Doctors and Bus Drivers
Are doctors more important than bus drivers?
Most people would generally agree that while all jobs are important, certain jobs are more important than others. For example, a surgeon performs operations to save lives, while a bus driver ferries people from location to location.
That being said, it is interesting to attempt to argue from the other side, and push for bus drivers being at least equal, if not more important than doctors. The focus on bus drivers here is arbitrary - bus drivers could be changed to say, train drivers.
Argument: Bus drivers have more lives at stake
Suppose we take the importance of a profession to be proportional to the number of lives at stake.
Then, we can argue that a bus driver is directly responsible, on average, for more lives than the typical doctor, since a commercial bus driver typically ferries ~50 passengers per trip, and makes multiple trips per day, compared to a doctor who may see something like 30 patients per day.
Counterargument: Each commuter only has a small chance of dying (e.g. the road traffic accident rate), while each sick patient has a much higher chance of dying. So, the doctor has more lives at stake.
Reply
This is not generally true. A bus may also be carrying many doctors to work, and these doctors are saving lives. So, by extension, the bus driver is saving as many, if not more lives, if we consider all the potential doctors that the bus driver is ferrying to work. Furthermore, if the bus were to crash, there would be a huge impact on patients' lives being saved both now and in the future (those that the doctors, if alive, would have saved). So, the bus driver may actually have more lives at stake.
Counterargument: Consider a heart surgeon treating patients with heart attacks. All their patients would almost certainly die without any intervention, compared to the bus driver's doctors, who may simply be treating patients with minor conditions. So, the heart surgeon here has more lives at stake.
Reply
Note that we are now looking at the isolated case of this particular heart surgeon, rather than doctors in general. Nontheless, we can provide the following example of a bus driver who has as many, if not more lives at stke.
The Bus Driver Ferrying Heart Surgeons
Imagine a hypothetical bus driver whose job is to ferry 10 heart surgeons to work daily, maybe from their residences to the hospital. This bus driver has the combined responsibility of not only the 10 heart surgeon's lives, but also all of their patients, who would die not only if the heart surgeons did not intervene, but also if the bus driver had an accident.
Counterargument: Doctors save lives, while bus drivers don't. For example, a commuter going to work is not expected to die from taking a bus, but a sick patient who does not go for surgery is. We consider the patient's life saved, but not the commuter's.
Reply
Note that the definition of importance has now been shifted to being that of whoever is actively saving more lives, rather than lives at stake. Nontheless, we can come up with a hypothetical bus driver who is actively saving as many, if not more lives, than doctors:
The Treacherous Road Argument
Imagine a bus driver operating a bus along a treacherous mountain route between a hospital and a village. There is no other form of transport available, and walking is not possible due to the distance. This bus driver also happens to be ferrying 10 heart surgeons to work daily, who perform life-saving surgery on hundreds of patients in the hospital. In this scenario, the bus driver's act of driving the bus to the hospital could arguably be viewed as an active form of life-saving (his return journey, however, is another topic).
Counterargument: The surgeon's life-saving is more direct than the bus driver's: the surgeon is holding the scalpel, and their correct actions/mistakes directly impact the patient. The bus driver's influence however, is more indirect, in this case merely providing transport for the surgeons.
Reply
There is an implicit premise here that direct actions are more important than indirect actions. However, the surgeon's direct actions are the result of many necessary factors coming into play, for example the hospital builders, who built the operating theatre, or the scrub nurses, who prepared the instruments, or the bus driver, who ferried the surgeon to the hospital. Any one of these factors missing would result in the surgeon not being able to perform the surgery (and save the patient's life).
As a corollary, think about who is more important at a rocket launch: the person pressing the 'Launch' button, or the engineers who performed the necessary research, building and testing of the rocket and its systems.
Therefore, all these contributing factors are necessary, and indirect actions can be equally, if not more important, than direct actions, as the direct action would not have been possible otherwise.
Counterargument: Skill
Let us define the importance of a job to the skill level required.
A surgeon's (or doctor's) job demands higher skill than that of a bus driver, so the former are more important. For example, the doctor has more actions to take (e.g. what medicine to give), vs the bus driver, who only has to control the steering wheel and pedals.
Reply
We are assuming that higher skill is tied to importance. Does this then mean highly skilled, 10x developers are more important than doctors, if they are rarer?
We can also argue that a bus driving job actually demands the same, if not higher skills than that of a doctor.
In order to successfully navigate a road safely, a bus driver requires the ability to turn the steering wheel at precisely the right time, and maintain the correct speed. They would also have to use the brake pedal appropriately and with the correct amount of force. During inclement weather, this is made even more difficult. A misjudgement of a few milliseconds can mean the difference between an accident and getting home safely.
Counterargument: Replaceability
Let us tie the importance of a job to its replaceability - a more important job is more irreplaceable.
We can calculate the ratio of replaceability, \(R\) as follows:
A job which is more irreplaceable has a lower \(R\).
\(C\) is smaller for doctors than bus drivers, while \(V\) may be similar (there are a shortage of doctors everywhere, while there are also a lot of bus routes). \(R\) is thus smaller for doctors than bus drivers. So, doctors are more irreplaceable than bus drivers, and are therefore more important.
Reply
Consider the following for \(C\) and \(V\):
\(C\) would be very small - nobody wants to work for peanuts. \(V\) would be large - everyone wants employees who are willing to work for free. \(R\) would then be very small, and therefore this group of individuals (bus drivers willing to work for $1 a day) would be more irreplaceable than doctors.