Responsibility for Health

This Element provides a new overarching perspective on responsibility for health, covering public health, healthcare policies, and clinical medicine.

This Element offers a broad perspective on responsibility for health. It investigates responsibilities in the prevention of disease and accidents, and in the creation of healthcare for all. It explores the professional responsibilities of physicians and nurses, and discusses the responsibilities that we all have for our own health.This Element offers a broad perspective on responsibility for health. This includes responsibilities in the prevention of disease and accidents, and in the creation of healthcare for all. The professional responsibilities of physicians and nurses are explored, and so are the responsibilities that we all have for our own health. Many of the central problems in healthcare ethics are discussed from a responsibility perspective, for instance paternalism, informed consent, evidence-based medicine, alternative medicine, and the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare. In order to perform this analysis, conceptual tools for responsibility analysis are provided, such as the distinction between blame responsibility and task responsibility and various notions of causality that are relevant for our understanding of responsibility.