Emily Slome

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated into healthcare decision-making, concerns arise regarding deference to AI systems. While existing discussions highlight issues such as the opacity of AI outputs and responsibility gaps, this paper introduces a new concern: the impact of deference to AI on decision ownership among healthcare professionals. I argue that reliance on AI can lead to a diminished sense of ownership over decisions based on AI-generated outputs. This consequence is problematic, as a strong sense of decision ownership is essential for ensuring high quality patient care. I recommend that this concern be taken into consideration when implementing the use of AI in healthcare contexts. To address the concern, training and policies should discourage healthcare professionals from simply deferring to AI. Instead, we should encourage such professionals to treat AI as merely an assistive tool, which complements rather than replaces their expertise. Whenever there is any doubt or lack of understanding associated with an AI output, further measures must be taken before a decision is made.

In this paper, we discuss a concern about moral testimony in the context of clinical ethics consultation. We argue that deference to moral testimony complicates the notion of moral answerability. By moral answerability, we mean roughly the notion of being the appropriate target for demands for moral justification regarding a belief or action and being eligible for a variety of moral responses. In cases of deference to moral testimony, it is unclear whether it is the testifier or the deferring agent who is morally answerable for the testimony-based belief and any requisite action performed on the basis of said belief. We discuss the implications of this idea for the practice of clinical ethics consultation. We explore whether the ethicist or the consultee is answerable for beliefs formed and actions performed as outcomes of the consultation. We outline the various considerations for holding each party answerable and ultimately propose a joint answerability account according to which both the ethicist and the consultee are answerable for moral responses, but to different degrees depending on the context.

In the article ‘Moral Testimony: A Re-Conceived Understanding Explanation’, Callahan argues that her re-conceived view of understanding can explain the issue with deference to moral testimony better than the more traditional understanding-based accounts. In this paper, I argue that Callahan fails to give a more successful explanation of the problem with moral testimony for two reasons. First, I argue that Callahan fails to adequately prove her claim that deference to testimony disincentivizes her re-conceived understanding. Second, I take issue with Callahan's claim that this re-conceived understanding is distinctly important in the moral domain. I also offer a more promising route for Callahan to take in explaining the problem with moral testimony.

In this paper, I argue that the success of evolutionary debunking arguments hinges on what theory of epistemic justification one endorses. More specifically, I argue that what it takes to satisfactorily respond to evolutionary debunking arguments depends on what view of epistemic justification one is operating under and that a thorough analysis of any line of response to evolutionary debunking arguments must take into account whether there is a specific view of justification motivating the response or looming in the background. In particular, I argue that pace Andrew del Rio’s claim in the article “Why Undermining Evolutionary Debunkers is Not Enough,” merely undermining the empirical claim can in fact be a successful line of response to debunkers if one endorses a particular version of doxastic conservatism. I also argue that examining how satisfying a response to an evolutionary debunking argument seems to us and considering what theory of justification is looming in the background of the response can shed light on the plausibility of certain theories of epistemic justification.