Medical artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, by their capacity to decipher enormous data sets, identify meaningful patterns beyond what human intelligence can recognize, and in some cases render decisions without human assistance, are poised to transform healthcare. As with any powerful technology, careful ethical analysis is needed if we are to realize the benefits of AI while avoiding its perils. Four available perspectives are recognized. One perspective is technological sentimentalism, which resists novel technologies that seem to displace a more natural way of inhabiting the world. A second perspective is technological messianism, which uncritically welcomes novel technology as intrinsically good and the answer to all human problems. A third perspective, common today, is technological pragmatism, which weighs benefits and risks in a utilitarian framework that emphasizes empirical facts but disregards moral values, considering them to be opinions without consequence or validity. A fourth and preferred perspective is technological responsibilism, which considers not only outcomes but also the moral values laden in the design and implementation of technology. Technological responsibilism respects the deeply human attributes of voluntary responsibility, moral agency, and character. Morally responsible use of AI is needed if healthcare professionals are to sustain their focus, not on technology, but on patients.
Category Archives: Early Access
Book Review: “Disability and the Church”
Known as the “Autism Pastor,” Lamar Hardwick is an essential voice in a rising field: the theology of disability. In Disability and the Church: A Vision for Diversity and Inclusion, the author is true to the subtitle, casting a pastor’s vision for positive change in the church.
Religious Decision-Making in a Teenager
Clinical Ethics Dilemma: May we accept this 13½-year-old adolescent Jehovah’s Witness refusal of blood transfusion?
A Clash of Medical Cultures
Question: Should we go to court to prevent this Samoan man’s family from taking him home against medical advice? Tuiasosopo is a 39-year-old Samoan agricultural worker who was admitted 7 weeks ago after two weeks of headaches and intermittent nausea and vomiting and blindness for 24 hours.
Book Review: “Invitation to Christian Ethics”
Christian ethics and moral decision-making can be complex and intimidating to non-theologians. In addition, the authoritative scriptures do not directly address every possible ethical issue. This problem is especially true in bioethics, which evolves continuously based on medical, scientific, and technological advancements. How should Christians view such issues as artificial intelligence, gene editing, and bodily enhancements? Pastors, healthcare professionals, and lay congregants need help. Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues, by Kenneth Magnuson, gives moral guidance to the Christian community to navigate these problems. While not perfect, it offers a solid philosophical and practical approach to Christian ethics.
Book Review: “Losing Our Dignity”
In Losing Our Dignity, Camosy’s central driving thesis is that the authority and power of modern medicine “have put an increasing number of human beings outside the circle of protection based on fundamental human equality” (p. 13). This loss of human equality and dignity is based primarily on cognitive disadvantages among neurologically diverse individuals, from those with Down syndrome to others with Alzheimer’s disease. In the eyes of an increasingly secular world, such people have less to offer, therefore less dignity.
Book Review: Dennis M. Sullivan, Douglas C. Anderson, and Justin W. Cole, “Ethics in Pharmacy Practice: A Practical Guide”
Along with nurses and medical doctors, pharmacists have long been recognized, and honored, by the public as professionals exhibiting honesty and high ethical standards. Serving as the medication expert in the healthcare system, both other medical professionals and patients alike rely heavily on the pharmacist’s knowledge and skills related to an increasingly complex landscape of medications and the diseases (or situations) that such are intended to prevent or treat. And it is expected—assumed even—that the pharmacist will leverage such expertise in the best interest of the patient—as a fiduciary, if you will—exercising a competent, selfless, and wise approach to each patient’s care.
Book Review: Carl Trueman, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution”
Carl Trueman, a church historian by training and, in recent years, a cultural analyst, has given the evangelical world—and others willing to listen—a sophisticated historical and philosophical genealogy of the current cultural crisis in the West. It is a “how we arrived at our present situation” book, filled with evidence and intellectual connections over about 300 years. Trueman searches for the roots, not only of our sexual mores and practices, but of the broader ideas that form what many would label the reigning worldview.
Book Review: Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen, “The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession”
Sometimes a book has pages filled with the reality of truth. The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession, by Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen, is one such work. In a relatively short and readable volume, the authors explore and analyze the how’s and why’s of medical practice, from the ancient model of Hippocrates to the modern “service-provider model.” Using case examples, moral theory, foundational ethics, and experience, they charge after the conflicts between the modern model and the more ancient “way of medicine,” which they espouse as “a practice oriented toward the patient’s health as one basic human good” (p. 54). Their central questions are: “what is medicine?” and “what is medicine for?” They answer these by embracing clinical practice as a profession, not a job.