Responsibility

This article focuses on the moral responsibility of individual persons. The early sections consider four different aspects of this. (1) Moral agency, or what it is for a person to count as responsible per se; (2) retrospective responsibility – when we look at the actions a responsible person has already performed, and ask (for example) whether we should blame or punish him or her; (3) prospective responsibility – this forward-looking use of responsibility concerns what a person should do now or in the future, perhaps because of a role that she or he occupies and should fulfil; and (4) responsibility as a virtue – when we use the word “responsible” to praise a person. Two further sections discuss the relation between legal and moral responsibility, and the responsibility of collectives such as groups or organisations.

Most philosophical discussion concerns individual moral agency and questions of retrospective responsibility. This article points out that when we think about all the meanings that “responsibility” bears we take a wider view of the concept. This may be helpful in thinking about how collectives as well as individuals may be responsible. It may also help us to understand why responsibility is now such a widely used concept – not just in philosophy but in everyday life – although it was formerly a prominent concept only in political theory and political debate.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Individual Responsibility
   1. Moral Agency
   2. Retrospective Responsibility
   3. Prospective Responsibility
   4. Responsibility as a Virtue
   5. Moral versus Legal Responsibility
3. Collective Responsibility
   1. The Agency of Groups
   2. Retrospective Responsibility of Collectives
   3. Prospective Responsibilities of Groups
   4. Responsibility as a Virtue
4. Conclusion
5. References and Further Reading

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). Or to put the matter slightly differently, 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. Thus the Oxford English Dictionary cites the Federalist Papers (1787) and 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, rather with the principles of representative government. At the end of the nineteenth century, the most notable thinker to speak of responsibility is Max Weber.  Weber propounds an ethics of responsibility, a “Verantwortungsethik”, for the politician. He suggests that the vocation of politics demands a calm attention to the facts of the situation and the consequences of actions, as opposed to an ethics of personal integrity.

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? Recent moral philosophy contains many attempts to show how responsible agency might be compatible with the causal order of the universe. This usage obviously centres on the individual agent. As such, it poses difficulties for understanding the topic of collective responsibility – an issue that twentieth century politics has raised with a new urgency. Nor does it correspond very closely to many everyday concerns 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.

Another article considers collective moral responsibility, and this article deals mainly with the responsibility of individual persons. 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. This article will then consider what relations there may be between the concept’s individual and collective uses. It will conclude 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 Responsibility

Reflecting Ricoeur’s comment above, it is important to note that there is no philosophically well-settled way of dividing or analyzing the various components of responsibility – and that some components are often ignored. To take a more comprehensive approach, I suggest that we can divide 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 see why this should be, philosophers tend to turn to psychological and metaphysical features of normal adults, such as free will or the capacity to respond to moral (and other) reason. We might also approach the same issue with a somewhat different emphasis: which features of 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 is considered 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”; compare the more recent demand that corporations be “socially responsible”. This aspect of the question has received little philosophical attention.

“What is a person responsible for?” is most often asked by philosophers in connection with causation and accountability. This 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 a different question; “what is a person responsible for?” might 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. Against questions of retrospective responsibility, this topic is sometimes termed prospective responsibility – which responsibilities we are duty-bound to undertake.

These two apparently simple questions 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 involve the relation between legal and moral responsibility. Many important theories of responsibility relate to legal concerns, these are discussed below. As we pursue these topics it is necessary to be clear about how they interrelate, so it makes sense to use the same word to raise each issue.

I begin with the topics which philosophers have most often discussed: the nature of moral agency and retrospective responsibility.

a. Moral Agency

Normal human adults represent our paradigm case of responsible agents. What is distinctive about humans, such that they can be held accountable for their actions – so that they can (thinking of retrospective responsibility) be justly praised or blamed, deservedly punished or rewarded?

The philosophical literature has explored three broad approaches to this question:

1. Human beings have free will, that is, distinctive causal powers or a special metaphysical status, that separate them from everything else in the universe.
2. Human beings can act on the basis of reason(s).
3. Human beings have a certain set of moral or proto-moral feelings.

Although historically important, the first approach has largely been discredited by the success of modern science in providing, or promising, naturalistic explanations of such phenomena as the evolution of the human species and the workings of the brain. Most modern philosophers approach responsibility as compatibilists – that is, they assume that moral responsibility must be compatible with causal or naturalistic explanations 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 b. and c. – 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. What is indisputable, however, is that our rationality is at the centre of his picture of moral agency. Kant himself only occasionally speaks 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. Apart from his account of legal punishment, however, Kant was principally concerned with evaluation of the self. Although he occasionally mentions blame (mutual accountability), then, his moral theory really concerns the basis on which a person regards 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.

The moral role of reason represents a key issue that 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 concerns our tendencies to feel shame or guilt, or more broadly, to be concerned with how others see us and the effects of our actions on others. 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) explicitly develops Hume’s own account. In twentieth century philosophy, broadly Humean approaches were given a new lease of life by Peter Strawson’s classic essay, “Freedom and Resentment” (1962). This 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 very simple. Kantians are open 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 it mysterious how human beings and morality might have evolved. Humeans are open 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 to take account of such criticisms. This has led to rather technical debates about the nature of reason, such as the question of normativity, what it is for something to provide a reason to act or think in a certain way (e.g. Korsgaard, 1996b) and Bernard Williams’ (1981) well-known distinction between internal and external reasons. Regarding responsibility, Wallace (1994) makes a well-received 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 morality 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 morally competent authors of their deeds and to feel resentful or grateful to them as fellow participants in social life). In each case, the first example in brackets has a typically Kantian (reason-based) cast, the second a Humean (feeling/emotion-related) cast.

There are 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 moral agency is a matter of degree. One possible implication is that some other animals might have a degree of moral agency; another, 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 which opposes free will to determinism. However, whether we emphasize the rational or the affective basis for responsible agency has tended to generate characteristically different accounts of retrospective responsibility, where the issue of free will tends to recur.

b. Retrospective Responsibility

In assigning responsibility for an outcome or event, we can 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. Philosophers sometimes distinguish this usage by referring to “causal responsibility”. More commonly, however, responsibility attribution is concerned with the morality of somebody’s actions or omissions. Among the many different causes that led to an outcome, we identify the one which is morally salient. 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. Again, 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 will tend to picture them 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 excusing conditions he mentions intoxication, force of circumstances, and coercion. We cannot be held responsible where our capacity to choose is 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.

Aristotle agrees with Kant that our capacities for deliberation and choice are important to responsible agency – without these, we would not be the sort of beings with the moral power to act well or badly, a power that is found in no other animal. However, 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 the excusing conditions he lists represent cases where an action does not reveal a person’s character. Everybody would have to act like that if circumstances provided no other choice; no one (?) is responsible when drunk. On the other hand, how we respond to coercion does reveal much about our virtues and vices, though 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 (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, been so influential in recent accounts of retrospective responsibility. Why should this be so?

One tempting answer might be that Kant’s account gives a more adequate place to desert. One justification for practices of holding responsible that was formerly quite prominent was consequentialist in form. 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, because they ignore the culprit’s desert.

For most people, the intuitive justification for the sort of desert involved in retrospective responsibility consists 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 thinking clearly gives pride of place to our freedom of choice and our capacity to control our conduct in the light of reasons, moral and otherwise. But it is also open to a very obvious objection: our 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. A number of recent authors, however, have sought to challenge the close link between responsibility and control, pointing out (for example) that we often blame people for vices, such as insensitivity or selfishness, even when these seem to be fixed aspects of their characters (see Merrrihew-Adams, 1985; Scanlon, 2008; Sher, 2006; Smith, 2005).

Readers of Kant may easily get the impression that a desert-based account is fundamental to his thought. As well as emphasizing our freedom of choice, Kant often writes that the person who acts well deserves to be happy, and continually refers to goodness as “worthiness to be happy”. Presumably then, the person who has acted badly does not. The difficulty, however, is that Kant does not hold that it is a human responsibility to dole out these deserts, but rather a divine task. In addition, Kant characteristically interprets this as an attitude that each person may take toward her own moral striving, that she might become worthy of happiness; and he never gives any attention to the thought that other people might justly suffer for their wrong-doing.

Instead, modern writers on responsibility who have been inspired by Kant emphasize his insistence that the rational agent can choose whether or not to act on the basis of reasons. Our responsibility for our actions arises from the idea that rational agents should be respected as the authors of their thoughts and actions. Recent Kantian accounts develop the idea – not explicitly found in Kant’s own writings – that when we hold others responsible, we address them as rational agents (see Wolf, 1990; Korsgaard, 1996a; Bok, 1998; Darwall, 2006). They emphasize that respect for the person requires us to address him as one capable of acting in the light of moral reasons. A prominent early statement of this view is also found in Wallace (1994). His account explicitly aims to combine the Humean concern with reactive sentiments (especially as found in Strawson, 1962) with a Kantian emphasis on people’s power to respond to moral reasons.

The article on praise and blame discusses this issue in more depth, contrasting Kant’s approach with that of Aristotle and utilitarianism. Humeans, favouring naturalistic explanations of thought and action, are likely to be drawn to elements of the last two (Aristotle’s emphasis on actions as revealing virtues and vices; the consequentialist emphasis on social benefits of practices of accountability). In particular, they 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 exercise of 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 leads us to the question: what is it about human interaction that means we hold one another responsible? Kantians, on the other hand, tend to think of retrospective responsibility as a matter of respecting individual capacities for rational choice. However, the Kantian view may still allow for mutual influence when “holding responsible” is interpreted as requiring us to address one another with moral reasons.

c. Prospective Responsibility

A rather 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 (“everyone is responsible for looking after his own health”). More typically, we use the term to describe a person’s particular duties. He is responsible for sorting the garbage; she is responsible for looking after her baby; the environment 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. Discussions of the social and political division of responsibilities are found in Richardson (1999) and Williams (2006).

Clearly 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. The 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 the accident were not my fault, the contract may stipulate that I will be responsible for a certain part of the repair costs. I accept – take responsibility for – certain risks.

As legal thinkers in particular, have pointed out, this suggests one inadequacy in approaches to responsibility which focus on acts and outcomes that were under a person’s control. We may think that everybody has a duty (i.e. a prospective responsibility) to make recompense when certain sorts of risks materialize from their actions. A standard example: a pure accident, where I slip and break a vase in your shop, was not something I had control over. 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 some damage results from their actions, however accidental. From the point of view of our interacting with one another, the question is not really whether people could have avoided that 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”? If so, we basically shrug our shoulders about the damage, and the only person who suffers is the shop-owner. Or should the losses be redistributed? For that to happen, someone else has to make some sort of amends – that is, accept responsibility.

In terms of prospective responsibility, then, we may think that everyone has a duty to make certain sorts of 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 separate the duty to make amends from the issue of blameworthiness. It is possible to agree with the above account, but to say that in such a case, a person may be responsible for compensating the owner of the broken vase, even though he 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 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 also raises another complication. This stems from the fact that people often disagree about what they ought to do – that is, what people’s prospective responsibilities are. This is the question of moral disagreement, which is not often mentioned in debates about responsibility but may be rather important (see for instance Calhoun, 1989). 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 (in certain circumstances ought we to help someone die, or must we uphold the sanctity of life?) 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, in this way (that is, when actors and on-lookers dispute what responses are appropriate – praise or blame, reward or punishment, and so on). This is important for the whole topic of responsibility, because it relates to how moral agents come to be aware of what morality demands of them.

Kantian ethics typically sees 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 was so clear that people, or rather their reason, 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, because he obeys, rather than exercising his own judgment about what he ought to do. This issue is not just about how we judge ourselves, however: it’s also about how others see us, and our right to judge others. So far as others regard us as responsible, they will recognise 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 judges of 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. Different degrees 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, this fact again reminds us of the 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 agency are probably a matter of degree. It might also remind us of a fourth use of the term responsibility: as a virtue of character.

d. Responsibility as a Virtue

While 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 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 do 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 harks 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 controversial, because it seems to undermine the idea that all human beings are equally moral agents. However, it would help us see why a term we sometimes use to describe all moral agents can also be used to praise some people above others.

However this may be, it is fair to say that this usage of “responsible” has received the least attention from philosophers, which 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 to the areas that philosophers have emphasized.

The irresponsible person is not one who lacks prospective responsibilities, nor is he one who may not be held responsible retrospectively. It is only that he does not take these responsibilities seriously. Note, however, that the more responsible someone is, the more we will be inclined to entrust them with demanding roles and responsibilities. In this case, their “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 – not a moral agent, not to be assigned prospective responsibilities, not to be held retrospectively responsible. 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 who will never be responsive to blame or feel guilt, and who will never take any responsibility seriously, does not qualify as a moral agent at all – as being responsible in its most basic sense. This might sound as if we’re writing the person a blank cheque to behave utterly immorally. But we should remember that society protects itself against such people, often by incarcerating them as insane (“psychopathy” classifies a mental disorder). Strawson’s famous Humean account observes that we no longer regard such persons as participants in social life; Kantian views remind us that not to treat someone as responsible for his actions is not to respect him as the author of his deeds. In other words, not to be regarded as responsible represents an extremely serious deprivation of social or even moral status.

Looking at the matter positively, we can also say that a person who exhibits the virtue of responsibility lives up to the other three aspects of responsibility in an exemplary way. (1) She exercises the features of responsible moral agency to a model degree. (2) She approaches her previous actions and omissions with all due concern, being prepared to take responsibility for any failings she may have shown. Likewise, she will also be well-placed to judge when and how to hold another person responsible. And (3), she takes her prospective responsibilities seriously, being both a capable judge of what she should do, and willing to act accordingly.

e. Moral versus Legal Responsibility

As 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 fulfil these responsibilities – either directly, 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, much philosophy of responsibility has been written by legal philosophers, including figures such as H.L.A. Hart, Herbert Morris and Joel Feinberg. At the same time, those 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 will obviously be very common that legal and moral responsibility have no relation at all. Tyrants often demand that their subjects be complicit in immoral acts, such as harming the innocent.) An example where law and morality clearly overlap is murder: both a legal crime and an egregious moral wrong. Few would dispute, then, that it 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 focus on intentions, in the same way that many believe that moral judgment should do. The difference between murder and grievous bodily harm may not lie in the intention or even in the actual wounds inflicted: everything depends on whether death results. Thus the crimes will 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 so.

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, it 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 deterrence, because some people might hope to wriggle out of legal accountability). This is because excuses are part of system that does not just seek to prevent crime, but also to protect choice. 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). It will also respect what Peter Strawson stressed in “Freedom and Resentment” (1962): that our social relations depend on our emotional responses to people’s voluntary and intentional 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 with an important mental element: punishment is only appropriate in cases of competent choice, that is, where excusing conditions do not apply. However, Hart emphasizes that his account does not apply to moral judgment.

More recent writers have taken up this same 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. It therefore 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 equal 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 (prospective and 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 agency and intentions of the culprit.

A quite different school of thought, recently exemplified in the work of Michael Moore (1998), endorses a view of moral responsibility that focuses on the intentions of the wrong-doer, and argues that the law ought to share this approach. Note, however, that this school of thought has to claim that large parts of legal practice are misconceived. An account such as Ripstein’s can argue that legal practices of strict liability are legitimate – that is, laws can declare that people may be held accountable if certain harms materialize, even if the person could not have done anything to prevent those harms coming about. 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 only permits people above certain ages to engage in various activities: 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 – the very young are not regarded as responsible for their actions, nor sufficiently responsible to judge what medical care they should receive. Of course, there is no guarantee that this will be so in every case. After all, when a person becomes sufficiently mature to be responsible – twelve, or eighteen, or thirty? – depends on the person, as well as on the difficult question of what degree of maturity is necessary to responsible conduct in one or another sphere of life.

3. Collective Responsibility

In recent decades increasing attention has been given to the question of collective responsibility. This 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 many 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. One of the original uses of the word “responsible” was to describe a desirable quality of a government, and 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). 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, because it lacks the psychological capacities of an individual person (but see the article on collective intentionality) and because 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 virtue of responsibility, or the Humean account of moral agency discussed above 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.

a. 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, a matter of internal communication, deliberative mechanisms, and allocation of responsibilities to individuals. In all these regards, organizations can be more or less well organized – as can the other organizations with which they interact and which may, in turn, hold them responsible.

b. 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: it can be fined for compensation or as a punishment, and it can be ordered 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 we know, waging war or inflicting grave injustice upon their own peoples. International law attempts to codify some of the duties of states, and those who govern them. But it lacks the enforcement mechanisms (police, courts, judiciary) that operate 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 1961 Jerusalem trial of Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann; and the exacting of reparations following the defeat of a state in war, for instance the notorious Versailles agreement that penalised 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 generates many difficult questions about how the supposed responsibilities of the group might be traced back to particular individuals. Perhaps the people who were most influential 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 which has fired all its top managers still be liable to pay fines for the misdeeds that they led the corporation into? For many, this is the most puzzling aspect of collective responsibility, the idea that individuals might justly be required to make amends for others’ actions and policies.

c. Prospective Responsibilities of Groups

For formally organized collectives, even more so than individuals, these 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, moral judgment may differ from codified responsibilities: not only moral but also political argument often surrounds 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 organisations retrospectively accountable therefore often reveal serious moral disagreements, and invariably have a political dimension too.

d. Responsibility as a Virtue

Groups, companies, states can all be more or less responsible. “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 aspects of responsibility. It will require (1) good internal organisation, so that the body is aware of its situation, capacities, actions and impacts; (2) a willingness and ability to deal with failings and omissions, and to learn from these; (3) activities and policies being 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 others around it act responsibly – for instance, in forming appropriate expectations of the collective, and being prepared to enforce these fairly and reasonably.

4. Conclusion

This article has pointed to four dimensions of responsibility, reflecting the various ways in which the word can be 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, and 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, though 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 organised so as to be more or less responsible.

The article began by observing that the word responsibility is surprisingly modern – and that two quite different philosophical stories have been told about it. This article has said very little 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 – especially 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, it is useful to highlight one possible connection between the original political story, and moral 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. We are asked to hold one another accountable, and to negotiate our own responsibilities in terms of the roles we adopt. Uncertainty and disagreement about prospective responsibilities are always passing over into disputes about retrospective responsibility. We all face the challenge, 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. But 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 perhaps no wonder, then, that we no longer think of responsibility as only a question for the political sphere.

5. 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 Organisations (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge).
  • Investigates how regulation, organizational reform, and different means of accountability can address irresponsibility on the part of institutions.
• Calhoun, Cheshire (1989). “Responsibility and Reproach”, Ethics 99, 389 – 406.
• 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.
• Darwall, Stephen (2006). The Second-Person Standpoint (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA).
  • Difficult recent study, arguing that morality is necessarily bound up with mutual   accountability, as we relate to one another as “second persons” (“I” to “you”).
• Duff, R.A. (1990). Intention, Agency and Criminal Liability (Blackwell, Oxford) chs. 3-5.
  • A careful analysis of moral and legal responsibility, focussing on the centrality of intentional action.
• Feinberg, Joel (1970). Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.).
  • 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, IL).
  • 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 analyzes 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 and 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 (trans. 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 (1996a). “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.
• Korsgaard, Christine (1996b). The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge).
• Kutz, Christopher (2000). Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
  • 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.
• Merrihew-Adams, Robert (1985). “Involuntary Sins.” Philosophical Review 94.1: 3–31.
• Moore, Michael (1998). Placing Blame (Clarendon Press, Oxford).
  • Argues that legal responsibility and moral (retrospective) responsibility should both be understood as 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 emphazises both responsiveness to reasons and the interactive nature of responsibility attribution, and explores the connection between individual agency and political contexts.
• Richardson, Henry S. (1999). “Institutionally Divided Moral Responsibility”, Social Philosophy and Policy, 16.2, 214-49.
• Ricoeur, Paul (1992). “The Concept of Responsibility: an Essay in Semantic Analysis” in his The Just, trans. by David Pellauer (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).
  • A demanding but 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 essentially uphold 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, ch. 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.
• Scanlon, T. M. (2008). Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Belknap, Cambridge, MA).
• Sher, George (1987). Desert (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ).
  • A careful, advanced study of the concept of desert.
• Sher, George (2006). “Out of Control”, Ethics 116, 285–301.
• 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.
• Smith, Angela (2005). “Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life”, Ethics 115, 236–271.
• 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 labelled 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 CA).
  • 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), chs. 1-3.
• Williams, Garrath (2006). “ ‘Infrastructures of Responsibility’: The Moral Tasks of Institutions”, Journal of Applied Philosophy 23.2, 207–221.
• Wolf, Susan (1990). Freedom within Reason (Oxford University Press, Oxford).

Author Information

Garrath Williams
Email: g.d.williams@lancaster.ac.uk
Lancaster University
United Kingdom