DIGITAL BIOETHICS AS DIGITAL HEALTH ETHICS

Abstract

Personalized medicine development includes an active use of digital products and tools for diagnosing, treating and monitoring health. This phenomenon generates such digital-related concepts as “digital health,” “Digital Medicine,” “Digital Therapeutics,” or “Digital Wellness.” Digital health includes tele- and algorithmic medicine, e-health, and mobile health. Bioethics represents a research area and social institution. Bioethics should increase the ethical support for bioethical choice subjects in the context of the social practices’ transformation in personal and public health. The article highlights the features of the subject and methodology interpretation; indicates the prospects for the development of digital bioethics. This article describes digital bioethics as digital health ethics. This interpretation differs from the understanding of digital bioethics as a field of using digital methods of empirical research. The research subject is social relations regarding confidentiality, truthfulness, trust, justice, and accountability. The entire social system is involved in the bioethical analysis, since the ethical issues of digital health are considered in a wide context of social dynamics, economic interactions, and political governance. Thus, digital bioethics is close to biopolitics. Digital bioethics uses several approaches. It refers to certain ethical theories to evaluate the results of the digital health technologies’ use. It considers different digital health-related situations through bioethical principles. It also describes the ethical harm in the digital technologies’ creation and integration in healthcare. Ethical issues are related to the social mechanisms in which they are created and used. The moral dilemmas’ resolution is seen as power relations’ manifestation. Digital bioethics analyzes the policy of various healthcare actors, the dependence of digital health on communication infrastructure and economic influence. Digital bioethics proposes to address treatment depersonalization and anonymization which represent the consequences of health and disease datafication. Digital bioethics complements empirical description of digital health practices and public health policies. On the one hand, digital bioethics is a field of digital methods’ application for studying bioethical discourse in the digital space. Thus, digital bioethics digitizes analog methods and additionally develops digital analysis methods. On the other hand, digital bioethics is defined as digital health ethics, and does not pay attention to the development of its own research methods. These two interpretations are interconnected. According to digital bioethics, ethically acceptable futures are the basis for management decisions in healthcare. This fact enhances a comprehensive transdisciplinary description of digital ethical foundations and ethical regulation mechanisms. Bioethics, algoretics, artificial intelligence ethics, engineering ethics, business ethics, political ethics, and other manifestations of applied ethics can be combined into a unique research complex and form a common mechanism for social and humanitarian innovations’ expertise. Prospects for the digital bioethics’ development should be comprehended through the empirical and normative traditions, the correlation of analog and digital discourses of bioethics, as well as the peculiarities of the bioethical institutions’ functioning in the digital space