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- Value profile: responsibility
Responsibility is metaphorically structured. Metaphor, for Johnson and Lakoff, is more than just a figure of speech. It is a projection of meaning and structure from one domain, a familiar experience termed the
source domain , onto another less familiar domain termed the
target domain . Seeing the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar or extending existing meaning and experience to cover new regions, represents, for Johnson and Lakoff, a fundamental imaginative activity. So, our experience of physical forces and their interactions is encapsulated into the image schema, stimulus-response. Then this basic structure is projected onto the moral domain: stimulus-response becomes perception of relevance-response to relevance. This projection doesn't merely repeat the original experience; it does not reduce the moral to the physical. Stimulus-response is expanded by the insertion of moral content. Stimulus becomes sensitivity to what is morally salient in a situation; we use perceptual and emotional sensitivities and skills to zero in on the moral aspects of a complex situation. Response, when projected onto the moral domain, is no longer unthinking, automatic; now it becomes the formulation of action that is calibrated to moral salience. This metaphorical structure of responsibility is subject to further elaborations. As you will see in the exercises below, responsibility begins as a punitive response to failure to achieve the minimally moral. We blame an engineer for an accident when it results from her failure to exercise even minimal due care in the design and testing of a product. But, through repeated metaphorical projections, moral repsonsibility is repeatedly elaborated onto higher and higher moral spaces as the pursuit of excellence, not just the avoidance of blame. In short, the metaphorical elaboration of the root meaning of responsibility allows us to see continuity between its negative, reactive, and blame-center forms and more advanced positive, proactive, and supererogatory praise-worthy forms. Just below is a slide that taken from a presentation given by the author on "Teaching Moral Responsibility" at the annual meeting of the Association of Practical and Professional Ethics, March 2012; it shows the elaboration of moral responsibility through the repeated projeections of the image schema stimulus-response or the experience of physical force and its interactions. (This account of responsibilty as a metaphor is taken from Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind, p. 14. See other Johnson references listed below.)
Positive and negative senses of responsibility
Negative rsponsibility
The negative sense focuses on assigning blame for the untoward. (Untoward means something negative like harmful or unduely risky, etc.) This sense of responsibility works, primarily, from the threshold of the morally minimum. If you are below this threshold, several things happen: you are subjective to reactive attitudes (resentment, indignation, guilt), blame or approbation, and punishment. It is this sense that Bradley had in mind when he asserted that "repsonsibliity is necessarily connected to punishment." In this domain, the goal is to stay out of trouble which is the same as staying above the minmally moral. Good enough to stay out of trouble but not really good. (Hobbes, in Calvin and Hobbes, tells Santa Clause that he has not committed any murders or robbed any banks this year. Hobbes tells him that this might not be enough; not doing wrong does not fully constitute doing good.)
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Source:
OpenStax, Engineering ethics modules for ethics across the curriculum. OpenStax CNX. Oct 08, 2012 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col10552/1.3
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