Med Health Care Philos [JOURNAL]
Sun
200 papers
The moral significance of moral distress.
Brown C, Solbakk JH
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 42329578 · Publisher ↗
Since Andrew Jameton introduced the term "moral distress" (MD) in 1984, the concept has attracted extensive attention in the healthcare literature. Much of this work emphasizes the costs of MD-for instance, psychological...
Since Andrew Jameton introduced the term "moral distress" (MD) in 1984, the concept has attracted extensive attention in the healthcare literature. Much of this work emphasizes the costs of MD-for instance, psychological pain, work dissatisfaction, and burnout-while some highlights its potential benefits, including motivating self-improvement and institutional reform. We survey these assessments and argue that the bulk of them share a common limitation: they evaluate MD purely instrumentally, in terms of its painfulness and consequences, rather than its character as a moral experience. This instrumental framing, we contend, obscures MD's core moral significance and invites misguided interventions. In particular, it neglects the question of when MD is a fitting response to one's situation, and thus justified on intrinsic rather than instrumental grounds. We suggest that MD is fitting when one is genuinely constrained from meeting a moral requirement, and that fitting MD is significant in its own right.
A defense of empathy: Edith Stein, nursing, and prisoner/patients.
Rojo M, Curlin F
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 42307891 · Publisher ↗
Many nurses fear empathizing too much with patients. They worry that empathy requires letting their guard down, which, when caring for a potentially violent patient, will make them vulnerable to the risk of assault. They...
Many nurses fear empathizing too much with patients. They worry that empathy requires letting their guard down, which, when caring for a potentially violent patient, will make them vulnerable to the risk of assault. They worry that as empathy leads the nurse to reckon with who the other is, it will draw out prejudices the nurse might have toward some categories of persons. And nurses worry that empathy will cause them to experience and be burdened too much by the patient's suffering. These fears are perhaps most distilled in nurses' relationships with prisoner/patients, and situating our analysis within such relationships, this paper asks how philosopher Edith Stein's accounts of empathy and community address nurses' fears when caring for patients who may pose danger to them. We argue first that empathy for the prisoner/patient permits nurses to anticipate the patient's future actions, including violent ones. Second, what Stein calls reiterated empathy allows nurses to discern prisoner/patients' appraisal of the nurse's care and to self-correct, as needed, any stigmatizing care. Finally, though the suffering of patients is indeed too much for the nurse to bear alone, following Stein we suggest that through relationships of solidarity the nurse may meaningfully bear that suffering in community, and the community may meaningfully bear that suffering in the nurse. In Edith Stein, who, in addition to studying philosophy, had worked briefly as a nurse, we find resources to address nurses' misconceptions and fears of empathy and to enliven nurses' care.
Should we be testing pregnant patients' urine for drugs? An applied ethics approach.
Holland E, Ieong M
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 42250166 · Publisher ↗
Urine toxicology testing among birthing people in the United States remains a clinical practice often informed more by personal values and conscious and unconscious biases, than by medical evidence and ethical obligation...
Urine toxicology testing among birthing people in the United States remains a clinical practice often informed more by personal values and conscious and unconscious biases, than by medical evidence and ethical obligations. As empirical evidence addressing harms and benefits of toxicology testing in pregnancy grows, and national organizations are taking a moral stance around clinical practice, no published structure explicitly positions the evolving data within an ethical framework. We draw on a model of applied ethics to inform a set of concrete recommendations about what clinicians ought to do with regards to the practice of urine toxicology testing of pregnant patients. These methods facilitate a relationship between empirical data regarding toxicology testing in pregnancy and ethical norms. Our findings serve as a practical guide for clinicians and policymakers seeking clinical guidance around urine toxicology testing in pregnancy as well as a model for future translation of theoretical approaches into clinical action.
Taking the Right to Die Seriously.
Szocik K, Häyry M, Januszewicz P
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Jun · PMID 42223559 · Publisher ↗
This article offers a Hohfeldian analysis of the right to die and asks what follows, normatively and institutionally, once the relevant incidents are distinguished. It argues that debates about assisted dying frequently...
This article offers a Hohfeldian analysis of the right to die and asks what follows, normatively and institutionally, once the relevant incidents are distinguished. It argues that debates about assisted dying frequently conflate four questions: whether choosing death is morally permitted (licence), whether others must not interfere with that choice (negative claim-right), whether a valid request can alter others' normative situation (normative power), and whether anyone owes assistance (positive claim-right). The paper maps major objections to the incident they primarily target and shows that many familiar objections to assisted dying bear most directly on duties of assistance rather than on the underlying permission or the claim against interference. Substantively, it defends a universal moral licence to die and, where competence, voluntariness, and adequate information are satisfied, a corresponding negative claim-right against unjustified interference. Its institutional conclusion is more limited than a direct duty on any particular physician to provide assisted death: what can be justified more securely is a right to make a request that must be assessed under public criteria and, in jurisdictions authorising assisted dying, routed to willing and licensed providers. Separating public validity review from plural provision models, the paper argues, can reduce coercion and conscience-based conflict while preserving access.
Improving bioethics by clarifying and elaborating its methodology: a response to Gomez-Virseda and colleagues.
Hofmann B
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42217123 · Publisher ↗
In a recent article Gomez-Virseda and coauthors criticize my previous work on methodology in bioethics and argue that bioethics is a discipline. While I think that Gomez-Virseda and co-authors misconstrue my argument, st...
In a recent article Gomez-Virseda and coauthors criticize my previous work on methodology in bioethics and argue that bioethics is a discipline. While I think that Gomez-Virseda and co-authors misconstrue my argument, state the obvious, and fail to address pressing questions to their argument, I am most thankful for the inspiration and opportunity to elaborate on why methodology matters for consolidating bioethics' professional standing, to improving its quality, ascertaining its academic and educational importance, and to advancing its trustworthiness and social impact.
Bioethics as bios ethikos.
de Miranda L
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42217122 · Publisher ↗
Drawing on a genealogical analysis of the distinction between zoē (biological life as organic functioning) and bios (a distinctively human way of life shaped by meaning, orientation, and evaluative practice), the article...
Drawing on a genealogical analysis of the distinction between zoē (biological life as organic functioning) and bios (a distinctively human way of life shaped by meaning, orientation, and evaluative practice), the article reconceives bioethics as bios ethikos: ethical reflection on the conditions under which forms of life become meaningful and inhabitable. It introduces the notion of the existential remainder to describe the ethically significant dimensions that persist when institutional deliberation leaves aspects of lived existence under-articulated. The article proposes a renewed structural orientation grounded in the heuristic formula T = PEWS + C. Ethical thinking (T) is distributed across four interrelated domains of lived existence: Person, Earth, Work, and Society (PEWS), while the addition of C designates the creative openness that resists full institutional codification. PEWS-oriented evaluation may be operationalised through more integrative assessment tools, while maintaining vigilance toward the irreducible horizon of existential creativity. Bioethics, thus reconceived, becomes not only the regulation of life, but reflection on whether the governance of life sustains the conditions under which life can remain meaningfully lived.
Advance directives in psychiatry to foster self-determination: a proposal for the Italian scenario.
Ienco G, Porteri C
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42189414 · Publisher ↗
Psychiatric advance directives (PADs) are statements that allow people with mental disorders to express their preferences and wishes in anticipation of future crisis situations in which the patient's decision-making capa...
Psychiatric advance directives (PADs) are statements that allow people with mental disorders to express their preferences and wishes in anticipation of future crisis situations in which the patient's decision-making capacity may be compromised due to their mental disorder. The fundamental value of PADs is the promotion of self-determination and personal autonomy. Although PADs have common elements, they may differ across countries in their content, development process and legal status. Italy does not have a specific regulation regarding PADs; however, we argue that important indications may be drawn from Law No. 219/2017 regulating informed consent, advance directives and shared care planning (SCP). Moving from the international context and empirical evidence regarding barriers and facilitators to the implementation of PADs, the paper provides a key for interpreting SCP in the psychiatric field. The discussion highlights the importance of an interdisciplinary collaboration among bioethics, law, and clinics to improve the quality and consistency of care for people with mental disorders.
Prioritising time for communication in healthcare-a normative analysis.
Björk J
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42183973 · Publisher ↗
Modern healthcare faces a mismatch in terms of supply and demand which makes careful priority setting imperative. The debate on priority setting in healthcare has focussed on pharmaceuticals and other tangible medical in...
Modern healthcare faces a mismatch in terms of supply and demand which makes careful priority setting imperative. The debate on priority setting in healthcare has focussed on pharmaceuticals and other tangible medical interventions. This article instead looks at the time that healthcare professionals have at their disposal. How should healthcare professionals divide their time between tangible medical interventions and communication with patients? What communicative goals should be prioritised? This normative analysis focusses on situations which involve time consuming communication between professionals and patients, which cannot easily be carried out alongside other medical interventions or is itself the main intervention as in psychotherapy. The arguments brought forth are applicable across the healthcare panorama and apply to all healthcare professions. It is argued that there are many different communicative goals which cannot be reduced to one type. Some recommendations are given and defended regarding the priority setting of different communicative goals. For reasons of value coherence and formal equality, all patients should be given a baseline amount of time for communication and time beyond that should be prioritised based on healthcare needs. If accepted, the arguments here highlight that a substantive part of healthcare's (time) resources should be spent on communicative tasks. Indeed, it is time that we take time for communication seriously.
Must egalitarians oppose private healthcare?
Go J
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42183972 · Publisher ↗
A central tenet of health equity is that access to healthcare should be responsive to need rather than patients' socioeconomic status. The idea that ability to pay can enable some people to access faster, better, or more...
A central tenet of health equity is that access to healthcare should be responsive to need rather than patients' socioeconomic status. The idea that ability to pay can enable some people to access faster, better, or more healthcare strikes many egalitarians as clearly objectionable. This paper argues that this view is more complicated than may initially appear. While there are egalitarian reasons to oppose private healthcare, these are often less decisive than they may initially appear and prohibiting private healthcare on egalitarian grounds is likely to run afoul of egalitarianism's liberal commitments. There are several important theoretical hurdles to pass through for a successful egalitarian argument against private healthcare, which this paper aims to highlight.
A foundational perspective of deontology and deontological codes through Paul Ricoeur´s "little ethics".
Ribeiro Ferreira N, Bicho P, Pereira A … +1 more , Nunes R
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42183971 · Publisher ↗
Paul Ricoeur's ethics comprises three distinct moments where it is possible to recognize the influences of Aristotle, Kant, Rawls and an original ricoeurian moment of practical wisdom, where the concept of phronesis is r...
Paul Ricoeur's ethics comprises three distinct moments where it is possible to recognize the influences of Aristotle, Kant, Rawls and an original ricoeurian moment of practical wisdom, where the concept of phronesis is rehabilitated. When reflecting on medical practices, Ricoeur distinguishes, in continuity with his triadic ethics, three levels of judgment: the prudential and ethical level concerning the singularity of the clinical encounter that is essential for establishing a pact of trust, the formal and moral level where deontological codes emerge and the reflexive level where the two previous judgments become legitimated. Our aim with this paper is, through Paul Ricoeur´s ethics, to perspective deontology and deontological codes as a broader set of implicit philosophical and anthropological conceptions, rooted in the clinical encounter, that constitute a theoretical and foundational background for medical rules and norms.
Critical bioethics: a new paradigm for the era of techno-feudalism.
Rubeis G
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42113399 · Publisher ↗
The rise of right-wing political movements supported by key players from big tech is transforming Western societies. This so-called techno-feudalism also implies challenges for bioethics. Racist agendas, intentional misi...
The rise of right-wing political movements supported by key players from big tech is transforming Western societies. This so-called techno-feudalism also implies challenges for bioethics. Racist agendas, intentional misinformation on health topics such as vaccinations, banned words and research topics in public institutions, and the massive funding of questionable biomedical research projects undermine health equity, patient safety, and autonomy. This new sociopolitical situation exacerbates a long-standing issue in healthcare that bioethics hitherto mostly failed to address adequately: societal power asymmetries that shape the roles and relationships of actors in healthcare and biomedical research. Although attempts have been made to reflect upon this issue, e.g. in feminist or postcolonial bioethics, there is no coherent bioethical approach that fundamentally focuses on power asymmetries as a lens of bioethical inquiry. In this article, I therefore introduce critical bioethics, an approach that takes epistemic lenses from critical theory, especially the so-called Frankfurt School. These epistemic lenses-totality and embeddedness, instrumental reason, dialectics and emancipation-allow us to uncover the societal causes for ethical issues in healthcare and biomedical research. Based on this methodological foundation, critical bioethics addresses health inequity as a result of power asymmetries by understanding individuals as fundamentally embedded in a concrete socioeconomic context. Through the lens of instrumental reason, it addresses the connection between disruptive technological innovations and economic interests in terms of commodification and solutionism. By using dialectics as a method to uncover contradictions in the way bioethics understands its principles, it provides an emancipatory perspective for normativity that separates it from affirmative forms of bioethical thinking that simply reproduce the suppressive status quo.
Tool-mediated patienthood: structural plurality in oncology, surgery, and palliative care.
Yan K, Cheng MJ, Kuo YY … +1 more , Wang YA
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42113398 · Publisher ↗
Patient-centered care (PCC) is widely endorsed in contemporary medicine, yet philosophical analyses often approach it through concept-first approaches that define patienthood in advance-typically in terms of autonomy, ho...
Patient-centered care (PCC) is widely endorsed in contemporary medicine, yet philosophical analyses often approach it through concept-first approaches that define patienthood in advance-typically in terms of autonomy, holistic personhood, or rational agency-and then assess clinical practice by reference to these ideals. This paper argues that such an approach can obscure how patienthood is configured in practice. We develop a tool-first approach that treats cognitive, communicative, and material tools as analytically primary for understanding how patients are individuated in clinical reasoning. The argument is grounded in an ethnographic case study conducted in a specialized cancer hospital, focusing on outpatient clinics in medical oncology, colorectal surgery, and palliative care. Rather than treating ethnography as descriptive background, we use it to identify tools-in-use that structure what becomes salient, actionable, and patient-relevant in situated encounters. Across these settings, distinct configurations of tools generate systematically different modes of patienthood. In oncology, staging systems and expectation management configure patients as therapeutic trajectories oriented toward uncertain futures. In surgery, anatomical diagrams and probabilistic framings individuate patients as operative bodies embedded in structured decision spaces. In palliative care, symptom scales, narrative practices, and informational scaffolding configure patients as experiential subjects and epistemic agents. We analyze these differences as instances of structural plurality: patterned, tool-mediated modes of patient individuation that are internally coherent yet irreducible to a single model. On this account, ethical ideals commonly associated with PCC-such as autonomy, shared decision-making, and informed consent-can be understood less as prior normative standards applied to practice, and more as contingent achievements that depend on how tools structure salience, understanding, and possibilities for agency in clinical contexts.
The interrelationship between soul and body: Plato as pioneer of the philosophy of health.
Şimşek N
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42113397 · Publisher ↗
This article argues that Plato was a pioneer of the philosophy of health. It examines the psychosomatic interrelationship between soul (psychē) and body (sōma) primarily in the Charmides and the Timaeus, with selective r...
This article argues that Plato was a pioneer of the philosophy of health. It examines the psychosomatic interrelationship between soul (psychē) and body (sōma) primarily in the Charmides and the Timaeus, with selective references to other dialogues, notably the Republic and Phaedrus. The central claim is that Plato's account of the psychosomatic interrelationship can be adequately understood only when its sociopolitical dimension is taken into account. Although this emphasis is relatively novel in contemporary scholarship, it was commonplace in Plato's milieu to conceive of human beings as members and citizens of the city-state (polis). The article further argues that Plato's approach to psychosomatic phenomena extends beyond states of pain or disease and instead encompasses a holistic vision of health and human flourishing. Accordingly, this study aims to deepen the current understanding of Plato's philosophy of health. Given that the philosophy of health is an emerging interdisciplinary field, the article also seeks to contribute to its conceptual development.
An analysis of Heidegger's concept of angst and death in the Ménière's disease patient.
Kaylie DM
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42090039 · Publisher ↗
The current state of medical practice is going through tremendous and rapid changes. There is an increasing prevalence of burnout among physicians, where they are questioning the value of practicing medicine. There is al...
The current state of medical practice is going through tremendous and rapid changes. There is an increasing prevalence of burnout among physicians, where they are questioning the value of practicing medicine. There is also a growing frustration among patients over reduced access to physicians, feeling rushed at appointments and generally feeling that they are not being heard. These conditions point to a sense among doctors and patients that the doctor-patient relationship is compromised without a viable pathway to repair this vital connection. In this paper, I want to show how applying philosophy, particularly, Martin Heidegger's discussion of angst and death can help to show a way for doctors to have a deeper ontological understanding of their patients' conditions, which can provide a bridge for doctors to re-establish a deep doctor-patient relationship. I will use vertigo as a paradigm condition of a disorder in which doctors have a poor understanding of their patients' condition. This leads to frustrating interactions with patients and breakdown of the doctor-patient relationship. Ménière's disease is a particular type of vertigo disorder which will serve as the foundation for this study which will examine the severe vertigo attacks and chronic disequilibrium these patients experience through the lens of Heidegger's highly technical phenomenological analysis of angst and death. Ménière's disease is an inner ear disorder that causes violent vertigo attacks and hearing loss followed by severe disequilibrium. During the attacks patients are incapacitated by the vertigo, and after the attack subsides, the disequilibrium makes life's normal pursuits meaningless. These patients understand the role of entities in their lives, but entities do not matter to them. Heidegger introduces the concept of for-the-sake-of-which to describe how entities in the world are interrelated with Dasein's purpose of disclosing a world. He provides a sense of for-the-sake-of-which where everyday entities are used to fulfill Dasein's activities which is an existentiell mode of for-the-sake-of-which. His famous example is the hammer in the workshop. He also gives a sense of for-the-sake-of-which where the totality of entities in the world are related to Dasein's ultimate goal of being a discloser of its world. This is Dasein's ultimate for-the-sake-of-which, which is an existential mode. In this paper I show that for-the-sakes-of-which can be thought of as having an existentiell and existential sense, and the existentiell for-the-sakes-of-which can be inauthentic or authentic. I will show how Heidegger's analysis of Dasein can be applied to concrete human existence, using the inner ear disorder, Ménière's Disease as an example. I am suggesting that the disequilibrium from Ménière's disease is a naturalized account of Heideggerian angst and is being-towards-death. I am also suggesting that the Ménière's attack is an experience of existential death because all possibilities and solicitations are impossible. I show that some Ménière's patients are able to take on authentic for-the-sake-of-which by becoming resolute and anticipating death.
Navigating patients' refusal of information in clinical practice - a clinical scenario.
Lindberg J
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42068520 · Publisher ↗
The right of patients to decline information about their health, prognosis, and available treatment options is a salient principle in both domestic law and international declarations and conventions. This right may be co...
The right of patients to decline information about their health, prognosis, and available treatment options is a salient principle in both domestic law and international declarations and conventions. This right may be considered either unnegotiable or subject to certain terms and conditions. While respecting this right may seem straightforward, doing so in clinical practice can be challenging. This article uses a realistic hypothetical scenario to examine the epistemic, moral, and practical challenges that can arise, particularly with patients nearing the end of life. These challenges include how and when to honor the right and its potential conflict with moral values such as self-determination, authenticity, and avoiding harm to oneself and others. The end of life exacerbates these issues because of the irretrievability of decisions and the successive reduction of possible courses of action, as well as potentially changing preferences. These potential conflicts of values deserve further attention and must be considered when deciding whether to honor a patient's wish not to know.
Speaking to no one: ontological dissonance and the double bind of conversational AI.
Brosnahan H, Lipińska I
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 May · PMID 42068519 · Publisher ↗
Recent reports indicate that sustained interaction with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems can, in a small subset of users, contribute to the emergence or stabilisation of delusional experience. Existing...
Recent reports indicate that sustained interaction with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems can, in a small subset of users, contribute to the emergence or stabilisation of delusional experience. Existing accounts typically attribute such cases either to individual vulnerability or to failures of safety engineering. These explanations are incomplete. Drawing on phenomenology, psychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience, this paper argues that the risk arises from the relational and ontological structure of the interaction itself. Conversational AI generates ontological dissonance: a conflict between the appearance of relational presence and the absence of any subject capable of sustaining it. Maintained through a communicative double bind and amplified by attentional asymmetries, this dissonance tends, under conditions of affective vulnerability, to stabilise into a technologically mediated analogue of folie à deux. This account explains why explicit disclaimers often fail to disrupt delusional involvement and clarifies the ethical and clinical implications for the design and use of conversational AI.
A review of contemporary autonomy: ethics, authority, and the fragility of the late modern subject.
Madeira L, Águas C
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Apr · PMID 42008060 · Publisher ↗
This conceptual review examines how autonomy became the dominant moral grammar of late modern Western societies and how its expansion reshapes subjectivity, institutions, public life, and healthcare practice. A genealogy...
This conceptual review examines how autonomy became the dominant moral grammar of late modern Western societies and how its expansion reshapes subjectivity, institutions, public life, and healthcare practice. A genealogy traces autonomy from Enlightenment duty bound self legislation and civic self rule, through liberal non interference, to later forms shaped by expressive individualism, therapeutic culture, and recognition based claims. The paper argues that autonomy's normative achievements remain decisive, yet its cultural absolutization can generate a fragile subject who is highly expressive but insufficiently equipped for sustained responsibility. Five linked pathologies are analysed: autonomy as entitlement and boundary protection, transgression emptied by indeterminate norms, opinion transformed into performative positioning under hyperpluralism and platform surveillance, symbolic authority eroded across education and the professions, and duties devalued within a rights centred moral economy. In response, the paper proposes a reconstructive framework that redefines autonomy as ethical maturity, a formed capability sustained by responsibility, legitimate authority, deliberative practices of opinion, and duty. Particular attention is given to philosophy of medicine, where patient autonomy and professional autonomy illuminate the difference between supported agency and consumerist choice. Methodologically, the article combines genealogical reconstruction, phenomenological interpretation, and a purposive interdisciplinary synthesis of sociology, developmental psychology, philosophy of medicine, moral psychology, and media studies. Implications are sketched for education, healthcare, professional trust, and platform governance, with emphasis on proportional accountability and repair.
Prevention and Irony: The Challenge of Expanding Individual Behavioural Choices.
Wiesing U
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Apr · PMID 42008058 · Publisher ↗
Prevention can make a significant contribution to a longer and healthier life. However, individual behavioural prevention has an influence on lifestyle with regard to how one deals with time. After all, prevention is alw...
Prevention can make a significant contribution to a longer and healthier life. However, individual behavioural prevention has an influence on lifestyle with regard to how one deals with time. After all, prevention is always about making decisions in the present to change anticipated conditions in the future in a beneficial way. It is associated with challenges and an increase in responsibility. Its results are uncertain. The essay asks how one can respond to these characteristics of individual behavioural prevention. One possible response is to adopt an attitude of irony.
Future-oriented chance prioritarianism: survival prospects as the distributive currency.
Żuradzki T
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Apr · PMID 42008059 · Publisher ↗
Debates over distributive justice often agree that the worse-off deserve priority, yet disagree about when and on what basis someone counts as worse-off. Two dimensions structure these disagreements: the temporal unit (l...
Debates over distributive justice often agree that the worse-off deserve priority, yet disagree about when and on what basis someone counts as worse-off. Two dimensions structure these disagreements: the temporal unit (lifetime vs. time-slice assessment) and the currency (welfare, resources, capabilities, or other goods). This article develops a form of time-slice prioritarianism—future-oriented chance prioritarianism—which identifies the worse-off as those with the lowest near-term survival prospects. On this view, survival chances, rather than welfare or life-years, function as the distributive currency to which diminishing marginal weight applies. After situating the view within the landscape of lifetime and time-slice prioritarianisms, I analyze a stylized vaccine-allocation case to show how weighting survival prospects can diverge from utilitarian or standard welfarist prioritarian recommendations, and how the verdict flips when we switch the reference class (whole cohort vs. infected subpopulation). I then address two conceptual challenges: (i) clarifying the factors relevant for assigning normative weight to risk concentration, when it conflicts with aggregate outcomes; and (ii) diagnosing the partition-sensitivity of who counts as worse-off and its interaction with interpretations of probability.
Digital bioethics: exploring an emerging field.
Starke G, Balke WT, Benzinger L … +9 more , Buchholz O, Burghardt M, Meier LJ, Mihailov E, Seidlmayer E, Ranisch R, Ursin F, Vayena E, Salloch S
Med Health Care Philos · 2026 Apr · PMID 41989660 · Publisher ↗
The uptake of social science methods by bioethics significantly expanded its methodological spectrum, raising new theoretical, methodological, and practical questions. Recently, we are witnessing another trend, adding ad...
The uptake of social science methods by bioethics significantly expanded its methodological spectrum, raising new theoretical, methodological, and practical questions. Recently, we are witnessing another trend, adding advanced data science methods to bioethics' toolkit to aid, for example, in online data analysis, support scholarly writing, and inform clinical ethics. This article explores the emerging field of Digital Bioethics across its dimensions by analysing the tangled relationship between topics and methods, highlighting intersections between Digital Bioethics and Bioethics of the Digital, and advocating for a methods-based definition of the field. The use of advanced data science methods within bioethics must be interpreted in the context of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in health care. At the same time, it presents unique opportunities and challenges. Defining, and thus demarcating, Digital Bioethics can create support for the new field but also requires navigating trade-offs. To do so, we take four kindred academic fields as points of comparison (Digital Humanities, Experimental Philosophical Bioethics, computational medicine and digitised biology) to analyse what each of them teaches for critically assessing and further developing Digital Bioethics. The article discusses potential pitfalls and concludes with recommendations on how the field can fully develop its potential to promote bioethical research and argument. Furthermore, the article discusses how a critical reflection of the use of AI methods within bioethics itself will also contribute to the ethical oversight of increasingly AI-driven branches of healthcare.
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