PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Brown, Rebecca C H
AU  - Savulescu, Julian
TI  - Responsibility in healthcare across time and agents
AID  - 10.1136/medethics-2019-105382
DP  - 2019 Oct 01
TA  - Journal of Medical Ethics
PG  - 636--644
VI  - 45
IP  - 10
4099  - http://jme.bmj.com/content/45/10/636.short
4100  - http://jme.bmj.com/content/45/10/636.full
SO  - J Med Ethics2019 Oct 01; 45
AB  - 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 what paying more attention to the diachronic and dyadic aspects of responsibility might involve and what implications this could have for assessments of responsibility for health-related behaviour.