Presenters
Michiel De Proost
Kind of session / presentation

Moral repair after disruption: rethinking sustainability and innovation in medical ethics

Innovations that have been regarded as disruptive in the medical realm, such as mHealth applications, or machine learning, are perceived as part of a positive shift towards a more preventive, participatory and affordable healthcare model. More recently, several contributions have started exploring the ecological impacts of disruptive innovations in healthcare. New principles have been developed concerning sustainable development and use of technology in health care. However, this literature often takes the route of ideal theory and does not address the possible aftermath of environmental injustices, such as the destruction or degradation of community relationships. In this article we introduce the concept of “moral repair” as a useful hermeneutical tool for understanding and enacting meaningful responses to the injustices of disruptive innovation in healthcare and climate change. Moral repair can be understood as the process of moral calibration amongst moral relationships in response to situations of damage or loss, as it explicitly aims to address harm to those who have been wronged. We argue that such a reparative model of justice can provide some needed redirection and focus on non-ideal moral issues comparatively neglected in the disruptive innovation debate in medical ethics today. If we consider, for instance, the infrastructure on which these applications depend, there are other types of harm worth mentioning, such as electronic waste production or the use of scarce natural resources. Taking those examples as our starting point draws attention to how existing practices of innovation damage conditions of justice, which call for a process of moral repair.