Responsibility and Healthcare

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This edited collection brings together world-leading authors writing about a wide range of issues related to responsibility and healthcare, and from a variety of perspectives. Alongside a comprehensive introduction by the editors outlining the scope of the relevant debates, the volume contains 14 chapters, split into four sections. This volume pushes forward a number of important debates on responsibility and its role in contemporary healthcare.
The first and second groups of chapters focus, respectively, on (a) the potential justification and (b) nature of ’responsibility-sensitive’ policies in healthcare provision; in other words, policies that would hold some patients responsible for their ill health via differences in treatment. These sections include empirically-informed work on public opinion, chapters linking responsibility in healthcare with ongoing debates around criminal responsibility, and new conceptual and theoretical work on the details of responsibility-sensitive policies.
The third set of chapters turns in a more detailed way to the issues of whether, and how, we can be responsible for our health, presenting novel challenges and questions for those who would advocate responsibility-sensitive policies in healthcare.
Finally, questions of responsibility in medicine do not end with those receiving treatment. The fourth group of chapters broadens the volume’s focus to think about responsibility of individuals other than patients, including medical professionals and policymakers, including specific consideration of the role of responsibility during pandemics.

Ben Davies is a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He was previously a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, leading a project on the role of sufficiency in health care ethics and policy.

Dr Gabriel De Marco received his PhD in 2018 at Florida State University, with a focus on free action and moral responsibility. After graduating, he joined the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics as a research fellow, expanding his focus to practical issues concerning agency, free action, and responsibility; especially concerning, neurocorrectives, arational influences, and responsibility in the context of health.

Professor Neil Levy began academic life as a continental philosopher, but has broaden his interests to cover much of philosophy. He Has worked at applied ethics centres (first the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, in Australia, then the Uehiro Centre) for much of his career. Beyond applied ethics, he has serious research interests in philosophical psychology and epistemology.

Professor Julian Savulescu has held the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford since 2002, where he founded the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics in 2003. In August 2022, he moved to Singapore to take up the Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics at the National University of Singapore, where he directs the Centre for Biomedical Ethics. He has degrees in medicine, neuroscience and bioethics and visiting professorships at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Melbourne Law School where he leads the Biomedical Ethics Research Group.