title: Personal responsibility in oral health: ethical considerations.
abstract: Personal responsibility is a powerful idea supported by many values central to West European thought. On the conceptual level personal responsibility is a complex notion. It is important to separate the concept of being responsible for a given state of affairs from the concept of holding people responsible by introducing measures that decrease their share of available resources. Introducing personal responsibility in oral health also has limitations of a more practical nature. Knowledge, social status and other diseases affect the degree to which people can be said to be responsible for their poor oral health. These factors affect people's oral health and their ability to take care of it. Both the conceptual and practical issues at stake are not reasons to abandon the idea of personal responsibility in oral health, but they do affect what the notion means and when it is reasonable to hold people responsible. They also commit people who support the idea of personal responsibility in oral health to supporting the idea of societal responsibility for mitigating the effects of factors that diminish people's responsibility and increase the available information and knowledge in the population.
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University, Denmark. aba@ps.au.dk
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Albertsen
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information / Q000941:ethics; D001294:Attitude to Health; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000941:ethics; D015438:Health Behavior; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D009909:Oral Health / Q000941:ethics*; D010358:Patient Participation; D026684:Personal Autonomy; D012648:Self Care / Q000941:ethics*; D012923:Social Class; D063508:Social Discrimination / Q000941:ethics; D012935:Social Justice / Q000941:ethics; D012941:Social Responsibility; D012945:Social Values; D035862:Vulnerable Populations