Some thoughts on responsibility
September 4th 2008 13:39
Errant etymology
* Speculative, masturbatory, for-what-it's-worth etymologising: "Spondere" in Latin is to promise. So perhaps, in the English-language concept of "responsibility", there are the outlines of an old system of morality, based not on some metaphysical code written into the fabric of the universe, but on actual promises person to person, on reputation and reliability, on expectations explicit and implicit, and the rewards and punishments that follow.
(But, without going to the OED for help, it might be the case that the English word is less connected, historically, to promising, and is more closely linked to answering -- as in a "response". Derrida takes this idea and flies with it: "Passions" in Derrida: a critical reader, 1991.)
Responsibility and causation
* "I'm responsible for this" often means "I did it".
* But responsibility doesn't neatly map onto causation.
-- Responsibility without causation: an employer might be responsible for an employee acting independently, or a government might be responsible for the abuses of a previous government (apologies to the stolen generation; apologies of the Japanese government...).
Compare: your actions might redound to my honour; you can bring shame on the family.
-- Causation without responsibility: I can hurt you -- and perhaps it was an accident. Perhaps no one would blame me -- I couldn't have known, I couldn't have foreseen, etc, etc.
* When is someone responsible, and when are they not? From a certain perspective, the matter looks arbitrary. Different cultures draw different lines.
And different ethics within a culture. Consider the expression "to be held responsible" -- sometimes used as if there are two systems, one layered on another -- a more natural system, in terms of which you'd not be responsible, and a second-layer system, that regards you as responsible.
In the context of law, there are notions like "strict liability", "no fault liability" -- self-conscious drawing of the lines -- recognition of the arbitrariness, difficulty, in saying that this cause in these circumstances is "responsible".
Three (related) types of responsibility
* One type of responsibility is to do with specifiable obligations. So I might say "It's your responsibility to hand in this essay by 3pm" -- or, much to the same effect, I could say "It's your obligation to hand in this essay by 3pm".
Similarly, I could accuse you of "failing in your responsibilities", and the "failing" might imply an obvious standard; or I might interview you for a job, and tell you "These are the responsibilities of the position -- to inform management of any delays in projects, to ensure product is delivered on time and meeting these particular benchmarks of quality...".
Of course, "responsibility" and "obligation" never mean quite the same thing.
* Secondly, there is the responsibility that is less to do with clear obligation than with who takes the rap and who takes the credit. Perhaps there is nothing that I should have done, or even could have done, to avoid hitting that pedestrian. And yet I feel responsible, or am responsible.
In this sense, to be responsible is to be open to be treated, or for it to be appropriate that you are treated, in certain ways -- the object, for instance, of practices and attitudes of praise and blame (though I don't think that praise and blame exhaust the field).
(Responsibility shares affinity with "humiliation": when something is humiliated, the change lies not in the object itself, but in the position of the object within a social system.)
* Thirdly, "responsibility" can be used to say not only that this is my area of concern, or the area for which I shall be liable, but it's mine to do with as I wish -- this is my property, my right, or my problem and not yours. -- "Okay, dad, I'm screwing up my life, but my life is my business, my responsibility." Or, as I've been told on this blog: "My children are my responsibility; how dare you interfere in their upbringing."
Assigning responsibility
* There's plenty of situations in which you might ask, "Is this my responsibility?"
And of course I'm thinking less in an employment sense than in a good Samaritan sense. A person falls over in front of you. Or a child is starving to death on the other side of the planet. Or your brother runs into financial problems and needs a loan. "Is this my responsibility?" -- Do I have to do anything? What do I have to do? How much do I have to do? How far does my responsibility go? When must I step in and take action -- how bad do things have to get? And am I to blame if I take no action? (Did everyday German citizens share in the responsibility for the Shoah?)
* A couple of random observations, and then some further thoughts.
-- Obs 1: Sometimes people might ask, "If this is not my responsibility, then whose is it?" -- meaning that everything should be someone's responsibility -- the belief that the entire world is or should be carved into tendable gardens.
If I am the only person who is in a position to do anything (so this thought might continue), then it is my responsibility.
And if there are many people in a position to do something, then I have less responsibility (responsibility and obligation being not black and white, but admitting of degrees: there is less urgency, the imperative occupies a lower rung, I am less liable). Recall the psychology experiment where humans are more inclined to help if they're not in a crowd.
-- Obs 2: Notice that people might ask the responsibility question before asking the "should" question. And sometimes they never get around to "should"; as with the second type of responsibility, their beliefs might dictate area of concern, but give little guidance in terms of rules to be followed, qualities to be maximized.
Moral thinking and language might not be neatly reducible to "should" and "should not" and to questions of obligation.
-- Obs 3: There are two famous Saint Bridgets in the Catholic pantheon, one of Ireland, and one of Sweden, and the Irish Bridget was renowned for her extreme generosity -- giving away everything to beggars, including what didn't belong to her, like her father's jewelled sword.
Viewed with certain assumptions, morality seems to have this all-encompassing demand, seems to challenge us to be Bridgets; there's no principled way to draw a line -- no point at which to say, "This is how much money you should give, and no more"; "These are the people you should care about, and no others"; "This is my responsibility, and that isn't".
And yet we believe there are or should be such lines (a strange "should" here, neither purely practical, nor what would ordinarily be recognized as moral).
* Some further thoughts on assigning responsibility...
So what makes something your responsibility, or otherwise? Different ethical systems answer differently. For instance:
-- There might be a customary assignment of roles and jurisdictions: "This is not your responsibility, because, traditionally, it's not your responsibility."
-- A Kantian attitude. It would be logically consistent if everyone adopted x as their area of concern, and logically inconsistent if they didn't. This thing, x, is your responsibility, because every citizen has to mind their x, because otherwise the state would break down, and we can't have that. If this litter were not your concern, then it would just pile up. (Kant's imperatives, as Mill pointed out, are presented as purely rational and yet contentful, but in practice seem formalistic or consequential.)
-- A Levinasian attitude: the care that you cannot ignore. This is your responsibility because it calls to you, and you can't pretend it doesn't.
* I suppose my glib way of answering the question is to emphasize that "Am I responsible? Is it my place to do anything? Must I do anything?", when asked outside any particular ethical system, pose a "genuine decision".
I mean something like this: when Peter Singer says there's nothing wrong with infanticide, or the Catholic church says that condoms are evil, these are not genuine decisions, but applications of a decision. To oversimplify (it could never really be this crass), the moment of genuine decision was in accepting the belief framework to begin with. The genuine decision was when a law was established as authoritative.
Is this my responsibility or isn't it? You wonder about changing your habits; I could give much more to charity; I could be a protester or activist; I could be more politically involved... Perhaps, in these moments, you're taken outside of whatever belief framework you blithely operated with, and are faced again with an originatory, genuine decision. The error in answering is to assume that there is anything that forces choice, any method more compelling than flipping a coin.
Notes
-- Wednesday 10 September 2008: One is presented with all sorts of situations, all the time, that one could take some sort of "moral" interest in. Open a newspaper -- the plight of indigenous people, a person in a car crash, proposed education laws, proposed abortion laws... And in your everyday life, almost everyone you meet is a person whose life you could improve, though they have varying levels of want and need.
To take a specific example: Russia vs Georgia. Is the situation something you should take an interest in, and how much of an interest? And if you were convinced of the claims of one side or the other, what, if anything, could or should you do? How far do your responsibilities go?
* Speculative, masturbatory, for-what-it's-worth etymologising: "Spondere" in Latin is to promise. So perhaps, in the English-language concept of "responsibility", there are the outlines of an old system of morality, based not on some metaphysical code written into the fabric of the universe, but on actual promises person to person, on reputation and reliability, on expectations explicit and implicit, and the rewards and punishments that follow.
(But, without going to the OED for help, it might be the case that the English word is less connected, historically, to promising, and is more closely linked to answering -- as in a "response". Derrida takes this idea and flies with it: "Passions" in Derrida: a critical reader, 1991.)
Responsibility and causation
* "I'm responsible for this" often means "I did it".
* But responsibility doesn't neatly map onto causation.
-- Responsibility without causation: an employer might be responsible for an employee acting independently, or a government might be responsible for the abuses of a previous government (apologies to the stolen generation; apologies of the Japanese government...).
Compare: your actions might redound to my honour; you can bring shame on the family.
-- Causation without responsibility: I can hurt you -- and perhaps it was an accident. Perhaps no one would blame me -- I couldn't have known, I couldn't have foreseen, etc, etc.
* When is someone responsible, and when are they not? From a certain perspective, the matter looks arbitrary. Different cultures draw different lines.
And different ethics within a culture. Consider the expression "to be held responsible" -- sometimes used as if there are two systems, one layered on another -- a more natural system, in terms of which you'd not be responsible, and a second-layer system, that regards you as responsible.
In the context of law, there are notions like "strict liability", "no fault liability" -- self-conscious drawing of the lines -- recognition of the arbitrariness, difficulty, in saying that this cause in these circumstances is "responsible".
Three (related) types of responsibility
* One type of responsibility is to do with specifiable obligations. So I might say "It's your responsibility to hand in this essay by 3pm" -- or, much to the same effect, I could say "It's your obligation to hand in this essay by 3pm".
Similarly, I could accuse you of "failing in your responsibilities", and the "failing" might imply an obvious standard; or I might interview you for a job, and tell you "These are the responsibilities of the position -- to inform management of any delays in projects, to ensure product is delivered on time and meeting these particular benchmarks of quality...".
Of course, "responsibility" and "obligation" never mean quite the same thing.
* Secondly, there is the responsibility that is less to do with clear obligation than with who takes the rap and who takes the credit. Perhaps there is nothing that I should have done, or even could have done, to avoid hitting that pedestrian. And yet I feel responsible, or am responsible.
In this sense, to be responsible is to be open to be treated, or for it to be appropriate that you are treated, in certain ways -- the object, for instance, of practices and attitudes of praise and blame (though I don't think that praise and blame exhaust the field).
(Responsibility shares affinity with "humiliation": when something is humiliated, the change lies not in the object itself, but in the position of the object within a social system.)
* Thirdly, "responsibility" can be used to say not only that this is my area of concern, or the area for which I shall be liable, but it's mine to do with as I wish -- this is my property, my right, or my problem and not yours. -- "Okay, dad, I'm screwing up my life, but my life is my business, my responsibility." Or, as I've been told on this blog: "My children are my responsibility; how dare you interfere in their upbringing."
Assigning responsibility
* There's plenty of situations in which you might ask, "Is this my responsibility?"
And of course I'm thinking less in an employment sense than in a good Samaritan sense. A person falls over in front of you. Or a child is starving to death on the other side of the planet. Or your brother runs into financial problems and needs a loan. "Is this my responsibility?" -- Do I have to do anything? What do I have to do? How much do I have to do? How far does my responsibility go? When must I step in and take action -- how bad do things have to get? And am I to blame if I take no action? (Did everyday German citizens share in the responsibility for the Shoah?)
* A couple of random observations, and then some further thoughts.
-- Obs 1: Sometimes people might ask, "If this is not my responsibility, then whose is it?" -- meaning that everything should be someone's responsibility -- the belief that the entire world is or should be carved into tendable gardens.
If I am the only person who is in a position to do anything (so this thought might continue), then it is my responsibility.
And if there are many people in a position to do something, then I have less responsibility (responsibility and obligation being not black and white, but admitting of degrees: there is less urgency, the imperative occupies a lower rung, I am less liable). Recall the psychology experiment where humans are more inclined to help if they're not in a crowd.
-- Obs 2: Notice that people might ask the responsibility question before asking the "should" question. And sometimes they never get around to "should"; as with the second type of responsibility, their beliefs might dictate area of concern, but give little guidance in terms of rules to be followed, qualities to be maximized.
Moral thinking and language might not be neatly reducible to "should" and "should not" and to questions of obligation.
-- Obs 3: There are two famous Saint Bridgets in the Catholic pantheon, one of Ireland, and one of Sweden, and the Irish Bridget was renowned for her extreme generosity -- giving away everything to beggars, including what didn't belong to her, like her father's jewelled sword.
Viewed with certain assumptions, morality seems to have this all-encompassing demand, seems to challenge us to be Bridgets; there's no principled way to draw a line -- no point at which to say, "This is how much money you should give, and no more"; "These are the people you should care about, and no others"; "This is my responsibility, and that isn't".
And yet we believe there are or should be such lines (a strange "should" here, neither purely practical, nor what would ordinarily be recognized as moral).
* Some further thoughts on assigning responsibility...
So what makes something your responsibility, or otherwise? Different ethical systems answer differently. For instance:
-- There might be a customary assignment of roles and jurisdictions: "This is not your responsibility, because, traditionally, it's not your responsibility."
-- A Kantian attitude. It would be logically consistent if everyone adopted x as their area of concern, and logically inconsistent if they didn't. This thing, x, is your responsibility, because every citizen has to mind their x, because otherwise the state would break down, and we can't have that. If this litter were not your concern, then it would just pile up. (Kant's imperatives, as Mill pointed out, are presented as purely rational and yet contentful, but in practice seem formalistic or consequential.)
-- A Levinasian attitude: the care that you cannot ignore. This is your responsibility because it calls to you, and you can't pretend it doesn't.
* I suppose my glib way of answering the question is to emphasize that "Am I responsible? Is it my place to do anything? Must I do anything?", when asked outside any particular ethical system, pose a "genuine decision".
I mean something like this: when Peter Singer says there's nothing wrong with infanticide, or the Catholic church says that condoms are evil, these are not genuine decisions, but applications of a decision. To oversimplify (it could never really be this crass), the moment of genuine decision was in accepting the belief framework to begin with. The genuine decision was when a law was established as authoritative.
Is this my responsibility or isn't it? You wonder about changing your habits; I could give much more to charity; I could be a protester or activist; I could be more politically involved... Perhaps, in these moments, you're taken outside of whatever belief framework you blithely operated with, and are faced again with an originatory, genuine decision. The error in answering is to assume that there is anything that forces choice, any method more compelling than flipping a coin.
***
Notes
-- Wednesday 10 September 2008: One is presented with all sorts of situations, all the time, that one could take some sort of "moral" interest in. Open a newspaper -- the plight of indigenous people, a person in a car crash, proposed education laws, proposed abortion laws... And in your everyday life, almost everyone you meet is a person whose life you could improve, though they have varying levels of want and need.
To take a specific example: Russia vs Georgia. Is the situation something you should take an interest in, and how much of an interest? And if you were convinced of the claims of one side or the other, what, if anything, could or should you do? How far do your responsibilities go?
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