7.1 Value profile: responsibility  (Page 6/10)

Kinds of responsibility

The root metaphor of responsibility is "response to essential relevance" or "response to relevance." But this root metaphor has been used to structure different moral, legal, social, and other practical domains. The result are several different senses of responsibility. This section will help you sort out some of the different senses by providing brief, provisional definitions of causal, capacity, blame, role, and corporate responsibility.

• Causal Responsibility : Physical motions or events produce other physical motions or events. The hurricane blew the panel off the roof and caused other damage to the house.
• Capacity Responsibility : Conditions for attributing an action to an agent for the purposes of assigning moral praise or blame.
• Blame Responsibility : Blaming individuals for their actions, attitudes, or characters that result in untoward or negative consequences
• Role Responsibility : To stand committed to realizing the values, goods, or interests around which a social, occupational, or professional role is built or oriented.
• Corporate Responsibility : The legal and moral practice of treating corporations as moral agents (not necessarily as persons) and holding them accountable or answerable for their actions. Corporate moral responsibility should not exclude attributing moral responsibility to individuals for their actions. Yet, under special conditions, the actions of individuals can be re-described as corporations or re-description can reveal a corporate dimension or aspect to individual actions.

There are different accounts of types of responsibility in H. L. A. Hart, “Responsibility and Retribution,” in Computers, Ethics and Social Values, Deborah G. Johnson and Helen Nissenbaum, Eds. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995, pp. 514-525 as well as K. Baier, “Types of Responsibility,” in The Spectrum of Responsibility, Peter A. French, Ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991, pp. 117-122.

Useful responsibility frameworks

Responsibility has positive and negative senses. In its negative sense, responsibility is the practice of assigning blame and setting the stage for punishment as a means of discouraging modes of action that lead to bad results. But the positive sense--so to speak--pivots off this negative sense and reconstructs the negative and reactive as positive and proactive. (More on this below.) This section presents F.H. Bradley's conditions of imputibility, requirements that must be in place in order for us to hold one another responsible for our actions and their results. Combining the perspectives of Bradley and Strawson, we could say that one fits into the participant attitude if one satisfies the conditions of imputability, that is, self-sameness, moral sense, and ownership. Failing this, one could still be in the participant perspective but, due to special circumstances, be unable (temporarily)to act responsibly. But Strawson's objective attitude is more fundamental and applies to children, the disabled, and the insane. In this case, we are dealing with individuals who are incapable of fulfilling the conditions of imputability, especially self-sameness and moral sense. In this case, the individual falls outside the practice of responsibility, the participant attitude, and into what Strawson terms the objective attitude. We can treat such an individual as "as a possible predictable entity 'to be managed or handled or cured or trained; and perhaps simply to be avoided.'" (Margaret Urban-Walker in Moral Repair quoting--in part--Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment."