

Junying Zhao
Mathematical Behavioral Sciences
UC Irvine

The Hippocratic Oath and its derived four principles are the moral foundations of medical decision-making. However, they are self-contradictory in both theory and practice, which leads to hard cases confronted by the U.S. Supreme Court. This dissertation proposes two consecutive projects to resolve such paradoxes. The first project offers a geometric approach to identify all possible contradictions in the form of cyclic rankings. It is the first mathematical analysis of the Hippocratic Paradox — a common interest shared by the literature of medicine, moral philosophy, and law. The second project particularly reconciles the conflict between physician’s professional judgment and patient’s autonomous choice. It takes a behavioral economic approach — irrational revealed-preferences that are particularly relevant to health care. By constructing unique utility representations of irrational preferences, this study aims to find the minimal conditions on utility functions that can guarantee agreement between a physician and a patient.