Are ethical issues involving computers different from other ethical situations?
Dr. Brown: Ethical dilemmas (I prefer to use the term dilemmas instead of issues because an “issue” is noncontextual) involving computers can be guided by Symphonology just as any other situation. Dr. Goodman: Some are and some are not. The need for confidentiality was perhaps first articulated by Hippocrates, so if anything is different it is in the ways it can be violated. It might be that the use of computers for clinical decision support and data mining in research raise new ethical issues. Dr. Husted: Not fundamentally, or the term ethics becomes ambiguous.
