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We evaluate people and groups as responsible or not, depending on how
seriously they take their responsibilities. Often we do this
informally, via moral judgment. Sometimes we do this formally, for
instance in legal judgment. This article considers mainly moral
responsibility, and focuses largely upon individuals. Later sections
also comment on the relation between legal and moral responsibility,
and on the responsibility of collectives.
The article discusses four different areas of individual moral
responsibility: (1) Responsible agency, whereby a person is regarded as
a normal moral agent; (2) Retrospective responsibility, when a person
is judged for her actions, for instance, in being blamed or punished;
(3) Prospective responsibility, for instance, the responsibilities
attaching to a particular role; and (4) Responsibility as a virtue,
when we praise a person as being responsible. Philosophical discussion
of responsibility has focused largely on (1) and (2). The article
points out that a wider view of responsibility helps explore some
connections between moral and legal responsibility, and between
individual and collective responsibility. It also enables us to relate responsibility to its original philosophical use, which was in political thought.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to those parts of this article)
1. Introduction
The word responsibility is surprisingly modern. It is also, as Paul Ricoeur
has observed, “not really well-established within the philosophical
tradition” (2000: 11). This is reflected in the fact that we can locate
two rather different philosophical approaches to responsibility.
The original philosophical usage of responsibility was
political (see McKeon, 1957). This reflected the origin of the word. In
all modern European languages, “responsibility” only finds a home
toward the end of the eighteenth century. This is within debates about
representative government, that is, government which is responsible to
the people. In the etymology of “responsibility,” the Oxford English Dictionary cites the debates on the U.S. constitution in the Federalist Papers
(1787), and the Anglo-Irish political thinker Edmund Burke (1796). When John Stuart Mill
writes of responsibility, in the middle of the nineteenth century,
again his concern is not with free will, but with the principles of
representative government. At the end of the nineteenth century, the
most notable thinker to speak of responsibility is Max Weber, who
propounds an ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) for
the politician. For Weber, the vocation of politics demands a calm
attention to the facts of the situation and the consequences of actions
– and not to lofty or abstract principles.
So far as responsibility has a place in eighteenth and nineteenth century
thought, then, this is in political contexts, where the concern is with
responsible action and the principles of representative government. In twentieth
century philosophy, on the other hand, the emphasis has been on questions of free will and determinism:
Is a person responsible for her actions or character? Would the truth
of determinism eliminate such responsibility? Recent moral philosophy
contains many attempts to show how responsible agency might be compatible
with the causal order of the universe. These debates obviously center
on the individual agent. As such, they pose difficulties for
understanding the topic of collective responsibility – an issue that
twentieth century politics has raised with a new urgency. Nor does a
concern with free will correspond to many everyday issues about
responsibility – for example, questions of mutual accountability,
defining a person’s sphere of responsibility, or judging a person as
sufficiently responsible for a particular role.
This Encyclopedia article will mainly deal with the responsibility of individual persons;
another article considers collective moral responsibility.
In fact, there are several important uses of responsibility as it
relates to individuals, which this article will tackle in turn. There
are also important questions about the distinction between moral and
legal responsibility. The article will then consider what relations
there may be between the concept’s individual and collective uses. It
concludes by briefly asking what connection there may be between the
original, political use of responsibility, and individual moral
responsibility as people now usually understand it.
2. Individual ResponsibilityThere
is no philosophically well-settled way of dividing or analyzing the
various components of responsibility, and some components are often
ignored by philosophers. To take a more comprehensive approach, this
article divides the responsibility of individuals into four areas of
enquiry. Recent analytic moral philosophy has tended to ask two
deceptively simple questions about responsibility: “What is it to be
responsible?” and “What is a person responsible for?” The first
question is usually taken as a question about moral agency, the second
as a question about holding people accountable for past actions. As
noted, however, this does not capture the variety of uses that we make
of the concept. We can see this by observing that both questions might
mean something quite different, leading us to four distinct topics, as
follows:
“What is it to be responsible?” is most often asked by philosophers as a question about the foundations of moral agency.
What sort of creature can properly be held responsible for its actions?
The simple answer is: a normal human adult. To explain and justify this
reply, philosophers tend to turn to psychological and metaphysical
features of normal adults, such as free will. We might also approach
the same issue with a somewhat different emphasis: What features of
(normal, adult) human interaction are involved in our holding one another responsible?
However, in asking “What is it to be responsible?” we might also have a
second question in mind. We often praise some people as responsible,
and criticize others as irresponsible. Here responsibility names a virtue
– a morally valuable character trait. We may also praise an institution
as responsible. One of the word’s original uses was to call for
“responsible government.” We can compare this with the more recent
demand that corporations be “socially responsible.” This aspect of
responsibility has received very little philosophical attention.
“What is a person responsible for?” is a question most often asked by
philosophers in connection with causation and accountability. This
retrospective, or backward-looking, use is closely connected with praise and blame, punishment,
and desert. When something has gone wrong, we invariably want to know
who was at fault; and when something has gone right, we occasionally
stop to ask who acted well. This is the topic of retrospective responsibility.
Again, however, we might use the same words to ask an entirely
different question: “What is a person responsible for?” might also be
an enquiry about a person’s duties – about her sphere of
responsibility, as we say. A parent is responsible for caring for his
child, an employee for doing her job, a citizen for obeying the law. It
is a basic fact of human cooperation that responsibilities are often
divided up between people: for example, the doctor is responsible for
prescribing the right drugs, and the patient responsible for taking
them correctly. As against questions of retrospective responsibility,
this topic is sometimes termed prospective responsibility, that is, what responsibilities we are duty-bound to undertake.
These two apparently simple questions (“What is it to be responsible?”,
“What is a person responsible for?”) about individual responsibility
thus point to four different topics: moral agency, responsibility as a virtue, retrospective responsibility, and prospective responsibility.
Each of these topics poses a host of important philosophical questions.
Both the retrospective and prospective uses also raise the relation
between legal and moral responsibility.
Many important theories of responsibility relate to legal concerns,
which will be discussed in a later section. As we pursue these topics,
there is also the difficulty of seeing how they interrelate, so that it
makes sense that we use the same word to raise each issue.
The discussion begins with the topics which philosophers have most
often discussed: the nature of moral agency and retrospective
responsibility.
a. Moral AgencyNormal human adults
represent our paradigm case of responsible agents. What is distinctive
about them, that we accord them this status? Thinking of retrospective
responsibility in particular, why can be held accountable for their
actions – justly praised or blamed, deservedly punished or rewarded?
The philosophical literature has explored three broad approaches to
moral agency:
- Human beings have free will, that is, distinctive causal powers or
a special metaphysical status, that separate them from everything else
in the universe;
- Human beings can act on the basis of reason(s);
- Human beings have a certain set of moral or proto-moral feelings.
The first approach, although historically important, has largely been
discredited by the success of modern science. Science provides, or promises, naturalistic explanations
of such phenomena as the evolution of the human species and the
workings of the brain. Almost all modern philosophers approach
responsibility as compatibilists – that is, they assume that
moral responsibility must be compatible with causal or naturalistic
explanation of human thought and action, and therefore reject the
metaphysical idea of free will. (An important note: There can be
terminological confusion here. Some contemporary philosophers will use
the term “free will” to describe our everyday freedom of choice,
claiming that free will, properly understood, is compatible with the
world’s causal order.)
Among modern compatibilists, a contest remains, however, between the
second and third approaches – positions that are essentially Kantian
and Humean in inspiration. Kant’s
own position is complex and commentators dispute how far his view also
involves a metaphysical notion of free will. It is indisputable,
however, that our rationality is at the centre of his picture of moral
agency. Kant himself does not speak of responsibility – the word was
only just coming into the language of his day – but he does have much
to say about imputation (Zurechnung), that is, the basis on
which actions are imputed to a person. Kant was principally concerned
with evaluation of the self. Although he occasionally mentions blame
(mutual accountability), his moral theory is really about the basis on
which a person treats herself as responsible. The core of his answer is
that a rational agent chooses to act in the light of principles – that
is, we deliberate among reasons. Therefore standards of rationality
apply to us, and when we fail to act rationally this is, simply and
crudely, a Bad Thing. It is important to be aware that Kant sees reason
as having moral content, so that there is a failure of rationality
involved when we do something immoral – for instance, by pursuing our
self-interest at the expense of others. Even if we sometimes feel no
inclination to take account of others, reason still tells us that we
should, and can motivate us to do so. Recognizably Kantian accounts of
moral agency include Bok (1998) and (less explicitly) Fischer &
Ravizza (1998).
The issue of reason’s moral content separates Kantians from Humeans.
Hume denied that reason can provide us with moral guidance, or the
motivation to act morally. He is famous for his claim that “Reason is
wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle
as conscience, or a sense of morals” (A Treatise of Human Nature,
book 3, part 1, sect. 1). If we are moral agents, this is because we
are equipped with certain tendencies to feel or desire, dispositions
that make it seem rational to us to act and think morally. Hume himself
stressed our tendency to feel sympathy for others and our tendency to
approve of actions that lead to social benefits (and to disapprove of
those contrary to the social good). Another important class of feelings
concern our tendencies to feel shame or guilt, or more broadly, to be
concerned with how others see our actions and character. A Humean
analysis of responsibility will investigate how these emotions lead us
to be responsive to one another, in ways that support moral conduct and
provide social penalties for immoral conduct. That is, its emphasis is
less on people’s evaluation of themselves and more on how people judge
and influence one another. Russell (1995) carefully develops Hume’s own
account. In twentieth century philosophy, broadly Humean approaches
were given a new lease of life by Peter Strawson’s “Freedom and
Resentment” (1962). This classic essay underlined the role of “reactive
sentiments” – that is, emotional responses such as resentment or shame
– in practices of responsibility.
The basic criticisms that each position makes of the other are simple.
Kantians are vulnerable to the charge that they do not give a proper
account of the role of feeling and emotion in the moral life. They can
also be accused of reifying our capacity for reason in a way that makes
mysterious how human beings’ capacities for reason and morality might
have evolved. Humeans are vulnerable to the charge that they cannot
give any account of the validity of reasoning beyond the boundaries of
what we might feel inclined to endorse or reject: if I do not feel
concern for others, then can the Humean really hold that moral
reasoning has any validity for me? Contemporary philosophers have
developed both positions so as to take account of such criticisms,
which has led to rather technical debates about the nature of reason
(for instance, Bernard Williams’ (1981) well-known distinction between
internal and external reasons) and normativity (what it is for
something to provide a reason to act or think in a certain way, for
example, Korsgaard, 1996). So far as responsibility is concerned,
Wallace (1994) is a well-regarded attempt to mediate between the two
approaches. Rather differently, Pettit (2001) uses our susceptibility
to reasons as the basis for an essentially interactive account of moral
agency.
For our purposes, perhaps the most important point is that both
positions highlight a series of factors important to responsibility and
mutual accountability. These factors include: general responsiveness to
others (for instance, via moral reasoning or feelings such as
sympathy); a sense of responsibility for our actions (for instance, so
that we may offer reasons for our actions or feel emotions of shame or
guilt); and tendencies to regard others as responsible (for instance,
to respect persons as the authors of their deeds and to feel resentful
or grateful to them). In each case, note that the first example in
brackets has a typically Kantian (reason-based) cast, the second a
Humean (feeling/emotion-related) cast.
Let me add two further thoughts which apply regardless of which side of
this debate one inclines toward: First, it is not at all clear that
these factors are “on/off,” either there or not there: in other words,
it looks likely that responsible agency is a matter of degree. One
possible implication of this is that some other animals might have a
degree of moral agency; another implication is that human beings may
vary in the extent of their agency. (This seems clearly true of
children as opposed to adults. We may be more reluctant to believe that
the extent of adults’ moral agency can vary, but such a claim is not
obviously false.) Second, none of these factors has an obvious
connection to free will, in the metaphysical sense that opposes free
will to determinism. As we shall see, however, whether we emphasize the
rational or the affective
basis for responsible agency tends to generate characteristically
different accounts of retrospective responsibility, where the issue of
free will tends to recur.
b. Retrospective ResponsibilityIn
assigning responsibility for an outcome or event, we may simply be
telling a causal story. This might or might not involve human actions.
For example: the faulty gasket was responsible for the car breaking
down; his epileptic fit was responsible for the accident. Such usages
do not imply any assignment of blame or desert, and philosophers often
distinguish them by referring to “causal responsibility.” More
commonly, however, responsibility attribution is concerned with the
morality of somebody’s action(s). Among the many different causes that
led to an outcome, that action is identified as the morally salient
one. If we say the captain was responsible for the shipwreck, we do not
deny that all sorts of other causes were in play. But we do single out
the person who we think ought to be held responsible
for the outcome. Philosophers sometimes distinguish this usage, by
speaking of “liability responsibility.” Retrospective responsibility
usually involves, then, a moral (or perhaps legal) judgment of the
person responsible. This judgment typically pictures the person as
liable to various consequences: to feeling remorse (or pride), to being
blamed (or praised), to making amends (or receiving gratitude), and so
forth.
This topic is an old concern of philosophers, predating the term
“responsibility” by at least two millennia. The classic analysis of the
issues goes back to Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics,
where he investigates the conditions that exculpate us from blame and
the circumstances where blame is appropriate. Among conditions that
excuse the actor, he mentions intoxication, force of circumstances, and
coercion: we cannot be held responsible where our capacity to choose
was grossly impaired or where there was no effective choice open to us
(though perhaps we can be blamed for getting into that condition or
those circumstances). We can be blamed for what we do when threatened
by others, but not as we would be if coercion were absent. In each
case, the issue seems to be whether or not we are able to control what
we do: if something lies beyond our control, it also lies beyond the
scope of our responsibility.
However, although Aristotle thinks that our capacities for deliberation
and choice are important to responsible agency, he lacks the Kantian
emphasis on rational control discussed in the last section. Aristotle
grants considerable importance to habituation and stable character
traits – the virtues and vices. Hence another way of interpreting what
he says about responsibility is to argue that Aristotle’s excusing
conditions represent cases where an action does not reveal a person’s
character: everybody would act like that if circumstances provided no
other choice; no one makes responsible choices when drunk. On the other
hand, how we respond to coercion does reveal much about our virtues and
vices; the point is that the meaning of such acts is very different
from the meaning they would have in the absence of coercion.
In its emphasis on character, Aristotle’s account is much closer to
Hume’s than to Kant’s, since character is about tendencies to feel and
behave in various ways, as well as to think and choose. Given that
Kant’s moral psychology is usually thought to be less plausible than
Aristotle or Hume’s, it is interesting that Kantian approaches have,
nonetheless, dominated modern approaches to retrospective
responsibility. Why should this be so?
Kant’s underlying thought is that the person who acts well deserves to
be happy (he continually refers to goodness as “worthiness to be
happy”). The person who acts badly does not: she deserves to be
reproached, ought to feel remorse, and may even deserve punishment.
Since blame, guilt and punishment are of great practical importance, it
is clearly desirable that our account of responsibility justify them.
Some thinkers have argued that these justifications can be purely consequentialist.
For instance, Smart (1961) argues that blame, guilt and punishment are
only merited insofar as they can encourage people to do better in the
future. However, most philosophers have been dissatisfied with such
accounts. Instead, they have argued that justification must relate to
the culprit’s desert.
For most people, the intuitive justification for the sort of desert
involved in retrospective responsibility lies in individual choice or
control. You chose to act selfishly: you deserve blame. You chose not
to take precautions: you deserve to bear the consequences. You chose to
break the law: you deserve punishment. (The question of legal
responsibility is considered separately, below.) This way of putting
matters clearly gives pride of place to our capacity to control our
conduct in the light of reasons, moral and otherwise. It will also
emphasize the intentions underlying an action rather than its actual
outcomes. This is because intentions are subject to rational choice in
a way that outcomes often are not. Kant’s thought that the rational
agent can choose whether or not to act on the basis of reasons is
sometimes expressed in the idea that we should each be respected as the
authors of our thoughts and intentions. This thought has the less
positive consequence that when somebody chooses immorally and
irrationally, he fails in a distinctive way, so that he is not (in
Kant’s terms) “worthy to be happy.” Note, however, that this line of
thought is open to a very obvious objection. It can be argued that our
intentions and choices are conditioned by our characters, and our
characters by the circumstances of our upbringing. Clearly these are not
matters of choice. This is why a concern with retrospective responsibility
raises the family of issues around moral luck
and continues to lead back to the issue of free will: the idea that we
are, really and ultimately, the authors of our own choices – despite
scientific and common-sense appearances.
The article on praise and blame discusses this issue in more depth,
contrasting Kant’s approach with that of Aristotle and utilitarianism. Humeans, favoring
naturalistic explanation
of thought and action, are likely to be drawn to elements of the last
two – namely Aristotle’s emphasis on actions as revealing virtues and
vices, and the consequentialist emphasis on social benefits of
practices of accountability. In particular, Humeans are much more
likely to see retrospective responsibility in terms of the feelings
that are appropriate – for instance, our resentment at someone’s bad
conduct, or our susceptibility to shame at others’ responses. Clearly,
such feelings and the resulting actions are about our exercising mutual
influence on one another’s conduct for the sake of more beneficial
social interaction. In other words, although the Humean analysis can be
understood in terms of individual psychology, it also points to the
question: What is it about human interaction that leads us to hold one
another responsible? Kantians, on the other hand, tend to think of
retrospective responsibility, not as a matter of influencing others,
but rather as our respecting individual capacities for rational choice.
This respect may still have harsh consequences, as it involves granting
people their just deserts, including blame and punishment.
c. Prospective ResponsibilityA
different use of “responsibility” is as a synonym for “duty.” When we
ask about a person’s responsibilities, we are concerned with what she
ought to be doing or attending to. Sometimes we use the term to
describe duties that everyone has – for example, “Everyone is
responsible for looking after his own health.” More typically, we use
the term to describe a particular person’s duties. He is responsible
for sorting the garbage; she is responsible for looking after her baby;
the Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for monitoring air
pollution; and so on. In these cases, the term singles out the duties,
or “area of responsibility,” that somebody has by virtue of their role.
This usage bears at least one straightforward relation to the question
of retrospective responsibility. We will tend to hold someone
responsible when she fails to perform her duties. A captain is
responsible for the safety of the ship; hence he will be held
responsible if there is a shipwreck. The usual justification for this
lies in the thought that if he had taken his responsibility more
seriously, then his actions might have averted the shipwreck. In some
cases, though, when we are entrusted with responsibility for something,
we will be held responsible if harm occurs, regardless of whether we
might have averted it. This might be true if we hire a car, for
instance: even if an accident were not my fault, the contract may
stipulate that I will be responsible for part of the repair costs. In
order to hire the care in the first place, I accept – take
responsibility for – certain risks.
Legal thinkers, in particular, have pointed out that this suggests one
way in which Kantian approaches – that is, approaches to responsibility
which focus on acts and outcomes that were under a person’s control –
may be inadequate. We may think that everybody has a duty (that is, a
prospective responsibility) to make recompense when certain sorts of
risks materialize from their actions. A standard example: an accident,
where I slip and break a vase in your shop. This is probably not
something I had control over, and to avoid the risk of damaging any of
your possessions, I would have to avoid entering your shop altogether.
Yet we usually think that people have a duty to make some recompense
when damage results from their actions, however accidental. From the
point of view of our interacting with one another, the issue is not
really whether a person could have avoided a particular, unfortunate
outcome, so much as the fact that all our actions create risks – and
when those risks materialize, someone suffers. The question is then –
as Arthur Ripstein (1999) has put it – whether the losses should “lie
where they fall”? To say that they should is basically to shrug our
shoulders about the damage; in that case, the only person who suffers
is the shop-owner. But we often think that losses should be
redistributed. For that to happen, someone else has to make some sort
of amends – in this case, the person who caused the accident will have
to accept responsibility.
In terms of prospective responsibility, then, we may think that
everyone has a duty to make certain amends when certain risks of action
actually materialize – just because all our actions impose risks on
others as well as ourselves. In this case, retrospective responsibility
is justified, not by whether the person controlled the outcome or could
have chosen to do otherwise, but by reference to these prospective
responsibilities. Notice, however, that we might want to distinguish
the duty to make amends from the issue of blameworthiness. One might
accept the above account as to why the customer should compensate the
owner of the broken vase, but add that in such a case she is not to blame
for the breakage. There is clearly some merit to this response. It
suggests that retrospective responsibility is more complicated than is
often thought: blameworthiness and liability to compensate are
different things, and may need to be justified in different ways.
However, this question has not really been systematically pursued by
moral philosophers, although the distinction between moral culpability
and liability to punishment has attracted much attention among legal
philosophers.
The connection between prospective and retrospective responsibility
raises another complication. This stems from the fact that people often
disagree about what they ought to do – that is, about what people’s
prospective responsibilities are. This question of moral disagreement
is not often mentioned in debates about responsibility, but may be
rather important. To take an example: people have very different
beliefs about the ethics of voluntary euthanasia – some call it “mercy
killing,” others outright murder. Depending on our view, we will tend
to blame or to condone the person who kills to end grave suffering. In
other words, different views of somebody’s prospective responsibilities
will lead to very different views of how retrospective responsibility
ought to be assigned. One might even argue that many of our moral
disagreements are actually brought to light, and fought out, when
actors and on-lookers dispute what responses are appropriate. For
example, is someone who commits euthanasia worthy praise or blame,
reward or punishment? These disagreements, often very vocal, are
important for the whole topic of responsibility, because they relate to
how moral agents come to be aware of what morality demands of them.
Kantian ethics typically describes moral agency in terms of the
co-authorship of moral norms: the rational agent imposes norms upon
herself, and so can regard herself as an “author” of morality. (This
element of Kantian ethics can be difficult to appreciate, because Kant
is so clear that everyone should impose the same objective morality on
themselves.) Whether or not one accepts the Kantian emphasis upon
rationality or a universalist morality, it is clear that an important
element of responsible agency consists in judging one’s own
responsibilities. Hence, we do not tend to describe a dutiful child as
responsible. This is because he obeys, rather than exercising his own
judgment about what he ought to do. This issue is not just about how we
judge our own duties, however: it’s also about how others judge us, and
our right to judge others. So far as others regard us as responsible,
they will recognize that we also have a right to judge what people’s
prospective responsibilities are, and how retrospective responsibility
ought to be assigned. Importantly, people can recognize one another as
responsible in this way, even in the face of quite deep moral
disagreements. By the same token, we know how disrespectful it is of
someone, not to take her moral judgments seriously.
The question of how far we are entitled to judge prospective
responsibilities – our own and other people’s – and how far we are
entitled to judge retrospective responsibilities – our own and others’
– raises yet another complication for how we think about
responsibility. As the example of childhood suggests, there can be
degrees of responsibility. Ascribing different degrees of
responsibility may be necessary or appropriate with regard to different
sorts of decision-making. Hence we sometimes say, “He’s not ready for
that sort of responsibility” or “She couldn’t be expected to understand
the implications of that sort of choice.” In the first place, such
statements highlight the close connection between prospective and
retrospective responsibility: it will not be appropriate to hold
someone (fully) responsible for his actions if he was faced with
responsibilities that were unrealistic and over-demanding. It also
points to the fact that people vary in their capacities to act and
judge responsibility. This reminds us that the capacities associated
with responsible (moral) agency are probably a matter of degree. It
might also remind us of a fourth use of “responsibility”: to name a
virtue of character.
d. Responsibility as a VirtueWhile
theories of moral agency tend to regard an agent as either responsible
or not, with no half-measures, our everyday language usually deploys
the term “responsible” in a more nuanced way. As just indicated, one
way we do this is by weighing degrees of responsibility, both with
regard to the sort of prospective responsibilities a person should bear
and a person’s liability to blame or penalties. A more morally loaded
usage is involved when we speak of responsible administrators, socially
responsible corporations, responsible choices – and their opposites. In
these cases, we use the term “responsible” as a term of praise:
responsibility represents a virtue that people (and organizations) may
exhibit in one area of their conduct, or perhaps exemplify in their
entire lives.
In such cases, our meaning is usually quite clear. The responsible
person can be relied on to judge and to act in certain morally
desirable ways; in the case of more demanding (“more responsible”)
roles, the person can be trusted to exercise initiative and to
demonstrate commitment; and when things go wrong, such a person will be
prepared to take responsibility for dealing with things. One way of
putting this might be to say that the responsible person can be counted
on take her responsibilities seriously. We will not need to hold her
responsible, because we can depend on her holding herself responsible.
Another way of putting the matter would be much more contentious, and
harkens back to the question of whether we should think of moral agency
as a matter of degree. One might claim that the responsible person
possesses the elements pertaining to moral agency (such as capacities
to judge moral norms or to respond to others) to a greater degree than
the irresponsible person. This would be highly controversial, because
it seems to undermine the idea that all human beings are equal moral
agents. However, it would help us to see why a term we sometimes use to
describe all moral agents can also be used to praise some people rather
than others.
However this may be, it is fair to say that this usage of “responsible”
has received the least attention from philosophers. This is interesting
given that this is clearly a virtue of considerable importance in
modern societies. At any rate, it is possible to see some important
connections between the virtue and the areas that philosophers have
emphasized.
The irresponsible person is not one who lacks prospective
responsibilities, nor is she one who may not be held responsible
retrospectively. It is only that she does not take her responsibilities
seriously. Note, however, that the more responsible someone is, the
more we will be inclined to entrust her with demanding roles and
responsibilities. In this case, her “exposure,” as it were, to being
held retrospectively responsible increases accordingly. And the same is
true in the opposite direction, when someone consistently behaves less
responsibly. An illuminating essay by Herbert Fingarette (1967)
considers the limit case of the psychopath, someone who shows
absolutely no moral concern for others, nor any sensitivity to moral
reproach. Perhaps our first response will be to say that such a person
is irresponsible, even evil. Fingarette argues we must finally conclude
that he is in fact not a candidate for moral responsibility – that he
is not a moral agent, not to be assigned prospective responsibilities,
not to be held retrospectively responsible for his actions. In other
words, it only makes sense to grade someone as responsible or
irresponsible, so long as holding her responsible has any prospect of
making her act more responsibly. The psychopath will never be
responsive to blame, nor ever feel guilt. In fact, as someone who will
never take any responsibility seriously, he does not qualify as a moral
agent at all – as being responsible in its most basic sense. This might
sound like writing the person a blank check to behave utterly
immorally, but two points should be remembered: First, society protects
itself against such people, often by incarcerating them as insane
(“psychopathy” names a mental disorder). Second, the Kantian account
reminds us that not to treat someone as responsible for her actions is
to fail to respect her as the author of her deeds. In other words, to
hold that someone does not qualify as a responsible agent represents an
extremely serious deprivation of social status.
Looking at the matter positively, we can also say that a person who
exhibits the virtue of responsibility lives up to the three other
aspects of responsibility in an exemplary way. First, she exercises the
capacities of responsible moral agency to a model degree. Second, she
approaches her previous actions and omissions with all due concern,
being prepared to take responsibility for any failings she may have
shown. And third, she takes her prospective responsibilities seriously,
being both a capable judge of what she should do, and willing to act
accordingly.
3. Moral versus Legal ResponsibilityAs
some of the examples of retrospective and prospective responsibility
indicate, law has an especial connection with questions of
responsibility. Legal institutions often assign responsibilities to
people, and hold them responsible for failing to fulfill these
responsibilities – either via the criminal law and policing, or by
allowing other parties to bring them to court via the civil law, for
example when a contract is breached. Accordingly, the justification of punishment represents a major concern of philosophy of law.
Likewise, legal philosophers, including figures such as H.L.A. Hart,
Herbert Morris and Joel Feinberg, have written a great deal about the
philosophy of responsibility. Their discussions have had considerable
influence on moral and political philosophers.
The most obvious point, that all writers will endorse, is that legal
and moral responsibility often overlap, but will diverge on some
occasions. In the liberal state we can hope that there will be
systematic convergence, inasmuch as the law will uphold important moral
precepts, especially concerning the protection of rights. (In a corrupt
or tyrannical state, on the other hand, it is obviously very common
that legal and moral responsibility have no relation at all. Tyrants
often demand that their subjects be complicit in immorality, such as
harming the innocent.) An example where law and morality clearly
overlap is murder: it is both a legal crime and an egregious moral
wrong. Few would dispute, then, that murder ought to be punished, both
legally and morally speaking.
However, the law does not punish attempted murder in the same way as an
actual murder – that is, it does not prioritize intentions over
outcomes in the same way that many believe that moral judgment should.
The difference between murder and grievous bodily harm may not lie in
the intention or even in the actual wounds inflicted: everything
depends on the outcome, that is, whether death results. Thus the crimes
attract different punishments, though our moral judgment of someone may
be no lighter in the case of a particularly vicious assault. One way of
putting this is to say that the law is concerned with definite
outcomes, and only secondarily with intentions. Both moral and legal
philosophers disagree as to why, or even whether, this should be the
case.
A distinguished line of thought, exemplified by H.L.A. Hart in his
essay “Legal Responsibility and Excuses” (in Hart, 1968), holds that
legal responsibility should be understood in different terms to moral
judgment. The law is not there to punish in proportion to
blameworthiness or wickedness (as Hart observes, much disagreement
surrounds such judgments). Instead, the law provides people who are
competent to choose with reasons to act in socially responsible ways.
Hart focuses on excuses under the law, such as insanity or coercion.
Law admits such excuses in spite of their possible consequentialist
disutility (excuses may well decrease the deterrent force of law,
because some people might hope to misuse these excuses to wriggle out
of legal accountability). For Hart, excuses are an important part of a
system that does not just seek to prevent crime, but also to protect
choice; as a result, law does not punish those who were not able to
choose their actions. Under such a “choosing system,” “individuals can
find out, in general terms at least, the costs they have to pay if they
act in certain ways” (1968: 44). In this way, law can foster “the prime
social virtue of self-restraint” (1968: 182). Law can also respect what
Peter Strawson stressed in “Freedom and Resentment” (1962): that our
social relations depend on our emotional responses to people’s
voluntary actions. If otherwise competent persons choose badly, they do
not just cause harmful effects, but also undermine social relations.
Hart’s justification of punishment, then, holds that attributions of
(legal) responsibility help uphold social order while respecting
individual choice. His account therefore combines a consequentialist
emphasis on external actions and outcomes with an important mental
element: punishment is only appropriate in case of competent choice,
that is, where excusing conditions do not apply. However, Hart
emphasizes that his account does not apply to moral judgment, about
which his views seem to be more or less Kantian.
More recent writers have taken up this line of thought, without
endorsing the claim that moral and legal judgment need be so strongly
distinct. Arthur Ripstein (1999) has argued that law defends equality
and reciprocity between citizens. It therefore has to protect people’s
interests in freedom of action as well their interests in security of
person and property. Law has to be concerned with fairness to victims
as well as fairness to culprits. To do this, it defines a system of
prospective responsibilities that protect the interests of all, and
holds people retrospectively responsible for breaches. For instance,
the coercive measure of punishment is called for where a person
disregards another’s liberty or security interests. Threats or attempts
also disregard those interests and may be punishable, but they do not
undermine equality in social relations as severely as successful
violations of rights. (As Ripstein notes, his approach actually
descends from Kant’s account of punishment, which works in a different
way to Kant’s account of moral imputation. On this, see Hill, 2002.)
Ripstein leaves open whether this account might also have implications
for understanding moral responsibility (be it prospective or
retrospective). However, his underlying idea – concerning fairness to
both wrong-doer and victim – does suggest problems for accounts of
retrospective moral responsibility that focus (in more or less Kantian
fashion) only on the culprit’s choice and intentions.
A quite different school of thought, recently exemplified in the work
of Michael Moore (1998), endorses a recognizably Kantian view of moral
responsibility, and argues that the law ought to share this approach.
Apart from the theoretical difficulties that face the Kantian approach
to moral responsibility, however, this school of thought has to claim
that large parts of legal practice are misconceived. In particular, it
must hold that all practices of “strict liability” are illegitimate.
Strict liability is the practice of holding a person accountable if
certain harms materialize, even where she could not have done anything
to prevent those harms coming about. (Contrast Ripstein’s account just
given, or the above example of the customer who accidentally breaks a
vase in a shop.) Similarly, Moore’s approach faces severe difficulties
in explaining why the law should punish on the basis of outcomes and
not only intentions – even though every legal system shares this
feature.
Legal responsibility has another interesting relation to the question
of responsible agency. In addition to admitting “excusing conditions”
such as insanity, systems of law stipulate various age conditions as to
who counts as responsible. For example, all jurisdictions have an age
of criminal responsibility: a person under the age of, say, twelve
cannot be punished for murder. Likewise, law permits only people above
certain ages to engage in various activities: drinking alcohol, voting,
standing as an elected representative, entering into contracts,
consenting to medical treatment, and so forth. Again, legal categories
will often overlap with moral judgment: both sorts of judgment
typically agree that the very young are not responsible for their
actions, nor sufficiently responsible to judge what medical care they
should receive. That said, our non-legal judgments about when a person
becomes sufficiently mature to be responsible invariably depend on the
person, as well as on the difficult question of what degree of maturity
is necessary to responsible conduct in different spheres of life.
4. Collective ResponsibilityIn
recent decades increasing attention has been given to the question of
collective responsibility. This question can arise wherever the actions
of a group of people combine to generate a particular result – whether
a corporation, or the citizens of a state, or even individuals who have
no particular connection to one another. (A well-known example of the
last is “the tragedy of the commons,” when lots of people use a shared
resource – for instance, everyone using the commons as grazing land for
their cattle – resulting in the degradation of that resource. Our
increasing awareness of damage to environment has given this case
particular contemporary importance.) There are questions about the
responsibilities of the collective, and of the individual as a member
of that body. Recall that one of the original uses of the word
responsible” was to describe a desirable quality of government, and
that we still use the word in this way to praise some institutions,
just as we may criticize a corporation or group as irresponsible.
Many perplexities about shared responsibility arise from the thought that
individuals are responsible agents, in a way that groups cannot be. A well-known
formulation captures this problem neatly: “No soul to damn, no body to kick”
(Coffee, 1981). As pointed out above, it is usually thought that a person can be
blamed or deserve punishment by virtue of certain psychological capacities
(“soul”), as well as by virtue of being the same person (“body”) today as she
was yesterday. On this account, there is a serious puzzle as to how a collective
can be responsible, since a collective lacks the psychological capacities of an
individual person (but see the Encyclopedia article on collective intentionality)
and its membership tends to alter over time. Note, however, that if we
think of responsibility in terms of capacities to interact in the light
of shared norms – as the Humean account of moral agency might suggest –
rather than as a matter of particular psychological capacities, then we
need not be so concerned with those capacities nor, perhaps, with
changes in membership.
A separate article, collective moral responsibility,
discusses the issues that arise here. It may be useful, however, to
indicate briefly how the four aspects of individual responsibility
discussed above might apply to the collective case.
The Agency of Groups
In the first place, it is clear that collective bodies can function as
agents, at least in some circumstances. Groups and organizations can
pursue particular policies, respect legal requirements, reach decisions
about how to respond to situations, and create important benefits and
costs for other agents. They can also offer an account of their
previous actions and policies, setting out how and why these were
decided upon. However, these abilities clearly depend upon the
collective’s being appropriately organized, which is a matter of
internal communication, deliberative mechanisms, and allocation of
responsibilities to individuals. Clearly, organizations may function
better or worse in all these regards – as may the other organizations
with which they interact and which may, in turn, hold them responsible.
Retrospective Responsibility of Collectives
By the same token, collective bodies can be held
responsible. In fact, law does this all the time, at least for formally
established collectives that are not states, for example, corporations,
charities and statutory bodies such as government agencies. Responsible
officers may be called to account – to answer for their organization’s
actions, to be dismissed or even punished if that account is
unsatisfactory. As a body, the collective owns property and acts in
systematic ways: legal measures can therefore make it provide
compensation, or exact fines simply as a punishment; a court can order
the body to act differently or to remedy a particular case or
situation.
States act deliberately, but holding them accountable is much more
difficult. States can commit the most serious wrongs, waging war or
inflicting grave injustice upon their own peoples. International law
attempts to codify some duties of states, and the duties of individuals
who govern them. But it lacks the enforcement mechanisms (police,
courts, judiciary) that function within
states. Examples of attempts to hold states and their agents
retrospectively responsible include: South Africa’s well-known Truth
and Reconciliation Commission, which addressed the brutalities of the
old apartheid regime; the trial of individuals, such as the 1961
Jerusalem trial of Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann; and the exacting of
reparations following the defeat of a state, for instance the notorious
Versailles agreement that penalized Germany for its role in the First
World War.
As the article on collective moral responsibility discusses, imposing
liabilities, punishments or duties onto collective bodies will finally
involve costs or duties for individuals. This poses many difficult
questions about how the supposed responsibilities of the group might be
traced back to particular individuals. Perhaps the people who were most
to blame have died or moved jobs or are otherwise out of reach. Should
the citizens of a country make amends for the wrong-doing of their
forefathers, for instance? Ought a corporation that has fired its top
managers still be liable to pay fines for the misdeeds that those
former managers led the corporation into? For many, such questions
highlight the most puzzling aspect of collective responsibility, namely
that individuals might justly be required to make amends for others’
actions and policies.
Prospective Responsibilities of Groups
For formally organized collectives, prospective
responsibilities are often codified by law, or (in the case of a
charity, for instance) specified in a group’s constitution. As in the
individual case, of course, our moral judgment may differ from codified
responsibilities: not only moral but also political arguments often
surround these allocations of responsibility. Proponents of corporate
social responsibility, for example, generally hold that companies’
responsibilities extend much beyond their legal duties, including wider
obligations to the communities amongst which they operate and to the
natural environment. Just as in the case of individuals, attempts to
hold groups and organizations retrospectively accountable often,
therefore, reveal serious moral disagreements, and invariably have a
political dimension, too.
Responsibility as a Virtue
Groups, companies, and states can all be more or less
responsible. Originally, “responsible government” described government
responsive to the wants and needs of its citizens; in the same way, we
now speak of corporate social responsibility. As in the individual
case, for collectives to exhibit the virtue of responsibility depends
on the other three aspects of responsibility discussed in this article.
With regard to moral agency, it will require good internal
organization, so that the body is aware of its situation, capacities,
actions and impacts. With regard to retrospective responsibility, it
involves a willingness and ability to deal with failings and omissions,
and to learn from these. In terms of prospective responsibility, the
collective’s activities and policies must be aptly chosen, conformable
to wider moral norms, and properly put into effect. As with
individuals, how far a body is likely to do these things also depends
on how far those around it (that is, both individuals and other
collectives) act responsibly. For instance, others will need to form
appropriate expectations of the collective, and be prepared to enforce
these expectations fairly and reasonably.
5. ConclusionThis article has
pointed to four dimensions of responsibility, reflecting the various
ways in which the word is used. Moral agency can also be termed
responsible agency, meaning that a person is open to moral evaluation.
This sort of moral status points in two directions. It means that a
person’s actions can be judged morally, so that various responses such
as praise or punishment may be appropriate – this is the stuff of
retrospective responsibility. In the other direction, a moral agent has
particular duties or concerns – the stuff of prospective
responsibility. Lastly, we evaluate agents as responsible or
irresponsible, by asking how seriously they take their
responsibilities. This involves evaluating them in terms of how far
they exercise (or possess) the capacities pertaining to moral agency,
how they approach their past actions and failings, and how they
approach their duties and areas of responsibility. As we have seen,
writers differ concerning the connections between moral and legal
responsibility, but it is also true that these four dimensions all find
echo in legal uses of responsibility.
Philosophical discussion often considers these aspects of
responsibility only with regard to individuals, so that the term
“collective responsibility” appears puzzling, despite its frequent
usage in everyday life. The final part of this article briefly
considered how each of these dimensions can be applied to groups,
although it has left aside some difficult questions that arise – for
example, how a group’s retrospective responsibilities can be fairly
apportioned to individuals, or how collectives can be organized so as
to be more or less responsible.
This article began by observing that the word responsibility is
surprisingly modern, and that two quite different philosophical stories
have been told about it. Very little was said concerning the first
story, concerning responsibility in political thought. However, it has
pointed out that the concept extends more widely than modern
philosophical debates tend to acknowledge. Prospective responsibility
relates to the fine-grained division of responsibilities involved in
the different roles which people adopt in modern societies – above all,
the different spheres of responsibility which we are given in the
workplace. By the same token, responsibility has clearly become a very
important virtue in modern societies.
In conclusion, then, let me point to one possible connection between
the original political story, and responsibility as we most often use
the term today. (See also Pettit, 2001, for another account.)
Uncertainty and disagreement about how we should live together is one
of the most marked features of modern life. We live in an age when both
individuals and organizations are asked to be endlessly flexible. Our
roles and responsibilities are continually changing and continually
challenged. Uncertainty and disagreement about prospective
responsibilities are always passing over into disputes about
retrospective responsibility, as we hold one another accountable. We
all face the test, then, of how to conduct ourselves amid this
uncertainty and disagreement. It is surely one hallmark of the person
who exhibits the virtue of responsibility that she contributes to
cooperation in the face of this difficult situation. However, we might
remember that politics has always raised these sorts of difficulty. In
modern societies, negotiation, compromise and judgment are required,
not just of those who take on formal political office, but of all of
us. It is surely no wonder, then, that we no longer think of
responsibility as only a question for the political sphere.
6. References and Further Reading
Adkins, A.W.H. (1960) Merit and Responsibility,
Clarendon Press, Oxford – argues that the Greeks lacked modern, Kantian
notions of duty and fairness in assigning responsibility.
Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics – the most readable translation is Roger Crisp’s, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.
Bok, Hilary (1998) Freedom and Responsibility, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ – a Kantian analysis of moral agency and retrospective responsibility.
Bovens, Mark (1998) The Quest for Responsibility: Accountability and Citizenship in Complex Organizations,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge – investigates how regulation,
organisational reform, and different means of accountability can
address irresponsibility on the part of institutions.
Coffee, Jr., John (1981) “‘No Soul to Damn: No Body to Kick’: An
Unscandalized Inquiry into the Problem of Corporate Punishment” Michigan Law Review, 79, 386-460.
Duff, R.A. (1990) Intention, Agency and Criminal Liability,
Blackwell, Oxford, Chapters 3-5 – a careful analysis of moral and legal
responsibility, focusing on the centrality of intentional action.
Feinberg, Joel (1970) Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility, Princeton University Press, Princeton – a collection of classic essays on moral and legal responsibility.
Fingarette, Herbert (1967) “Acceptance of Responsibility” in his On Responsibility,
Basic Books, New York – the essay referred to above, which takes the
example of psychopathy and argues that responsibility attributions are
intelligible only insofar as they connect up with a person’s existing
moral concern.
Fingarette, Herbert (2004) Mapping Responsibility: Explorations in Mind, Law, Myth, and Culture,
Open Court, Chicago – a collection of notably succinct essays,
summarizing a life-time’s careful reflection on many aspects of
responsibility.
Fischer, John Martin & Mark Ravizza (1998) Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge – contemporary restatement of the
idea that responsibility relates to rational control over one’s actions.
Hart, H.L.A. (1968) Punishment and Responsibility,
Oxford University Press, Oxford – a noted twentieth century legal
theorist analyses legal and moral responsibility, strongly defending
distinctions between moral and legal responsibility, and between
“punishment” and (in case of insanity) “treatment” .
Hill, Thomas E (2002) Human Welfare and Moral Worth: Kantian Perspectives,
Clarendon, Oxford – Chapters 9 & 10 explain how Kant’s account of
punishment is distinct from his account of moral imputation.
Hume, David (1777) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
(various editions) – Appendix IV, “Of some verbal disputes,” argues
that there is no real line between a talent and a (moral) virtue, and
that the real question concerning any character trait is whether it
elicits approval (praise) or disapproval (blame) .
Jaspers, Karl (1947) The Question of German Guilt,
translated by E.B. Ashton, Dial Press, New York – a classic reflection
on the issues facing Germany after the second world war, posed in terms
of criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical guilt.
Jonas, Hans (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago – argues that our new power to
destroy nature creates a historically novel responsibility toward
future generations.
Kant, Immanuel (1793) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone,
books I & II (various translations) – Kant’s most sustained
investigation of the basis on which individuals can be held accountable
for failing to live up to morality. .
Korsgaard, Christine (1996) “Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations” in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge – a sophisticated Kantian account
of responsibility, that quietly takes leave of Kant’s own views on the
matter.
Korsgaard, Christine (1996) The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Kutz, Christopher (2000) Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge – a study of collective
responsibility, arguing that individuals can justly be held responsible
for group actions, in ways that need not mirror their individual
contributions.
McKeon, Richard (1957) “The development and the significance of the concept of responsibility” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, XI, no. 39, 3-32 – a historical study of the concept, stressing its political roots.
Moore, Michael (1998) Placing Blame,
Clarendon Press, Oxford – argues that legal responsibility and moral
(retrospective) responsibility should both be understood in Kantian
manner, based on the culpability that can only owe to a person’s free
choices.
Pettit, Philip (2001) A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency,
Polity, Cambridge – an account of responsible agency that emphasizes
both responsiveness to reasons and the interactive nature of
responsibility attribution, and explores the connection between
individual agency and political contexts.
Ricoeur, Paul (1992) “The concept of responsibility: an essay in semantic analysis” in his The Just,
trans David Pellauer, University of Chicago Press, Chicago – a
demanding but astonishingly rich essay analyzing the concept
historically and in relation to the fundamentals of human agency.
Ripstein, Arthur (1999) Equality, Responsibility and the Law,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge – an important recent discussion,
that disavows the “voluntarism” (the focus on individual capacities
underlying responsible agency and the fairness of retrospective
responsibility) of many moral and legal accounts of responsibility, by
suggesting that legal practices of responsibility are essentially about
fostering fair terms of interaction.
Russell, Paul (1995) Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume’s Way of Naturalising Responsibility,
Oxford University Press, New York – shows how Hume’s approach is more
sophisticated than a narrow utilitarian “economy of threats” theory.
Scanlon, T M (1998) What We Owe to Each Other,
Chapter 6: “Responsibility,” Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA –
attacks a simple account of retrospective responsibility in terms of
choice (“the forfeiture view”), for a more sophisticated “value of
choice” view.
Sher, George (1987) Desert, Princeton University Press, Princeton – a careful, advanced study of the concept of desert.
Smart, J.J.C. (1961) “Free will, praise and blame” Mind 70, 291-306 – a clear and succinct utilitarian account of praise and blame.
Smiley, Marion (1992) Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community: Power and Accountability from a Pragmatic Point of View,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago – criticizes conventional
discussions of freedom and determinism, claiming that they fail to
investigate the idea of responsibility.
Strawson, Peter (1962) “Freedom and resentment” Proceedings of the British Academy 48, 1-25, reprinted in his Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays,
Methuen, London, 1974 – a classic essay, that seeks to bypass “free
will” based accounts of responsibility for one based on moral
sentiments such as resentment, reflecting the line of thought labeled
above as Humean.
Wallace, R. Jay (1994) Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA – seeks to mediate between the
Humean and Kantian accounts of (retrospective) responsibility sketched
above, by asking when it is fair to hold someone responsible and thus
expose them to “reactive” emotions such as resentment or indignation.
Watson, Gary (1982) Free Will, Oxford University Press, Oxford – a useful anthology of twentieth century treatments of free will, including Strawson (1962) .
Williams, Bernard (1981) “Internal and external reasons,” in his Moral Luck, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Williams, Bernard (1993) Shame and Necessity,
University of California Press, Berkeley – argues that the ancient
Greeks had a sophisticated account of responsibility attribution.
Though Williams relies on ancient Greek texts, his own views are
identifiably Humean, and can be read as a reply to Adkins’ (1960)
quasi-Kantian critique of Greek morality.
Williams, Bernard (1995) Making Sense of Humanity and other Philosophical Papers, 1982-1993, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Chapters 1-3.
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