Abstract
This contribution discusses the relation between forward-looking and backward-looking responsibility. The notion of forward-looking responsibility I focus on is, following Robert Goodin, that of seeing to it that a certain state of affairs obtains. In addition, I focus on two types of backward-looking responsibility: accountability and blameworthiness. I argue that accountability only entails blameworthiness if the agent cannot cite certain reasonable excuses like ignorance and compulsion (which were already mentioned by Aristotle). It is further argued that accountability can both be based on not properly discharging a forward-looking responsibility and on the breach of a duty that caused a certain negative consequence. I show that in both cases three general conditions need to apply in order to hold an agent reasonably accountable: a capacity condition, a causality condition and a wrongdoing condition. The exact content of these conditions, however, depends on whether accountability is based on a forward-looking responsibility that is not properly discharged or on the breach of a duty.
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Notes
- 1.
Hart (1968:210–37) was probably the first to distinguish four main senses of responsibility: role-responsibility, causal-responsibility, liability-responsibility and capacity-responsibility. The additional senses I distinguish in addition are related to these, but have in certain respects an (importantly) different meaning as explained. All the additional senses can indeed also be found in the literature on responsibility ( e.g. Casey 1971; Baier 1972; Ladd 1982; Zimmerman 1988; Lucas 1993; Bovens 1998; Cane 2002; Duff 2007; Williams 2008; Davis forthcoming). Hart discusses blameworthiness as a component of moral liability, but I think that it is conceptually clearer to distinguish both notions.
- 2.
This is what Hart calls role-responsibility.
- 3.
This may also be called responsibility-as-office or responsibility-as-jurisdiction. It refers to a realm in which one has the authority to make decisions or is in charge and for which one can be held accountable.
- 4.
Sometimes responsibility-as-accountability may be understood in a descriptive sense, as in cases in which one is accountable on the basis of certain organizational or legal rules. In such cases, responsibility-as-accountability seems often closely related to responsibility-as-task.
- 5.
Goodin (1995) in fact calls such responsibilities task-responsibilities, but – as pointed out in the text – I think there is an essential difference between task-responsibility in the sense I use the term and a (moral) obligation to see to something.
- 6.
According to Duff (2007:23), responsibility-as-capacity can be explained in relational terms as “the capacities that are necessary if one is to answer for one’s actions.” However, this conflates the conceptual nature of responsibility-as-capacity with its being a precondition for other relational concepts of responsibility.
- 7.
In fact, responsibility-as-task is also usually understood as a triadic relation.
- 8.
In fact, we may also have different responsibilities in the different roles we have, for example as teacher, as colleague and as parent, and also these responsibilities may conflict.
- 9.
This is my example. Kutz provides other examples, including examples in which it seems appropriate for the agent A to assume responsibility rather than, as in my example, there being a degree of freedom in taking responsibility or not. My suggestion is then not that the phenomenon of taking responsibility, to which I draw attention below, exhausts the relational nature of responsibility. Rather it draws attention to an aspect of responsibility that is also not fully grasped by formulations like (4).
- 10.
Excerpt from documentary “Why the Twin Towers collapsed” broadcasted by Discovery Channel.
- 11.
It is very interesting and indeed impressive that on the video of the interview Robertson starts nodding when he poses himself the question “Do I feel guilty?” One interpretation would be that in his non-verbal expressions (the nodding) he answers the question “Do I take the blame?” (He obviously feels very bad about what happened if not guilty), while in his verbal expressions he answers the question “Would it be proper for others to blame me?” His answer to the first question seems affirmative and to the second not.
- 12.
Also control is sometimes mentioned as condition, but see Sher (2006).
- 13.
A similar suggestion can be found in Hart (1968), Wallace (1994) and Duff (2007). Although Hart and Duff do not distinguish between blameworthiness and liability, they suggest a similar relation between accountability (or answerability) and liability as I do between accountability and blameworthiness. Wallace makes a distinction between A- and B-conditions for responsibility: “B-conditions make it fair to hold people morally to blame … while A-conditions make it fair to hold people morally accountability” (Wallace 1994:118) His A-conditions focus on when it is in general fair to hold people accountable (cf. Wallace 1994:154), this is my first condition (moral agency); his account seems to assume wrongdoing implicitly (e.g. Wallace 1994:156). My conditions for accountability also include conditions for when it is fair to hold someone accountable for a specific outcome.
- 14.
Wallace (1994:136–47) mentions four types of excuses: (1) inadvertence, mistake or accident, (2) unintentional bodily movements, (3) physical constraint and (4) coercion, necessity and duress. The first is a case of non-culpable ignorance (referring to the knowledge condition), the others of compulsion (referring to the freedom condition).
- 15.
Typically many other authors have treated those two conditions as the conditions for being at fault, suggesting that these are conditions for blameworthiness rather than for accountability.
- 16.
- 17.
It might in specific circumstances be possible to delegate some supervision, but the agent cannot delegate away all responsibility and still has a duty to supervise the supervision, et cetera.
- 18.
An alternative would be to require, in analogy with the deontological route, that the transgression of the supervisory duties implied by A’s responsibility for “not X” caused X rather than that something else. Apart from that this implies a counterfactual that may be difficult to establish (“what if A had lived by her responsibility?”), this seems me intuitively implausible. If A had to see to it that “not X” and did not fulfill her responsibility, this seems enough reasons to hold A accountable if X occurs. This is different in the deontological route because there the duty D does not contain a direct reference to X.
- 19.
Note that this causality condition is much weaker than the one in the deontic route.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was written as part of the research program “Moral Responsibility in R&D Networks”, which is supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under grant number 360-20-160. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Moral Responsibility: Neuroscience, Organization & Engineering, Delft, August 24–27, 2009. I would like to thank the conference participants, my co-workers in the project Moral Responsibility in R&D networks, Sven Ove Hansson, and Michael Davis for comments on earlier versions. I am grateful to NIAS, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, for providing me with the opportunity, as a Fellow-in-Residence, to rewrite and finish this paper during my stay in the academic year 2009–2010.
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van de Poel, I. (2011). The Relation Between Forward-Looking and Backward-Looking Responsibility. In: Vincent, N., van de Poel, I., van den Hoven, J. (eds) Moral Responsibility. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1878-4_3
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