Plurality of values in mHealth: Conventions and ethical dilemmas

The pragmatic economics of conventions offers new insights into mHealth, providing a deeper understanding of current ethical problems.

By conducting a pragmatic analysis of digitisation and mHealth, we want to introduce a new fundamental perspective to shed light on the moral and ethical questions arising from mHealth.

As a general social science theory, the economics of conventions (EC) offers consistent pragmatic concepts for the sociological analysis of social institutions, social cognition, social actions, social interactions and coordination processes, social constructions of facts, and social entities and their qualities. EC conceives of conventions as deeper and more general logics of coordination, interpretation and evaluation that actors apply in situations (Diaz-Bone 2018). From this perspective, actions are always the result of a process (Eymard-Duvernay et al. 2011) and are characterised by coordination between individuals and their social and material environments (Diaz-Bone 2018). Therefore, and in addition to the actors, conventions (Boltanski & Thévenot 2007), forms and objects (Thévenot 1984, 2001) become relevant by partly defining the meaning and social relevance of health. Adopting this theoretical perspective, we focus on health as a category that has to be mobilised in the first place (Foucault 1973; Ewald 1993) and has to be seen as a plural social institution (Collyer 2015; Batifoulier, Da Silva & Domin 2018; Da Silva 2018) that is enforced by ongoing digital transformations (Ruckenstein & Dow Schüll, 2017; Sharon 2018). Related to the EC perspective, we assume that the implementation of mHealth is guided by a plurality of logics, which causes – at least partially – (ethical) conflicts among them.