Ebubekir Muhammed Deniz

The rapid digitalization of healthcare—from telemedicine and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven diagnostics to wearable biosensors—has profoundly disrupted traditional norms of patient confidentiality. Classical privacy theories, anchored in physical co-presence and individual control, struggle to address the ethical challenges posed by opaque, persistent, and infrastructural data exposures in digital clinical environments. This study employs a theoretical-conceptual methodology to develop a multidimensional privacy framework responsive to the spatial and technological complexities of the digital clinic. Drawing from Edward T. Hall’s proxemics theory and the concept of cyberspace, we reinterpret interpersonal spatial zones (intimate, personal, social, public) in cyberspace. We introduce “cyberspatial privacy” as a transversal dimension that modulates privacy expectations across physical and digital layers. A hypothetical case—“Patient X,” a woman undergoing hybrid care—is used to demonstrate the framework’s practical utility in ethical analysis. The proposed framework reconceptualizes privacy as a dynamic continuum structured by both spatial proximity and digital mediation. By mapping risks across four proxemic zones and overlaying a cyberspatial dimension, the model reveals how privacy breaches differ not only in kind but in normative weight. For instance, biometric data collected by wearables (intimate zone) carries higher ethical risk than metadata exposed via public interfaces. The case of Patient X illustrates how classical theories fail to capture this gradient, while the new model enables zone-sensitive assessments of vulnerability, exposure, and trust. This framework advances the ethical understanding of privacy in digitally mediated healthcare by offering a granular, relational, and context-aware approach. It supports clinicians, designers, and policymakers in tailoring privacy safeguards to the spatial and digital contours of care. By reframing privacy as a condition of relational co-presence rather than isolated consent, this model promotes ethically robust design and governance in the era of cyber-augmented medicine.

Three different views have been put forward on the contemporary debate of laws of nature. The first of these is the regularity theory, which argues that the laws of nature do not imply any necessity and they are merely regularities that we observe. The second one, nomic necessity theory, by criticizing regularity theory defends that there is a nomic necessity in the laws of nature, and they have an ontological basis beyond regularity, and even so, the laws of nature are contingent. Third and the last view is dispositional essentialism. It defends that the necessity we observe in the laws of nature is based on essential dispositional properties of objects. In this study, we will describe these theories and discuss their arguments and weaknesses. Accordingly, we will state that; regularity theory has difficulties in distinguishing accidents from laws, and nomic necessity theory has problems in establishing the necessity of laws of nature and revealing the nature of particular-universal relation. Eventually, we will state that dispositional essentialism is still the strongest position among the three views and the minkish-finkish and antidote statuses -which are presented as counterexamples of dispositional essentialism- arise from categorical thinking and this leads to misinterpretation of dispositional essentialism. We will demonstrate that these counter-examples, ipso facto, affirm the basic notion of dispositions as defended by dispositional essentialism.