Lindsey Davies, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Western Avenue, Cardiff, UK – Abstract – Delightful lifestyle behaviours pose a formidable threat to public health, but one for which the solution modest changes in lifestyle selections is tantalising cost effective and nontoxic. Personal liability for lifestyle selections, once a governmental mantra, is increasingly being challenged as the complex relationships between sociocultural and environmental conditions and personal choices are recognised. Individuals make frequent lifestyle selections that affect their health and it’s intuitively assumed that these selections are made through free will.

Nevertheless, it’s argued that in order for a person to be considered fully responsible, certain preconditions must ideally be met, their actions must be informed, voluntary, uncoerced, spontaneous and deliberated. These preconditions are problematic when applied to lifestyle behaviours. They fail to acknowledge that health behaviours are affected by many competing factors: cultural pressures, health literacy, health inequalities, mental capacity, genetic predisposition and in case of smoking and alcohol, dependence on a substance. Understanding which risk factors are within or outside the individual’s control is needed when discussing liability for health. A balanced opinion would therefore suggest that lifestyle behaviours are affected by a complex interplay of intrapersonal and extrapersonal factors.

And liability varies for people along a continuum. Key Concepts: Individual personal liability for lifestyle selections lies on a continuum between complete free will and no choice. Individual personal liability for health is dependent on cultural pressures, health literacy, health inequalities, mental capacity, genetic predisposition and in case of smoking and alcohol, dependence on a substance. Health behaviour is determined in part by perceptions of control over performance of the behavior that will vary from individual to individual. Advances in our understanding of the genetic theology of socalled lifestyle diseases and their associated behaviours present new challenges for determining those risk factors which are under a person’s control and those which are outside of it. Providing people with genetic risk info might induce a feeling of fatalism, the belief that little might be done to reduce the risk. Fatalism can be especially relevant to perceptions of liability and control now that many diseases are believed to have a genetic aetiology. Habit and addiction introduce an additional level of complexity when debating personal liability for health.