Responsibility for Health

  • 1h 32m
  • Sven Ove Hansson
  • Cambridge University Press
  • 2022

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.

About the Author

Sven Ove Hansson, Karolinska Institutet and KTH Royal Institute of Technology

In this Book

  • Introduction
  • What Is Responsibility?
  • What Determines Our Health?
  • The Ethics of Public Health
  • Health Care for All
  • Responsibility in Health Care
  • Responsibility for One’s Own Health
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References