Responsibility and Obligation

Abstract

At the beginning of Chapter IV it was noted that the term “responsibility” in ordinary language is often used as a synonym for “obligation” or “duty,” and the discussion of this sense of “responsibility” was postponed till later. Now we must turn to this topic. It was also suggested that the word “obligation” would be usually employed in our discussions for this sense of “responsibility” in order to avoid possible confusions with “responsible” as a causal concept. Ordinarily, to say that the soldier has a responsibility to guard his post is to say that he ought to guard his post or that he has a duty to do so; or to say that the father has a responsibility to support his wife and children is to say that he ought to do so or that he has a duty to do so. This chapter will be concerned primarily with moral obligations and with the question whether an ethics based upon common sense must presuppose that a man must be a free agent before he can have moral obligations.