Dr Katrina Hutchison1
1Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Katrina Hutchison is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University. Her research focuses on topics in feminist epistemology, moral psychology, and bioethics and often incorporates empirical methods alongside traditional philosophy. Her recent work looks at issues of epistemic injustice and gender bias in careers, and on the ethical challenges associated with surgical innovation and devices. Much of her research is applied. She often works with interdisciplinary collaborators, especially surgeons, health researchers and health law scholars.
Abstract:
This talk explores the conceptual boundaries of the notion of a ‘surgical robot’, describing a variety of technologies ranging from those that are clearly surgical robots (such as the Intuitive Da Vinci and Medtronic Hugo) to technologies that are more difficult to classify such as micro-bots deployed to collect biopsies. If we are to develop useful ethical frameworks for surgical robots, these frameworks will need to apply across these different technologies. In this talk I present original mapping of the ethical issues associated with surgical robots. This ethical analysis informs an original algorithm that can be used by stakeholders to determine the ethical challenges associated with a particular robot in their local context. I reflect on how this algorithm could be deployed, and its potential to support ethical practice in various contexts (e.g. clinical use of surgical robots, or development of new robotic technologies by biomedical engineers). I finish the talk by discussing the distinctiveness of surgical robots. I argue that empirical testing is needed to discover whether an algorithm focused on ethics of surgical robots is useful, or whether it is better to approach these ethical issues via a more general framework.