ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ambiguities in moral language associated with the concept of responsibility, differentiating between several important dimensions of the general idea. The same word, ‘responsibility,’ can be used to talk about what must be done (the object of obligation), social structures of expected accountability (relations of oversight), ideas of fault and blameworthiness (culpability), questions of competent subjecthood (degrees of empowered moral agency), and certain character traits (diligence and reliability). These distinctions are important to bear in mind in order to avoid the all too common tendency to slip between different senses of the term, and in order to notice the strategic use of such slippages in the rhetoric of the powerful.
