Law, religion and technology

the new “truth” on patient’s body and the ethical ambivalence of the digital clinical gaze*

Abstract

The implementation of new technologies is usually perceived as a vector for stimulating significant changes to the status quo, allowing individuals to operate more quickly and efficiently. Technological innovation has passed from a response to one
or more perceived needs, to be part of the cultural identity of contemporary industrialised societies. Hence, it cannot only be seen as a social process, but it also refers to a peculiar “state of mind”, which encompasses a huge range of positive feelings lying between the evaluation of the present and expectations of the future. This paper briefly retraces the history of technological innovation in healthcare, highlighting the bonds it holds with religion and spirituality on one side, and with law and normativity on the other. In doing so, it aims to show that the informatisation of medical practice and the digitalisation of healthcare delivery rest on an “ethical ambivalence” as they relegate some sources of knowledge to the background – those linked to the sensory perception of the doctor and the patient, as well as those deriving from the relational dynamics – while they create new forms of knowledge resulting from complex assemblages between material and virtual factors that unavoidably reshape medical practice and medical epistemology itself.