Abstract

One of the most significant ethical concerns in the context of the use of AI in healthcare is the patient’s autonomy and informed consent. The problem of autonomy emerges from the concern that black box AI could endanger patient autonomy because its use in healthcare is incompatible with informed consent practice in healthcare. In this paper, I argue that AI’s opaque workings can be reconciled with morally justified healthcare practices through a coherent ethical framework based on consequentialism, and AI can preserve the autonomy of patients by guaranteeing transparency, disclosure and probabilistic assessment during the treatment process. Further, I will contend that although AI’s decision-making process remains opaque in terms of the internal workings of its algorithms, this lack of transparency does not necessarily undermine the ethical principle of informed consent if we employ “The rule of transparency and probabilistic assessment” grounded on a consequentialist framework.