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By Root 652 0

is aiming at bringing about) whereas when practicing money-making the physician’s aim is to bring about an increase in wealth for him or herself. In other words, it is to bring about a good in the physician , not in the patient. So, in aiming to bring about a good in him or herself, the physician is not simply practicing medicine badly, but rather is NOT practicing medicine at all. What he or she is doing is making money—which in fact can be done independently of practicing medicine, and shows that the two—practicing medicine and making money—are not the same.

Socrates again emphasizes the difference:

[N]o physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers his own good in what he prescribes, but the good of his patient; for the true physician is also a ruler having the human body as a subject, and is not a mere money-maker … (Republic, line 342d)

Here, Socrates again emphasizes that the aim or end of medicine is to bring about a good in the patient (health), whereas the aim or end of money-making would be to bring about a good in the physician (wealth). And, if the physician were aiming at bringing about such a good for him or herself, that is, if he or she were acting so as to make a buck, he or she would not be a true physician, as Socrates puts it, (that is, someone actually practicing medicine), but would be a mere money-maker.

As Bill Willers notes:

The corporate aim is to increase profit, and any competing or interfering value is to be neutralized. As movement up through corporate ranks takes place, individuals with qualms or values that hinder profiteering are selected against.200

So, any competing value, like performing expensive medical tests or procedures to benefit patients, will be “selected against” by higher-ups in the corporation (if these compete with the aim of making profit), and consequently neutralized. Willers continues:

Profiteering is so established as the primary function of the corporation that the corporate world’s foremost sage and theorist, the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, declared that any corporate management failing to function so as to maximize profit should be sued by shareholders.

When the primary aim of corporate healthcare, for example, is the making of profit, the aim is to benefit shareholders, not patients. In light of Willers’s remarks, Socrates seems able to make the following sort of argument: Corporate healthcare is a practitioner of medicine only if the primary aim of corporate healthcare is to benefit patients. But, the primary aim of corporate healthcare is not to benefit patients (rather, it is to benefit shareholders). Therefore, Corporate healthcare is NOT a practitioner of medicine (rather, it is a practitioner of money-making).

Now, why can’t corporate healthcare do both—benefit both patients and shareholders? Well, it presumably does. But, if the primary aim is what defines an action, and the primary aim of corporate healthcare is to make profit for shareholders, then its activity is NOT to be understood as the practice of medicine, but rather is to be understood as the practice of profiteering. As Willers’s analysis suggests, if benefiting patients ever comes into conflict with corporate healthcare’s primary aim, then it will “select against” the patient in favor of benefiting the shareholder. The nature or aim of corporate healthcare, then, is not the bringing about of health in the patient, but rather is the bringing about of wealth in the shareholder. These are two entirely different actions, and one would be deeply confused in thinking that corporate healthcare, understood in terms of its primary aim, is a practitioner of medicine.

In the Republic, Socrates argues that both the republic, which is the ideal city-state he is constructing, and the tyrannical state, which is a city-state furthest removed from the republic, nevertheless have the same political structure—Rulers oversee Soldiers, who in turn oversee the Artisans. Four virtues are located with respect to this model. Wisdom is attributed to the Rulers, courage