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thomblake comments on Religion, Mystery, and Warm, Soft Fuzzies - Less Wrong
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Even moreso, the alternative seems to be placing blame entirely on the doctor for not being an omnipotent being when the surgery goes wrong. "It was his time, he's in heaven now" seems like a pretty sweet cop-out, and it should come as no surprise that a more secular society would hold its surgeons too accountable.
But this doesn't seem to be what we are seeing empirically: northern europe is a lot more secular than the US, yet it is the US that has the problems with excessive medical malpractice litigation.
The US has more lawsuits outside of the medical arena as well. I think this has more to do with our respective legal systems rather than how secular we are.
Being responsible and engaging in malpractice are two different things.
We might not say that a surgeon violated any of the proprieties, yet still hold that he failed to save a patient; the alternative seems to be saying that the death was fated and it was "his time to go".
I would say that our accountability system for medical doctors is poorly designed. Some doctors are held accountable for things they should not be, others are not held accountable for things they should be. Its not at all clear to me that the former problem problem exceeds the latter.
I don't agree that would be too accountable; holding someone responsible isn't the same as holding them blameworthy. In any case, the vagaries of chance should be acknowledged as a contributing factor.
But I can easily imagine that, in very difficult surgeries in which the chance of catastrophic failure is quite large, doctors are perfectly willing to deflect praise for success in order that failure not be associated with them as well.
It's easier not to be considered responsible for outcomes, sometimes, even when logically we have at least a contributing influence.