Embedded Ethics in Practice: A Toolbox for Integrating the Analysis of Ethical and Social Issues into Healthcare AI Research.

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into critical domains such as healthcare holds immense promise. Nevertheless, significant challenges must be addressed to avoid harm, promote the well-being of individuals and societies, and ensure ethically sound and socially just technology development. Innovative approaches like Embedded Ethics, which refers to integrating ethics and social science into technology development based on interdisciplinary collaboration, are emerging to address issues of bias, transparency, misrepresentation, and more.

Memories without Survival: Personal Identity and the Ascending Reticular Activating System.

Lockean views of personal identity maintain that we are essentially persons who persist diachronically by virtue of being psychologically continuous with our former selves. In this article, I present a novel objection to this variant of psychological accounts, which is based on neurophysiological characteristics of the brain. While the mental states that constitute said psychological continuity reside in the cerebral hemispheres, so that for the former to persist only the upper brain must remain intact, being conscious additionally requires that a structure originating in the brainstem-the ascending reticular activating system-be functional.

Preparing for the Worst-Case Scenario in a Pandemic: Intensivists Simulate Prioritization and Triage of Scarce ICU Resources.

Objectives: Simulation and evaluation of a prioritization protocol at a German university hospital using a convergent parallel mixed methods design.

Design: Prospective single-center cohort study with a quantitative analysis of ICU patients and qualitative content analysis of two focus groups with intensivists.

Setting: Five ICUs of internal medicine and anesthesiology at a German university hospital.

Systemising triage: COVID-19 guidelines and their underlying theories of distributive justice.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been overwhelming public health-care systems around the world. With demand exceeding the availability of medical resources in several regions, hospitals have been forced to invoke triage. To ensure that this difficult task proceeds in a fair and organised manner, governments scrambled experts to draft triage guidelines under enormous time pressure.

Algorithms for Ethical Decision-Making in the Clinic: A Proof of Concept.

Machine intelligence already helps medical staff with a number of tasks. Ethical decision-making, however, has not been handed over to computers. In this proof-of-concept study, we show how an algorithm based on Beauchamp and Childress' prima-facie principles could be employed to advise on a range of moral dilemma situations that occur in medical institutions.

Are the irreversibly comatose still here? The destruction of brains and the persistence of persons.

When an individual is comatose while parts of her brain remain functional, the question arises as to whether any mental characteristics are still associated with this brain, that is, whether the person still exists. Settling this uncertainty requires that one becomes clear about two issues: the type of functional loss that is associated with the respective profile of brain damage and the persistence conditions of persons. Medical case studies can answer the former question, but they are not concerned with the latter.