Ethical Risks in Medical Artificial Intelligence and the Normative Function of Medical Humanities: A Study of AI and Emerging Medical Technologies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.71204/sprd8n54Keywords:
Medical Artificial Intelligence, Ethical Risk, Medical Humanities, Normative Framework, Emerging Medical TechnologiesAbstract
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and emerging digital technologies in medicine has fundamentally reshaped clinical decision-making, healthcare governance, and biomedical knowledge production. While medical artificial intelligence promises enhanced efficiency, diagnostic accuracy, and system optimization, it simultaneously generates complex ethical risks that challenge traditional medical norms and regulatory approaches. Existing discussions of medical AI ethics often prioritize technical safeguards, algorithmic transparency, or regulatory compliance, yet they frequently underestimate the need for deeper normative reflection on responsibility, moral agency, and the meaning of care. This paper argues that medical humanities plays an indispensable normative role in identifying, interpreting, and addressing the ethical risks embedded in medical AI applications. Focusing explicitly on artificial intelligence and frontier medical technologies, the study analyzes the structural sources of ethical risk in algorithm-driven medicine and examines how medical humanities contributes to ethical norm construction beyond procedural governance. By situating medical AI within humanistic concerns such as moral responsibility, interpretive judgment, and human dignity, the paper demonstrates that medical humanities is essential for ethically robust and socially legitimate AI-enabled healthcare.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Liwei Liu (Author)
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