  An appropriate ethical framework around the use of Artificial Intelligence
(AI) in healthcare has become a key desirable with the increasingly widespread
deployment of this technology. Advances in AI hold the promise of improving the
precision of outcome prediction at the level of the individual. However, the
addition of these technologies to patient-clinician interactions, as with any
complex human interaction, has potential pitfalls. While physicians have always
had to carefully consider the ethical background and implications of their
actions, detailed deliberations around fast-moving technological progress may
not have kept up. We use a common but key challenge in healthcare interactions,
the disclosure of bad news (likely imminent death), to illustrate how the
philosophical framework of the 'Felicific Calculus' developed in the 18th
century by Jeremy Bentham, may have a timely quasi-quantitative application in
the age of AI. We show how this ethical algorithm can be used to assess, across
seven mutually exclusive and exhaustive domains, whether an AI-supported action
can be morally justified.
