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Positive responsibility
Positive/proactive responsibility focuses on preventing harm and striving for supererogatory value-realization. You are working on an assembly line and see your coworker unconsciously taking a risk that could, under the right configuration of events, cause an accident. You make him aware of this risky habit and work with him to change it all the while taking care not blame him or attribute it to him as a fault. Your coworker could, and at least initially probably will say, that it is none of your business. But you make it clear that you are doing this because you are concerned and want to work with him to avoid an injury. More and more, companies are working to take injury prevention out of the negative and punitive stance and make it part of an approach that emphasizes non-fault prevention. But even more than prevention, positive responsibility can lie int he pursuit of the supererogatory. Here one takes responsibility even if prior to the act of commitment, it was not not obligatory. One delivers an unexpected good work or even offers a sacrifice of an important interest in the pursuit of an excellence. Positive responsibility sets behind itself issues of punishment and blame and recasts itself as the pursuit of excellence. In its most positive sense, responsibly becomes a virtue. (Pritchard, Harris, and Rabins discuss positive senses of responsibility in
Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases 99-116. 2nd Edition. See also William F. May, "Professoinal Virtue and Self-Regulation," in ethical Issues in Professional Life, Oxford University Press, 1988. Finally see John Ladd "Bhopal: An Essay on Moral Responsibility and Civic Virtue" in
Journal of Social Philosophy Vol. 22(1):73-91.)
Moral responsibility and the law
Moral responsibility cannot be reduced to legal responsibility. Yet, as Fingarette's investigation of criminal insanity shows, the two overlap and frequently compliment one another. Here it is absolutely essential to emphasize one fundamental difference. Legal responsibility focuses on the boundary between what is above the threshold of the minimally moral and what falls below. Moral responsibility begins with this minimal threshold or boundary but then proceeds to outline higher regions of what can be termed exemplary or supererogatory space. Another way of putting this is to hold that while moral responsibility can reflect legal responsibility by laying out the gateway between the blameworthy and the acceptable, it can also be formulated as a virtue or an excellence. Legal responsibility remains necessarily connected with blame and punishment. Moral responsibility at some point leaves these behind as it becomes associated with different morally reactive attitudes such as gratitude, admiration, and pride.
Responsibility under civil law
- A Tort is a wrongful injury. To prevail in a tort one must prove negligence, recklessness, or intent.
- Negligence emerges out of the background of the normal or reasonable where due care is exercised. In other words, it arises from the failure to exercise due care.
- Recklessness goes a step further. One consciously risks a harm but does so in pursuit of another intention or goal. So you may drive recklessly through the university but justify--in your own mind--this risk incurred on others because you are late to your job interview.
- Intent is the worst of all three. Here the harm in question forms a central part of the agent's intention. The employee fired from his job intentionally introduces a virus into the workplace computer network shutting it down and producing financial loss. Injury intentionally brought about not only triggers compensation to make the victim whole; it may also trigger punitive damages, an invasion of civil law by criminal law.
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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