Compassionate AI Ethics for Sustainable Healthcare

A focus on compassion as a guiding principle can bolster the sustainability of healthcare in various senses. For example, ecologically, compassion encourages us to broaden the circle of moral concern to include the more-than-human, recognizing how human thriving is interdependent with ecological and environmental health and sustainability. Psychologically, compassion works as an antidote to burnout and exhaustion, and helps healthcare providers to sustain their work while maintaining their own well-being. Pragmatically, compassion can be a compelling cross-cultural topic for both analysis and reconfiguration, exploring how cultural values are woven into norms of compassion and care and identifying where better practices could emerge going forward. Compassion is a focus of study in psychology and neuroscience with additional investigations examining compassion in clinical practices. Compassion has a variety of definitions, and we have found the classic psychological and philosophical lens of cognitive, affective, and motivational dimensions helpful in the context of AI. We also expand the well-recognized contributions of Buddhism to the study of compassion by drawing upon world religions and philosophical contributions. Others identify five elements of compassion: (a) recognizing suffering; (b) understanding the universality of suffering in human existence; (c) feeling for the person in distress; (d) tolerating uncomfortable feelings; and (e) motivation to act or acting to alleviate suffering, and some suggest a sixth element in the context of AI healthcare technology—attention to the effect and outcomes of the response. We expand upon this research and consider AI applications and their ethical implications for palliative care, voice assistants in eldercare, robot caregiving, mindfulness, and global health.