MedEthEx: Toward a Medical Ethics Advisor

As part of a larger Machine Ethics Project, we are developing an ethical advisor that provides guidance to health care workers faced with ethical dilemmas. MedEthEx is an implementation of Beauchamp’s and Childress’ Principles of Biomedical Ethics that harnesses machine learning techniques to abstract decision principles from cases in a particular type of dilemma with conflicting prima facie duties and uses these principles to determine the correct course of action in similar and new cases. We believe that accomplishing this will be a useful first step towards creating machines that can interact with those in need of health care, including the elderly, in a way that is sensitive to ethical issues that may arise.