Paper ID: 2504.01043 • Published Mar 31, 2025
Are clinicians ethically obligated to disclose their use of medical machine learning systems to patients?
Joshua Hatherley
TL;DR
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It is commonly accepted that clinicians are ethically obligated to disclose
their use of medical machine learning systems to patients, and that failure to
do so would amount to a moral fault for which clinicians ought to be held
accountable. Call this "the disclosure thesis." Four main arguments have been,
or could be, given to support the disclosure thesis in the ethics literature:
the risk-based argument, the rights-based argument, the materiality argument,
and the autonomy argument. In this article, I argue that each of these four
arguments are unconvincing, and therefore, that the disclosure thesis ought to
be rejected. I suggest that mandating disclosure may also even risk harming
patients by providing stakeholders with a way to avoid accountability for harm
that results from improper applications or uses of these systems.