TY - JOUR T1 - Applying Brown and Savulescu: the diachronic condition as excuse JF - Journal of Medical Ethics JO - J Med Ethics SP - 646 LP - 647 DO - 10.1136/medethics-2019-105684 VL - 45 IS - 10 AU - Neil Levy Y1 - 2019/10/01 UR - http://jme.bmj.com/content/45/10/646.abstract N2 - 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 (as they anticipate, in discussing my work). 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 (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) thinking.1 2 However, I won’t pursue this line of thought here (having done so elsewhere3). 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 (or, as I would prefer, social) level but the diachronic.Most of the … ER -