Healthcare, Responsibility and Golden Opportunities

When it comes to determining how healthcare resources should be allocated, there are many factors that could—and perhaps should—be taken into account. One such factor is a patient’s responsibility for his or her illness, or for the behavior that caused it. Policies that take responsibility for the unhealthy lifestyle or its outcomes into account—responsibility-sensitive policies—have faced a series of criticisms. One holds that agents often fail to meet either the control or epistemic conditions on responsibility with regard to their unhealthy lifestyles or their outcomes. Another holds that even if patients sometimes are responsible for these items, we cannot know whether a particular patient is responsible for them. In this article, we propose a type of responsibility-sensitive policy that may be able to surmount these difficulties. Under this type of policy, patients are empowered to change to a healthier lifestyle by being given what we call a ‘Golden Opportunity’ to change. Such a policy would not only avoid concerns about patients’ fulfilment of conditions on responsibility for their lifestyles, it would also allow healthcare authorities to be justified in believing that a patient who does not change her lifestyle is responsible for the unhealthy lifestyle. We conclude with a discussion of avenues for further work, and place this policy in the broader context of the debate on responsibility for health.