Is ChatGPT a good moral interlocutor for teaching bioethics? A case analysis

Some medical school educators have suggested that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can be used by students an autodidactic tool to generate workups of bioethics cases, which can enhance their ethics education. However, the framework of ChatGPT as a sophisticated search engine belies its designed function to be a conversationalist program, which raises concerns about its capacity to be a good moral interlocutor. Using a real-life ethics case, the quality of ChatGPT-3.5’s response to a hospital ethics committee’s deliberation over the case is analyzed to identify a pattern of flaws in ChatGPT’s ethical approach. The analysis reveals several appealing aspects of ChatGPT’s rapid and eloquent answering capabilities that conform well to medical educational culture’s emphasis on didactic efficiency in using third-party resources. However, a closer examination of ChatGPT’s answers reveals bias, inconsistency, and lack of moral curiosity, which can lead students to unknowingly develop unhealthy habits in ethical reasoning and become ill-equipped to approach real-life ethical dilemmas. Students should instead be exposed to ethical deliberations with peers, mentors and ethics committees to develop practicable skills in clarifying values and synthesizing diverse perspectives when approaching ethics cases.