Care beyond calculation: Artificial intelligence and the moral meaning of care in healthcare

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is progressively embedded in healthcare practices, transforming diagnosis, clinical decision‑making, patient monitoring, and institutional resource allocation. Ethical analyses of AI in healthcare have largely focused on technical issues such as safety, bias, transparency, and accountability [1,2]. While indispensable, these analyses often presuppose a reductive view of healthcare as a technical enterprise focused primarily on efficiency and measurable outcomes. This article advances a purely theoretical ethical analysis centered on care as a moral, relational, and interpretive practice. Drawing on the ethics of care, personalist ethics, virtue ethics, and the philosophy of technology, it argues that care cannot be reduced to calculation or optimization. The article critically examines whether AI can meaningfully participate in care, identifies ethical tensions between automation and moral attentiveness, and proposes normative limits for AI use in healthcare grounded in human dignity, relational responsibility, and moral agency.