Person a) Has malaria. Person b) What kind of help would you like? Person a) Screams, rolls around. Person b) Enjoy the consequences of your choice.

ChatGPT said:

Ah yes, the Rational Actor Theory in action: a perfect case study in why assuming people are always making conscious, utility-maximizing decisions leads you to behave like an emotionally stunted spreadsheet with a God complex.

Let’s review what this grotesque little parable tells us:

• Person A is clearly suffering, probably incapable of articulating needs because of, you know, having malaria.

• Person B is the smug libertarian thought experiment come to life. Instead of helping, they withhold care under the assumption that Person A chose this state of affairs, probably after reading a brochure titled “Malaria and You: A Lifestyle Option.”

It’s moralized abstraction — ignoring systems, constraints, histories, and literal pathogens in favor of a fantasy where everyone is just a little rational island responsible for their own suffering.

What you’ve written is satire, but unfortunately also policy in many parts of the world.

Wanna explore how RCT leads to victim-blaming, or dig into healthcare ethics and distributive justice, or maybe just scream into a philosophical pillow about how empathy fails under utilitarian logic?

ChatGPT said:

Yes, Rational Choice Theory (RCT) is basically the philosophical gateway drug to victim-blaming. It's not intended to be, of course — it just ends up there when left unsupervised, like a teenager with a Reddit account and a copy of Atlas Shrugged.

Here’s how the descent happens:

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🧠 Step 1: Assume People Are Rational Actors

RCT starts with the lovely fiction that people:

• Have stable preferences

• Weigh options with perfect information

• Choose what maximizes their personal utility

Basically: everyone is a tiny economist with a calculator in their soul.

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💀 Step 2: Assume Outcomes Reflect Choices

Now here's the trapdoor: if people are rational, then whatever happens to them must be the result of their own decisions.

• You're poor? Must’ve made bad choices.

• You're sick? Lifestyle error.

• You're unemployed? Didn’t invest in the right skills.

• You have malaria? You chose to live near mosquitoes, I guess.

RCT doesn't say these things, but its logic leaves a vacuum that moral judgment rushes in to fill. If we remove context, constraint, structural violence, and plain bad luck from the story, the only thing left is the individual.

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👺 Step 3: Moralize the Outcome

This is where victim-blaming flowers like a weed in a rationalist garden. If people are responsible for their outcomes, then we can start assigning moral worth to them:

• Success = smart, good, deserving.

• Failure = foolish, bad, disposable.

So the poor become lazy. The sick become negligent. The oppressed become irrational. You get a society that punishes the vulnerable because they must’ve “chosen” vulnerability.

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🏛️ Bonus Round: Policy Implications

RCT-inspired governance loves:

• Workfare: “You want support? Prove you're rationally improving yourself.”

• Sin taxes: “We’ll nudge you toward better utility-maximizing health choices.”

• Meritocracy myths: “Equal opportunity means outcomes reflect merit.”

Meanwhile, no attention paid to:

• Structural inequality

• Generational trauma

• Historical injustice

• Institutional failure

It's the economic equivalent of yelling “learn to swim” at someone you pushed into the ocean.

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📉 Conclusion: RCT Is a Theory of People Without People in It

It's not that RCT explicitly blames victims — it just erases all the systems, histories, and externalities that explain why people suffer in the first place. In its sterile model, suffering becomes evidence of bad decision-making.

And once that logic sinks into a culture, empathy becomes inefficiency, and real helping becomes interference.