Philosophical Ethics and the Future of Health

Module Overview

This module teaches students about ethical issues in the digital health and data-heavy healthcare. The first day introduces students to philosophy as a discipline–what kinds of questions philosophers ask, what kinds of tools they use–before offering a comprehensive overview of ethical challenges for the future of health and healthcare. The second week focuses on privacy, big data, and AI as particular sites of these issues, demonstrating how ethics can and should inform the development of these developing fields in the present and future.

Week 1, Day 1: Ethics: Methods and Tools

• Watch Introduction to the unit
• Watch What is Philosophy?
• Watch Philosophical Method

Week 1, Day 2:  Ethical Challenges for the Futures of Health: Overview

• Watch “AI Healthcare Overview”
• Zittraine, “The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking”
• Morley, et al., “The Debate on the Ethics of AI in Health Care”

Week 2, Day 1:Ethics Deep Dive: Privacy and Big Data Analytics

• Watch “Privacy Deep Dive”
• Veliz, “Medical Privacy and Big Data: A Further Reason in Favour of Public Universal Healthcare Coverage”
• Barocas and Nissenbaum, “Big Data’s End Run Around Privacy Protections”

Week 2, Day 2: AI Assistive Technology

• Watch “AI Assistive Technology“
• Coeckelbergh, Mark. “Health care, capabilities, and AI assistive technologies.” Ethical theory and moral practice 13, no. 2 (2010): 181-190.

Videos

• The first video offers an introduction to the module.
• The second video introduces students to the discipline of philosophy.
• The third video introduces students to the philosophical method–the ways philosophers approach questions and what tools they use to answer them.
• The fourth video outlines the kinds of ethical questions and problems raised by the uses of AI in healthcare.
• The fifth video takes an in-depth look at the privacy issues raised by technological innovation in healthcare.
• The sixth video discusses AI and assistive technology.

Readings

Zittraine and Morley provide an overview of potential ethical problems and losses involved in the automation of healthcare research and treatment. Veliz and Barocas and Nissenbaum explore the specific ethical issues raised by the uses of Big Data in healthcare focusing in particular on the troubling gaps in privacy protections the datafication of healthcare introduces. Veliz concludes that privatization of healthcare is (and public-private partnerships are) the driver of some of these central ethical concerns. Coeckelbergh suggests that AI prompts new questions about what constitutes good care. He warns that being too critical of AI’s introduction will also trouble current “low-tech health care practices.”

All readings demonstrate for students how ethics experts approach the new problems raised by the expanding uses of technology in healthcare.

• Barocas, Solon, and Helen Nissenbaum. “Big data’s end run around anonymity and consent.” Privacy, big data, and the public good: Frameworks for engagement 1 (2014): 44-75.
• Coeckelbergh, Mark. “Health care, capabilities, and AI assistive technologies.” Ethical theory and moral practice 13, no. 2 (2010): 181-190.
• Morley, Jessica, Caio Machado, Christopher Burr, Josh Cowls, Mariarosaria Taddeo, and Luciano Floridi. “The debate on the ethics of AI in health care: a reconstruction and critical review.” Available at SSRN 3486518 (2019).
• Véliz, Carissa. “Medical privacy and big data: A further reason in favour of public universal healthcare coverage.” Philosophical Foundations of Medical Law (2019).
• Zittrain, Jonathan. “The hidden costs of automated thinking.” The New Yorker (2019). Also available online here.