This volume bridges contemporary philosophical conceptions of risk and responsibility and offers an extensive examination of the topic. It shows that risk and responsibility combine in ways that give rise to new philosophical questions and problems. Philosophical interest in the relationship between risk and responsibility continues to rise, due in no small part due to environmental crises, emerging technologies, legal developments, and new medical advances. Despite such interest, scholars are just now working out how to conceive of the links between (...) risk and responsibility, the implications that risks may have to conceptions of responsibility (and vice versa), as well as how such theorizing might play out in applied cases. With contributions from leading scholars, this volume brings together new work examining the interplay between risk and responsibility, exploring its varied philosophical aspects and applications to contemporary issues in law, bioethics, technology, and environmental ethics. Risk and Responsibility in Context will be of interest to philosophers working in ethics, bioethics, philosophy of law, and philosophy of technology, as well as scholars and practitioners in law, health and science management, public policy, and environmental studies. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the extent to which health promoting wearable technologies can provide people with greater autonomy over their health. These devices are frequently presented as a means of expanding the possibilities people have for making healthier decisions and living healthier lives. We accept that by collecting, monitoring, analysing and displaying biomedical data, and by helping to underpin motivation, wearable technologies can support autonomy over health. However, we argue that their contribution in this regard is limited and that—even with (...) respect to their ‘autonomy enhancing’ potential—these devices may deliver costs as well as benefits. We proceed by rehearsing the distinction that can be drawn between procedural autonomy and substantive-relational autonomy. While the information provided by wearable technologies may support deliberation and decision-making, in isolation these technologies do little to provide substantive opportunities to act and achieve better health. As a consequence, wearable technologies risk generating burdens of anxiety and stigma for their users and reproducing existing health inequalities. We then reexamine the extent to which wearable technologies actually support autonomous deliberation. We argue that wearable technologies that subject their users to biomedical and consumerist epistemologies, norms and values also risk undermining processes of genuinely autonomous deliberation. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze a view that is increasingly spreading among philosophers and even physicians. Many of them believe that it is right to apply the principle of responsibility for illness in the allocation of health care. I attempt to show that this idea is unacceptable.

When is it fair that some people are less healthy than others due to their own individual choices and preferences? In this paper, I explore two alternative answers. The first is a luck-egalitarian account that holds people responsible for choices that society could have reasonably expected them to avoid. I argue that this account is indeterminate and go on to sketch an alternative proposal based on Rawls’s idea of a “social division of responsibility.” This latter approach connects the notion of (...) responsibility for health to the social conditions under which health-related behaviour is developed. (shrink)

The concept of responsibility for health is a significant feature of health discourse and public health policy, but application of the concept is poorly understood. This paper offers an analysis of the concept in two ways. Following an examination of the use of the word ‘responsibility’ in the nursing and wider health literature using three examples, the concept of ‘responsibility for health’ as fulfilling a social function is discussed with reference to policy documents from the UK. The philosophical literature on (...) moral responsibility is introduced, and in considering two versions, reactive attitudes and accountability, it is argued that in application both can be regarded, though with different emphasis, as being constituted in three parts: a responsible agent; having obligations ; and being susceptible to being held responsible if he fails to meet them. The three‐stage model is consistent with the examples of the word responsibility in use, but application to the social function model causes a number of problems for healthcare practice, especially for the reactive attitudes account. Apart from considerable problems in stating what exactly the obligations are and how they can be justified; and how blame might justly be apportioned and by whom, the very ideas of obligation and blame are in conflict within healthcare systems and professional nursing practice which have foundations deeply embedded in the notion of the supremacy of personal autonomy. It is concluded that current application of the concept of responsibility for health is conceptually incoherent, and if it is to retain its place in health policy and discourse, urgent remedy is required. (shrink)

Real-life decision-making often begins with a disorderly decision problem that has to be clarified and systematized before a decision can be made. This is the process of decision structuring that has largely been ignored both in decision theory and applied decision analysis. In this contribution, ten major components of decision structuring are identified, namely the determination of its scope, subdivision, agency, timing, options, control ascriptions, framing, horizon, criteria and restructuring. Four of these components, namely the scope, subdivision, options, and horizon (...) of a decision, are subjected to a more detailed analysis. (shrink)

Die epidemiologische Morbiditätsverschiebung der vergangenen Jahrzehnte hat verhaltensassoziierte Erkrankungen in das Zentrum der Public Health-Arbeit rücken lassen. Sowohl die Prävention Lebensstil-bedingter Erkrankungen als auch die Behandlung ihrer Folgen gehören angesichts steigender Morbiditäts- und Mortalitätszahlen zu den größten Herausforderungen für moderne Gesundheitssysteme. Eine Beeinflussung von Gesundheitsverhalten sowie dessen Berücksichtigung in der Mittelverteilung – prominent verhandelt in der medizinethischen Debatte um gesundheitliche Eigenverantwortung – sind jedoch kontrovers. Bisher konnte dafür noch kein allgemein akzeptiertes theoretisches Modell entwickelt werden. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird der (...) in letzter Zeit im angloamerikanischen Raum intensiv im Public Health-Kontext verhandelte libertäre Paternalismus als ein solches Modell untersucht und einer kritischen Untersuchung zugeführt. Es wird geschlussfolgert, dass dieses Modell zwar argumentativ in wesentlicher Hinsicht unterbestimmt ist, jedoch viele willkommene und sinnvolle Impulse für die moderne Public Health-Politik liefern kann. (shrink)