In applied ethics, debates about responsibility have been relentlessly individualistic and synchronic, even as recognition has increased in both philosophy and psychology that agency is distributed across time and individuals. I therefore warmly welcome Brown and Savulescu’s analysis of the conditions under which responsibility can be shared and extended. By carefully delineating how diachronic and dyadic responsibility interact with the long-established control and epistemic conditions, they lay the groundwork needed for identifying how responsibility may be inter-individual and intra-individual. Unsurprisingly, I (...) don’t agree with every aspect of their rich account. I strongly suspect that the privileged place the individual continues to occupy in their taxonomy is a residue of the kind of internalist intuitions which dominate WEIRD thinking.1 2 However, I won’t pursue this line of thought here. Instead, I apply Brown and Savulescu’s analysis. Moving beyond the programmatic level at which they develop their account, I will show how it provides a basis for excusing many individuals, focusing not on the dyadic level but the diachronic. Most of the …. (shrink)

Rebecca Brown and Julian Savulescu argue in ‘Responsibility in Healthcare Across Time and Agents’ that if responsibility should play a crucial role in healthcare, then we need a concept of responsibility that reflects that an individual’s behaviour is sometimes, if not routinely, influenced by external factors in various ways. As Brown and Savulescu convincingly show, health-related behaviour in particular is often affected by other agents and typically involves multiple decisions on different occasions. Smoking and a poor diet are but two (...) examples where these factors are salient. Since health-related behaviour is often influenced by others, and often spread out over time, a notion of responsibility that does not take these two factors into account will be inadequate. In this comment to their paper I wish to raise an issue concerning Brown and Savulescu’s characterisation of individual responsibility for health-related behaviour that involves multiple choices by the same agent over a period of time. For simple acts—smoking a cigarette or eating some junk food for example—Brown and Savulescu assume two necessary conditions for responsibility: a ‘control condition’ and a ‘epistemic condition’. These conditions are intended to capture the plausible idea that …. (shrink)