3.3 Theory building activities: "responsibility and incident at  (Page 4/7)

Fred, and other Incident at Morales stakeholders, can escape or minimize blame by establishing morally legitimate excuses. The following table associates common excuses with the formal conditions of imputability of blame responsibility. (Conditions of imputability are those conditions that allow us to associate an action with an agent for purposes of moral evaluation.)

Proactive responsibility

Preventive responsibility: responsive adjustment

• Responsibility to adjust future actions in response to what has been learned from the past
• Scenario One : Past actions that have led to untoward results. Failure here to adjust future actions to avoid repetition of untoward results leads to reassessing the original action and retrospectively blaming the agent.
• Scenario Two : Past actions have unintentionally and accidentally led to positive, value-realizing results. Here the agent responsively adjusts by being prepared to take advantage of being lucky. The agent adjusts future actions to repeat past successes. In this way, the agent captures past actions (past luck) and inserts them into the scope of praise.
• Nota Bene : The principle of responsible adjustment sets the foundation for responsibility in the sense of prevention of the untoward.

Responsibility as a virtue or excellence

1. Virtues are excellences of the character which are revealed by our actions, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes. Along these lines, responsibility as a virtue requires that we reformulate responsibility from its reactive, minimalist sense (where it derives much of its content from legal responsibility) to responsibility as an excellence of character.
2. Aristotle situates virtues as means between extremes of excess and defect. Can you think of examples of too much responsibility? (Does Fred try to take on too much responsibility in certain situations?) Can you think of anyone who exhibits too little responsibility. (Does Fred take on too little responsibility or shift responsibility to others?) For Aristotle, we can have too much or too little of a good thing. From the "too much" we derive vices of excess. from the"too little" we derive the vices of defect.
3. Virtues are more than just modes of reasoning and thinking. They also consist of emotions that clue us into aspects of the situation before us that are morally salient and, therefore, worthy of our notice and response. Two emotions important for responsibility are care and compassion. Care clues us into aspects of our situation that could harm those who depend on our actions and vigilance. Do Wally and Fred pay sufficient attention to the early batch leakages in the Morales plant? If not, does this stem from a lack of care ("Let operations handle it") and a lack of compassion ("Manuel can take care of himself")? Care and compassion help to sensitize us to what is morally salient in the situation at hand. They also motivate us to act responsibility on the basis of this sensitivity.
4. Responsibility as a virtue manifests itself in a willingness to pick up where others have left off. After the Bhopal disaster, a worker was asked why, when he saw a cut-off valve open, he didn't immediately close it as safety procedures required. His response was that shutting off the value was not a part of his job but, instead, the job of those working the next shift. This restriction of responsibility to what is one's job creates responsibility gaps through which accidents and other harms rise to the surface. The worker's lack of action may not constitute moral fault but it surely signifies lack of responsibility as a virtue because it indicates a deficiency of care and compassion. Those who practice responsibility as a virtue or excellence move quickly to fill responsibility gaps left by others even if these tasks are not a part of their own role responsibilities strictly defined. Escaping blame requires narrowing the range of one's role responsibilities while practicing responsibility as a virtue often requires effectively expanding it.
5. Finally, responsibility as an excellence requires extending the range of knowledge and control that one exercises in a situation. Preventing accidents requires collecting knowledge about a system even after it has left the design and manufacturing stages and entered its operational life. Responsibility requires that we search out and correct conditions that could, under the right circumstances, produce harmful accidents. Moreover, responsibility is a function of power and control. Extending these and directing them toward good results are clear signs of responsibility as a virtue.