ABSTRACT
Institutional responsibility is a species of responsibility and contrasts, perhaps most obviously, with moral responsibility. Institutional role structures vary greatly. Evidently individual role occupants are individually institutionally responsible for at least some of their actions and omissions. Again, an institutional role occupant in a position of authority over another might have an individual institutional responsibility to see to it that her subordinate performs the tasks definitive of the subordinate's role. Moreover, institutional actors can be ascribed collective institutional responsibility when they act jointly in accordance with their institutional roles. Collective institutional responsibility is involved not only in joint actions but also in the related phenomena of joint institutional mechanisms. The relationship between institutional responsibility and moral responsibility is a difficult one to unravel, not least because the notion of moral responsibility is itself theoretically complex and a matter of controversy.
