by C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D

Professor and Author of Bioethics and Medicine: A Short Companion

Apparently, AI therapy chatbots do not know that the first principle of medical ethics is primum non nocere (first, do no harm). Actually, they don’t know anything. Chatbots are not knowing beings; they are computational large language models (LLMs) that scrape data, predict how to respond to prompts, and spit out sometimes accurate and sometimes completely erroneous information (so-called hallucinations). Properly speaking, they are neither artificial nor intelligent. But many people, even in clinical medicine, seem to want to give AI the benefit of the doubt.

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Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D.

Professor of Biology Emerita

Trinity International University

Recently, the Parliament of Scotland (building pictured above) displayed an uncommon act of “Scotch courage”, which had everything to do with moral fortitude and nothing to do with whiskey.  On 17 March 2026, following months of debate, the Scottish Parliament voted independently from the rest of the United Kingdom to reject a bill that would allow medical assistance in dying to terminally ill adults.  Apparently, this bill, when originally proposed over two ...read more