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Hammer or Measuring Tape? Artificial Intelligence and Justice in Healthcare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2023

Jan-Hendrik Heinrichs Open the ORCID record for Jan-Hendrik Heinrichs [Opens in a new window]
Jan-Hendrik Heinrichs*
Affiliation:
Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine 7: Brain and Behaviour, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich, Germany; Institute of Philosophy, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
*
Email: j.heinrichs@fz-juelich.de
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Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool for several healthcare tasks. AI tools are suited to optimize predictive models in medicine. Ethical debates about AI’s extension of the predictive power of medical models suggest a need to adapt core principles of medical ethics. This article demonstrates that a popular interpretation of the principle of justice in healthcare needs amendment given the effect of AI on decision-making. The procedural approach to justice, exemplified with Norman Daniels and James Sabin’s accountability for reasonableness conception, needs amendment because, as research into algorithmic fairness shows, it is insufficiently sensitive to differential effects of seemingly just principles on different groups of people. The same line of research generates methods to quantify differential effects and make them amenable for correction. Thus, what is needed to improve the principle of justice is a combination of procedures for selecting just criteria and principles and the use of algorithmic tools to measure the real impact these criteria and principles have. In this article, the author shows that algorithmic tools do not merely raise issues of justice but can also be used in their mitigation by informing us about the real effects certain distributional principles and criteria would create.

Keywords

Artificial intelligencejusticealgorithmic fairnessaccountability for reasonablenessalgorithmic epistemic tools
Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , First View , pp. 1 - 12
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

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