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  1. Designing a just soda tax.Douglas MacKay & Alexandria Huber-Disla - 2024 - Economics and Philosophy 40 (2):353-373.
    Soda taxes are controversial. While proponents point to their potential health benefits and the public projects that could be funded with their revenue, critics argue that they are paternalistic and regressive. In this paper, we explore the prospects for designing a just soda tax, one that appropriately balances the often-competing ethical considerations of promoting social welfare, respecting people’s autonomy and ensuring distributive fairness. We argue that policymakers have several paths forward for designing a just soda tax, but that the considerations (...)
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  • Rationing, Responsibility, and Vaccination during COVID-19: A Conceptual Map.Jin K. Park & Ben Davies - 2023 - American Journal of Bioethics 24 (7):66-79.
    Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, shortages of scarce healthcare resources consistently presented significant moral and practical challenges. While the importance of vaccines as a key pharmaceutical intervention to stem pandemic scarcity was widely publicized, a sizable proportion of the population chose not to vaccinate. In response, some have defended the use of vaccination status as a criterion for the allocation of scarce medical resources. In this paper, we critically interpret this burgeoning literature, and describe a framework for thinking about vaccine-sensitive resource (...)
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  • Rare diseases in healthcare priority setting: should rarity matter?Andreas Albertsen - 2022 - Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (9):624-628.
    Rare diseases pose a particular priority setting problem. The UK gives rare diseases special priority in healthcare priority setting. Effectively, the National Health Service is willing to pay much more to gain a quality-adjusted life-year related to a very rare disease than one related to a more common condition. But should rare diseases receive priority in the allocation of scarce healthcare resources? This article develops and evaluates four arguments in favour of such a priority. These pertain to public values, luck (...)
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  • Institutional Responsibility is Prior to Personal Responsibility in a Pandemic.Ben Davies & Julian Savulescu - 2024 - Journal of Value Inquiry 58 (2):215-234.
    On 26 January 2021, while announcing that the country had reached the mark of 100,000 deaths within 28 days of COVID-19, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that he took “full responsibility for everything that the Government has done” as part of British efforts to tackle the pandemic. The force of this statement was undermined, however, by what followed: -/- What I can tell you is that we truly did everything we could, and continue to do everything that we can, (...)
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  • Responsibility and the recursion problem.Ben Davies - 2021 - Ratio 35 (2):112-122.
    A considerable literature has emerged around the idea of using ‘personal responsibility’ as an allocation criterion in healthcare distribution, where a person's being suitably responsible for their health needs may justify additional conditions on receiving healthcare, and perhaps even limiting access entirely, sometimes known as ‘responsibilisation’. This discussion focuses most prominently, but not exclusively, on ‘luck egalitarianism’, the view that deviations from equality are justified only by suitably free choices. A superficially separate issue in distributive justice concerns the two–way relationship (...)
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  • ‘Personal Health Surveillance’: The Use of mHealth in Healthcare Responsibilisation.Ben Davies - 2021 - Public Health Ethics 14 (3):268-280.
    There is an ongoing increase in the use of mobile health technologies that patients can use to monitor health-related outcomes and behaviours. While the dominant narrative around mHealth focuses on patient empowerment, there is potential for mHealth to fit into a growing push for patients to take personal responsibility for their health. I call the first of these uses ‘medical monitoring’, and the second ‘personal health surveillance’. After outlining two problems which the use of mHealth might seem to enable us (...)
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  • L'éthique pendant la pandémie.Sfetcu Nicolae - manuscript
    Les plus grandes institutions médicales et divers éthiciens préconisent une approche utilitariste en période de crise de santé publique, afin de maximiser les bénéfices pour la société, en conflit direct avec notre vision habituelle (kantienne) du respect des personnes en tant qu'individus. Un problème central de l'utilitarisme est qu'il n'y a pas de moyen clair d'évaluer les choix moraux, y compris dans les décisions médicales. En général, l'éthique médicale kantienne est respectée en médecine. Mais dans une pandémie, lorsque les ressources (...)
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  • COVID-19 Pandemic – Philosophical Approaches.Sfetcu Nicolae (ed.) - 2020 - Drobeta Turnu Severin: MultiMedia Publishing.
    The paper begins with a retrospective of the debates on the origin of life: the virus or the cell? The virus needs a cell for replication, instead the cell is a more evolved form on the evolutionary scale of life. In addition, the study of viruses raises pressing conceptual and philosophical questions about their nature, their classification, and their place in the biological world. The subject of pandemics is approached starting from the existentialism of Albert Camus and Sartre, the replacement (...)
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  • Ethics in the pandemic.Sfetcu Nicolae - manuscript
    The largest medical institutions and various ethicists advocate a utilitarian approach in times of public health crises, to maximize benefits for society, in direct conflict with our usual (Kantian) view of respect for people as individuals. A central problem with utilitarianism is that there is no clear way to evaluate moral choices, including in medical decisions. In general, in medicine is respected the Kantian medical ethics. But in a pandemic, when resources are poor, deep choices of life and death must (...)
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  • Pandemia COVID-19 - Abordări filosofice.Sfetcu Nicolae - 2020 - Drobeta Turnu Severin: MultiMedia Publishing.
    Lucrarea debutează cu o retrospectivă a dezbaterilor privind originea vieții: virusul sau celula? Virusul are nevoie de celulă pentru replicare, în schimb celula este o formă mai evoluată pe scara evoluționistă a vieții. În plus, studiul virușilor ridică întrebări conceptuale și filozofice presante despre natura lor, clasificarea lor, și locul lor în lumea biologică. Subiectul pandemiilor este abordat pornind de la existențialismul lui Albert Camus și Sartre, înlocuirea ritualului de excludere cu mecanismul disciplinar al lui Michel Foucault, și despre ipoteza (...)
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  • Etica în pandemie.Sfetcu Nicolae - manuscript
    Cele mai mari instituții medicale și diverși eticieni pledează pentru o abordare utilitaristă în perioadele de crize de sănătate publică, pentru a maximiza beneficiile pentru societate, în conflict direct cu viziunea noastră obișnuită (kantiană) privind respectul față de persoane ca indivizi. O problemă centrală a utilitarismului este că nu există nicio modalitate clară de a evalua alegerile morale, inclusiv în deciziile medicale. În general, în medicină se respectă etica medicală kantiană. Dar în pandemie, când resursele sunt sărace, trebuie făcute alegeri (...)
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  • From Sufficient Health to Sufficient Responsibility.Ben Davies & Julian Savulescu - 2020 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 17 (3):423-433.
    The idea of using responsibility in the allocation of healthcare resources has been criticized for, among other things, too readily abandoning people who are responsible for being very badly off. One response to this problem is that while responsibility can play a role in resource allocation, it cannot do so if it will leave those who are responsible below a “sufficiency” threshold. This paper considers first whether a view can be both distinctively sufficientarian and allow responsibility to play a role (...)
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  • Discrimination Based on Personal Responsibility: Luck Egalitarianism and Healthcare Priority Setting.Andreas Albertsen - 2024 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 33 (1):23-34.
    Luck egalitarianism is a responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice. Its application to health and healthcare is controversial. This article addresses a novel critique of luck egalitarianism, namely, that it wrongfully discriminates against those responsible for their health disadvantage when allocating scarce healthcare resources. The philosophical literature about discrimination offers two primary reasons for what makes discrimination wrong (when it is): harm and disrespect. These two approaches are employed to analyze whether luck egalitarian healthcare prioritization should be considered wrongful discrimination. Regarding (...)
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  • Utilitarianism and the pandemic.Julian Savulescu, Ingmar Persson & Dominic Wilkinson - 2020 - Bioethics 34 (6):620-632.
    There are no egalitarians in a pandemic. The scale of the challenge for health systems and public policy means that there is an ineluctable need to prioritize the needs of the many. It is impossible to treat all citizens equally, and a failure to carefully consider the consequences of actions could lead to massive preventable loss of life. In a pandemic there is a strong ethical need to consider how to do most good overall. Utilitarianism is an influential moral theory (...)
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  • Against Moral Responsibilisation of Health: Prudential Responsibility and Health Promotion.Rebecca C. H. Brown, Hannah Maslen & Julian Savulescu - 2019 - Public Health Ethics 12 (2):114-129.
    In this article, we outline a novel approach to understanding the role of responsibility in health promotion. Efforts to tackle chronic disease have led to an emphasis on personal responsibility and the identification of ways in which people can ‘take responsibility’ for their health by avoiding risk factors such as smoking and over-eating. We argue that the extent to which agents can be considered responsible for their health-related behaviour is limited, and as such, state health promotion which assumes certain forms (...)
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  • Golden opportunity, reasonable risk and personal responsibility for health.Julian Savulescu - 2017 - Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (1):59-61.
    In her excellent and comprehensive article, Friesen argues that utilising personal responsibility in healthcare is problematic in several ways: it is difficult to ascribe responsibility to behaviour; there is a risk of prejudice and bias in deciding which behaviours a person should be held responsible for; it may be ineffective at reducing health costs. In this short commentary, I will elaborate the critique of personal responsibility in health but suggest one way in which it could be used ethically. In doing (...)
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  • Justice, inequality, and health.Gopal Sreenivasan - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • The Myth of Zero-Sum Responsibility: Towards Scaffolded Responsibility for Health.Neil Levy & Julian Savulescu - 2023 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (1-2):85-105.
    Some people argue that the distribution of medical resources should be sensitive to agents’ responsibility for their ill-health. In contrast, others point to the social determinants of health to argue that the collective agents that control the conditions in which agents act should bear responsibility. To a large degree, this is a debate in which those who hold individuals responsible currently have the upper hand: warranted appeals to individual responsibility effectively block allocation of any significant degree of responsibility to collective (...)
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  • On the Anatomy of Health-related Actions for Which People Could Reasonably be Held Responsible: A Framework.Kristine Bærøe, Andreas Albertsen & Cornelius Cappelen - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (4):384-399.
    Should we let personal responsibility for health-related behavior influence the allocation of healthcare resources? In this paper, we clarify what it means to be responsible for an action. We rely on a crucial conceptual distinction between being responsible and holding someone responsible, and show that even though we might be considered responsible and blameworthy for our health-related actions, there could still be well-justified reasons for not considering it reasonable to hold us responsible by giving us lower priority. We transform these (...)
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  • Making psychiatry moral again: the role of psychiatry in patient moral development.Doug McConnell, Matthew Broome & Julian Savulescu - 2023 - Journal of Medical Ethics 49 (6):423-427.
    Psychiatric involvement in patient morality is controversial. If psychiatrists are tasked with shaping patient morality, the coercive potential of psychiatry is increased, treatment may be unfairly administered on the basis of patients’ moral beliefs rather than medical need, moral disputes could damage the therapeutic relationship and, in any case, we are often uncertain or conflicted about what is morally right. Yet, there is also a strong case for the view that psychiatry often works through improving patient morality and, therefore, should (...)
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  • Healthcare, Responsibility and Golden Opportunities.Gabriel De Marco, Thomas Douglas & Julian Savulescu - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1 (3).
    When it comes to determining how healthcare resources should be allocated, there are many factors that could—and perhaps should—be taken into account. One such factor is a patient’s responsibility for his or her illness, or for the behavior that caused it. Policies that take responsibility for the unhealthy lifestyle or its outcomes into account—responsibility-sensitive policies—have faced a series of criticisms. One holds that agents often fail to meet either the control or epistemic conditions on responsibility with regard to their unhealthy (...)
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  • Solidarity and Responsibility in Health Care.Ben Davies & Julian Savulescu - 2019 - Public Health Ethics 12 (2):133-144.
    Some healthcare systems are said to be grounded in solidarity because healthcare is funded as a form of mutual support. This article argues that health care systems that are grounded in solidarity have the right to penalise some users who are responsible for their poor health. This derives from the fact that solidary systems involve both rights and obligations and, in some cases, those who avoidably incur health burdens violate obligations of solidarity. Penalties warranted include direct patient contribution to costs, (...)
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  • Responsibility in healthcare across time and agents.Rebecca C. H. Brown & Julian Savulescu - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (10):636-644.
    It is unclear whether someone’s responsibility for developing a disease or maintaining his or her health should affect what healthcare he or she receives. While this dispute continues, we suggest that, if responsibility is to play a role in healthcare, the concept must be rethought in order to reflect the sense in which many health-related behaviours occur repeatedly over time and are the product of more than one agent. Most philosophical accounts of responsibility are synchronic and individualistic; we indicate here (...)
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  • Are We Justified in Introducing Carbon Monoxide Testing to Encourage Smoking Cessation in Pregnant Women?Catherine Bowden - 2019 - Health Care Analysis 27 (2):128-145.
    Smoking is frequently presented as being particularly problematic when the smoker is a pregnant woman because of the potential harm to the future child. This premise is used to justify targeting pregnant women with a unique approach to smoking cessation including policies such as the routine testing of all pregnant women for carbon monoxide at every antenatal appointment. This paper examines the evidence that such policies are justified by the aim of harm prevention and argues that targeting pregnant women in (...)
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  • Prevention in the age of personal responsibility: epigenetic risk-predictive screening for female cancers as a case study.Ineke Bolt, Eline M. Bunnik, Krista Tromp, Nora Pashayan, Martin Widschwendter & Inez de Beaufort - 2021 - Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (12):e46-e46.
    Epigenetic markers could potentially be used for risk assessment in risk-stratified population-based cancer screening programmes. Whereas current screening programmes generally aim to detect existing cancer, epigenetic markers could be used to provide risk estimates for not-yet-existing cancers. Epigenetic risk-predictive tests may thus allow for new opportunities for risk assessment for developing cancer in the future. Since epigenetic changes are presumed to be modifiable, preventive measures, such as lifestyle modification, could be used to reduce the risk of cancer. Moreover, epigenetic markers (...)
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  • Concepts of health in long-term home care: An empirical-ethical exploration.Anna-Henrikje Seidlein, Ines Buchholz, Maresa Buchholz & Sabine Salloch - 2020 - Nursing Ethics 27 (5):1187-1200.
    Background Concepts of health have been widely discussed in the philosophy and ethics of medicine. Parallel to these theoretical debates, numerous empirical research projects have focused on subjective concepts of health and shown their significance for individuals and society at various levels. Only a few studies have so far investigated the concepts of health of non-professionals and professionals involved in long-term home care and discussed these empirical perspectives regarding moral responsibilities. Objectives To identify the subjective concepts of the health of (...)
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  • Taking Responsibility for Responsibility.Neil Levy - 2019 - Public Health Ethics 12 (2):103-113.
    Governments, physicians, media and academics have all called for individuals to bear responsibility for their own health. In this article, I argue that requiring those with adverse health outcomes to bear responsibility for these outcomes is a bad basis for policy. The available evidence strongly suggests that the capacities for responsible choice, and the circumstances in which these capacities are exercised, are distributed alongside the kinds of goods we usually talk about in discussing distributive justice, and this distribution significantly explains (...)
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  • On the person in personal health responsibility.Joar Røkke Fystro, Bjørn Hofmann & Eli Feiring - 2022 - BMC Medical Ethics 23 (1):1-7.
    In this paper, we start by comparing the two agents, Ann and Bob, who are involved in two car crashes. Whereas Ann crashes her car through no fault of her own, Bob crashes as a result of reckless driving. Unlike Ann, Bob is held criminally responsible, and the insurance company refuses to cover the car’s damages. Nonetheless, Ann and Bob both receive emergency hospital treatment that a third party covers, regardless of any assessment of personal responsibility. What warrants such apparent (...)
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  • Being Healthy, Being Sick, Being Responsible: Attitudes towards Responsibility for Health in a Public Healthcare System.Gloria Traina, Pål E. Martinussen & Eli Feiring - 2019 - Public Health Ethics 12 (2):145-157.
    Lifestyle-induced diseases are becoming a burden on healthcare, actualizing the discussion on health responsibilities. Using data from the National Association for Heart and Lung Diseases ’s 2015 Health Survey, this study examined the public’s attitudes towards personal and social health responsibility in a Norwegian population. The questionnaires covered self-reported health and lifestyle, attitudes towards personal responsibility and the authorities’ responsibility for promoting health, resource-prioritisation and socio-demographic characteristics. Block-wise multiple linear regression assessed the association between attitudes towards health responsibilities and individual (...)
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  • Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound as a Consideration in the Patient Selection Process for Facial Transplantation.Michelle W. Mcquinn, Laura L. Kimberly, Brendan Parent, J. Rodrigo Diaz-Siso, Arthur L. Caplan, Aileen G. Blitz & Eduardo D. Rodriguez - 2019 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 28 (3):450-462.
    Abstract:Facial transplantation is emerging as a therapeutic option for self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The self-inflicted nature of this injury raises questions about the appropriate role of self-harm in determining patient eligibility. Potential candidates for facial transplantation undergo extensive psychosocial screening. The presence of a self-inflicted gunshot wound warrants special attention to ensure that a patient is prepared to undergo a demanding procedure that poses significant risk, as well as stringent lifelong management. Herein, we explore the ethics of considering mechanism of injury (...)
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