Prof. Dr. Karola Kreitmair

University of Wisconsin
Bioethics / Philosophy

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
February 2023 – June 2023

Last Update: 31.08.2023

Curriculum Vitae

Karola Kreitmair is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is the Co-Chair of the UW Hospital and Clinics Ethics Committee and the Co-Director of the Path of Distinction in Bioethics. Prof. Kreitmair is a member of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors and a member of the board of directors of the International Neuroethics Society. She is also co-editor for the Cambridge University Press Elements Series in Bioethics and Neuroethics. Prof. Kreitmair received the 2024 Vilas Award for her work on the moral status of human brain surrogates and a 2025 Wisconsin Partnership Program Collaborative Health Sciences Grant to work on ethical considerations around ambient AI in healthcare. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Brown University, her master’s degree in linguistics from Edinburgh University, and her doctorate in philosophy from Stanford University. Prior to her current position, Prof. Kreitmair served as clinical ethics fellow at Stanford University. She has a broad range of interests, including clinical ethics, philosophy, neuroethics, and playwriting. She has published widely on philosophical, clinical ethics, and neuroethical questions in journals such as the American Journal of Bioethics, Bioethics, the Journal of Medical Ethics, Nature Biotechnology, Hastings Center Report, and the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. Recent scholarship has included work on AI in healthcare, consciousness and moral status, ethical issues around organ transplantation, and ethical issues arising from direct-to-consumer digital behavioral technology.

Selected Publications

Kreitmair, K. (2025) “The Fundamental Fallacy of “Empathic AI””, Hastings Center Report, 55 (3), 36-44.
Kreitmair, K. (2025) “On the Ethical Permissibility of In Situ Reperfusion in Cardiac Transplantation after the Declaration of Circulatory Death”, Journal of Medical Ethics, 51(5).
Kreitmair, K. (2024) “Mobile Health Technology and Empowerment”, Bioethics, 38(6), [481-490].
(“Wiley Top-Cited Article”)
Kreitmair, K. (2023) “Consciousness and the Ethics of Human Brain Organoid Research”, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 34(4), 518-528.
Kreitmair, K. (2019) “Dimensions of Ethical Direct-to-Consumer Neurotechnologies”, American Journal of Bioethics – Neuroscience, 10 (4), 152-166.

FRIAS Project

Ethical and Philosophical Considerations around Offloading Clinical Encounters from Human Clinicians onto AI Chatbots

My proposed project builds on my existing work on the ethics of ‘empathic AI’ in the clinic setting. This prior work was done, in part, during my Alumna Fellowship in 2025. In it, I show that the Hegelian notion of existential recognition is ethically required for, at minimum, high-stakes clinician-patient encounters. I also argue that patients have a justified expectation of receiving this kind of recognition in encounters, and that AI chatbots are incapable of providing this recognition. Consequently, I maintain that the use of AI chatbots in medicine is ethically problematic. In my proposed project, I aim to develop a positive account of how chatbots may be utilized in clinical encounters. Not all clinical encounters generate the same degree of ethical requirement. Therefore, I will stratify types of clinical encounters, ranging from clinically peripheral ones, such as scheduling conversations, to high stakes encounters, such as goals-of-care conversations. I then provide an analysis of the relevant ethical requirements for each type of encounter. One of the main phenomena cited as a driver for the offloading of clinical encounters on AI chatbots is clinician burn out and moral distress. Consequently, it is important that an ethics of offloading addresses how this offloading interacts with the phenomena of clinician burnout and moral distress. AI chatbots do not have a visceral moral distress response to ethically problematic situations in the way human clinicians do. While moral distress in clinicians is naturally cast in a negative light, I intend to argue that it is a crucial data point that allows for ethical progress to be made. Without moral distress, we lose a valuable guide as to where ethical challenges lie. Consequently, I plan to argue that while it is appropriate to offload some work onto AI chatbots, it is vital that the existentially and morally relevant work remain with humans. (Of course, other avenues for addressing moral distress must be found.)