Responsibility, freedom, and forgiveness in health care

This paper focuses on the optimal allocation between health and lifestyle choices when a society is concerned about both fairness and forgiveness. Based on the idea of fresh starts, we construct a social ordering that permits us to make welfare assessments when it is acceptable to compensate individuals who have mismanaged their initial endowment. Our social rule also allows for the inclusion of the fairness approach in the model, to deal with the well-known clash between the principle of compensation and the principle of reward. Based on ethical principles, we propose the application of a minimax criterion to the distance between the individual’s final bundle and an ideal allocation.