ABSTRACT
Nowadays, political criminals claim responsibility while government officials and corporation executives disclaim it. None of these three is acting responsibly. Philosophers are caught up in the puzzle of how anyone can ever be responsible if all action is the effect of genetic and environmental causes. Jurists debate the significance of intent as a condition of responsibility. The practical, working understanding of responsibility does not rest on any generally accepted theory of responsibility. This does not keep moralists from continual exhortations to responsible behavior. Moral demands are weakened by their repetitive urgency. A healthy moral life is replaced by spiritual hypochondria – a perpetual sense of moral crisis. Anxious virtue is always suspicious. For political analysts there is a special problem. They neither decide policy nor execute it, but at most recommend. Advice, too, can be responsible or irresponsible. Giving advice is an act like other acts, and like them subject to moral and political norms. In some circumstances, advice amounts to a virtual decision, like a physician’s prescription. What corresponds here to malpractice is yet to be explored. A framework for such an exploration must first reaffirm the reality of responsibility as well as the reality of its limits. Neither causes nor intentions are decisive. Responsibility is answerability; it relates always to some community of obligation. A sense of community is as essential to responsible behavior as is a sense of obligation. The locus of responsibility is always the individual. Responsibility is assigned to collective entities, like states and corporations, not in reference to acts of fictitious persons, but in reference to decisions of real persons to act collectively in certain ways. Responsibility is both political and moral. Political exigencies do not cancel moral responsibility; they give it substance. In turn, political forms reflect the structure of moral responsibility. Both policy-makers and policy analysts can be held responsible. Only in a realistic perspective can this be done responsibly. Several propositions about responsibility should be taken as axiomatic. First is the Axiom of Differences: the responsibilities of one person are not those of another. Religious teaching, from the Talmud to Dostoevsky and beyond, is that everyone is responsible for everything: we are all to blame. Whatever the spiritual truth of this teaching, it is an ethical falsehood. To impute an unwarranted
responsibility is as unjust as it is to disclaim a genuine responsibility. Who is responsible for a given situation and what are the responsibilities of a given person are central questions of morality; “Everyone” and “Everything” are not useful answers. Closely related to the Axiom of Differences is the Axiom of Realism: there are some responsibilities. That no one is ever really responsible for anything is also an ethical falsehood. The problem of responsibility is not to prove that anyone can ever be responsible. The problem is to illuminate what confers greater or lesser responsibility in particular cases. Third is the Axiom of Objectivity: disclaiming a responsibility does not free one from it. We do assume responsibilities, but they may be ours whether or not we assume them. A person may have a real debt which, out of ignorance, error or dishonesty, the person refuses to acknowledge. Restaurants and parkingstructures post signs disclaiming responsibility for property left in their care; the signs do not cancel their liability. In the counter-culture, the doctrine became popular a few years ago that no one is responsible for another person’s response to a speaker’s words. “What I said did not make you angry or feel hurt; it was you who chose to take it that way.” The catchphrase “That’s your problem!” has a certain plausibility. But the problem is not only mine; it is ours. What happens when people are together is seldom the sole responsibility of only one of them. In any case, saying so does not make it so. Closely related to the Axiom of Objectivity is the Axiom of Factuality: acknowledging a responsibility does not impose it. The former axiom is that assuming responsibility is not a necessary condition for having responsibility; the latter, that it is not a sufficient condition. Whether a certain person is responsible in a particular case is an objective, factual question. When we assign responsibility to ourselves, we may be mistaken. The sense of responsibility differs from actual responsibility, just as the sense of guilt differs from actual guilt. In both cases, the sense may be conspicuously absent when it is called for and oppressively present when it is not. We may assume too much responsibility, as a self-punitive measure or as a payment in advance for anticipated irresponsibility – repentance which makes one feel free to sin again (the Karamazov syndrome). The Talmud rightly warns, “He who says I will sin, repent, sin again and repent again, will have no opportunity to repent.” Today it is widely supposed that what we feel intensely therefore has an objective ground. Inflexible principles, uncompromising policies and non-negotiable demands are not necessarily marks of a high moral standard. The question is not only whether people live up to what they see as their moral responsibilities; we may also question the acuity of their moral vision. The association of free will with responsibility is a mistake, if free will is conceived as a matter of uncaused choices. On that conception, it would be absurd to suppose that one person has free will and another not. It would be equally absurd to suppose that one person has more or less free will than another. The question asked when free will is counterpoised to determinism is whether there are or are not uncaused acts of will, not how many can be counted in
particular instances. The insistence on free will as a condition of responsibility is incompatible with the Axiom of Differences if there is free will, and incompatible with the Axiom of Realism if there is not. One of the founders of the logico-linguistic movement in contemporary philosophy, Moritz Schlick, calls it “really one of the greatest scandals of philosophy that again and again so much paper and printer’s ink is devoted to [the pseudoproblem of free will].”1 What makes it a pseudo-problem is that free will is being conceived apart from the contexts where responsibility is taken seriously. Lawyers do not debate responsibility for fulfillment of contract, for reasonable care or for protection of the environment in terms of whether human action is caused or is the outcome of free will. Psychiatrists may be asked to testify whether a person accused of a crime was sane at the time; no one proposes that quantum physicists, theologians or philosophers be asked to testify whether the accused possessed free will at that time. There is widespread misunderstanding of the sense in which laws of human behavior determine human action. Dostoevsky’s man from underground argues, “We have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions.”2 Why not? Laws of nature only allow us to predict; they do not compel action in any sense which makes the human being “a Pawn in the hands of Fate or a Prisoner in the iron grip of Necessity.”3 Freedom does not have to be unpredictable, randomly irregular; predictability, discernible regularity, does not confer absolution. That we can sometimes predict how the behavior of a responsible person will differ from that of an irresponsible one in the same circumstances does not obliterate the difference between the two sorts of people, but underlines it. Other analysts hold that the question of whether responsibility presupposes free will raises a moral issue rather than a logical one, because imputing or denying responsibility is a moral judgment. Who specifically bears a responsibility and what specifically falls within the scope of that responsibility are questions which do implicate moral judgments. Whether the answers to these questions hinge on the universality of causal determination remains a logical issue. David Hume’s argument is compelling: the imputation of responsibility would be pointless without determinism, or else holding someone responsible would have no purchase on that person’s future behavior. Even the present self would be disjoined from the past self guilty of the irresponsible action. The attempt to evade responsibility by appealing to causal necessity meets with the unanswerable rejoinder: “If you could not help doing it, neither can I help holding you responsible for it.” Determinism argues with equal force for both sides and so becomes irrelevant. The axioms similarly set intention aside, not as altogether irrelevant to responsibility, but as providing only mitigating or contributing circumstances. That an intention is not a necessary condition for responsibility is implied by the Axiom of Objectivity. We may be as responsible for the unintended consequences of our actions as we are for consequences deliberately brought about.
