Article: E-health meets technoethical issues

Michel PUECH

Paris-Sorbonne

Abstract

E-health refers to health actors’ intensive use of computer networking. It poses specific ethical questions, at the intersection between technoethics and medical ethics. Here, I will provide an interpretation from the point of view of technoethics of the current hurdles preventing the implementation of e-health. I argue that this implementation is inspired by a “digitally closed” system of values, which is succinctly defined in the article. This technoethical option is consistent with the technocracy option in the public administration of health. This account of the hurdles shows that e-health could be implemented with a better acceptance by harnessing the opposite system of values, here defined as “digitally open”, which is strikingly consistent with the ethics of autonomy.