Responsibility as an Obstacle to Good Policy: The Case of Lifestyle Related Disease

Abstract

There is a lively debate over who is to blame for the harms arising from unhealthy behaviours, like overeating and excessive drinking. In this paper, I argue that given how demanding the conditions required for moral responsibility actually are, we cannot be highly confident that anyone is ever morally responsible. I also adduce evidence that holding people responsible for their unhealthy behaviours has costs: it undermines public support for the measures that are likely to have the most impact on these harms. I claim that these two facts—the fact that we cannot be highly confident that anyone is morally responsible and the fact that holding people responsible for their unhealthy behaviours has costs—interact. Together they give us a powerful reason for believing, or acting as if we believed, that ordinary people are not in fact responsible for their unhealthy behaviours.

Personality and perceptions about the use of personal responsibility for illness as a health care rationing criteria.

“…Several arguments have been put forward both in favor of and in opposition to the idea of holding individuals responsible for their choices (see Albertsen & Knight, 2015; Brown, 2013; Cappelen & Norheim, 2005; Levy, 2018; Sharkey & Gillam, 2010, for reviews). The arguments in favor of such an assumption mainly focus on the concepts of deserving, wronging people, respect for human autonomy, and individual responsibility (Ekmekçi & Arda, 2015).…”

Unveiling the Impact of Personality in Lifestyle Solidarity: An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Dispositional Optimism and Risk Orientation

“…Several arguments have been put forward in favour of and against the idea of holding individuals responsible for their choices (for reviews, see, e.g. Cappelen & Norheim, 2005;Albertsen & Knight, 2015;Levy, 2018).…”

Embedded Journalists or Empirical Critics? The Nature of The “Gaze” in Bioethics

“…Then there is a group of others that approach their topics from what could be argued is a more critical bioethical perspective including commodification and its impact on healthcare systems (Koplin 2018), the impact birth politics, changing meanings and value conceptions of embryos in the IVF space, and webs of social, bodily, and emotional relations on willingness to donate embryos for research in China (Rosemann and Luo 2018), epistemic arguments regarding responsibility for unhealthy behaviours (Levy 2018), and epistemic injustice and symbolic power in the context of patient complaints (O'Donovan and Madden 2018).…”