Regulating Automated Healthcare and Research Technologies: First Do No Harm (to the Commons)

Pages: 266-274

DOI: 10.1017/9781108620024.033

Abstract:

New technologies, techniques, and tests in healthcare, offering better prevention, or better diagnosis and treatment, are not manna from heaven. Yet, how are the interests in pushing forward with research into potentially beneficial health technologies to be reconciled with the heterogeneous interests of the concerned who seek to push back against them? A stock answer to this question is that regulators should seek an accommodation or a balance of interests that is broadly ‘acceptable’. The central purpose of this chapter is to suggest that this balancing model needs to be located within a bigger picture of lexically ordered regulatory responsibilities. The paramount responsibility of regulators is to act in ways that protect and maintain the conditions that are fundamental to human social existence. A secondary responsibility is to protect and respect the values that constitute a group as the particular kind of community that it is. Only then do we get to a third set of responsibilities that demand that regulators seek out reasonable and acceptable balances of conflicting legitimate interests.

Source: Scopus