Responsibility

Being properly held to account for what one has done - and the conditions under which holding someone to account makes sense.

Theme: Mind, self and consciousness
Tradition: Cross-tradition
Term fixed: c. 340 BC

In plain terms

We hold people to account for some things and not others, and the line is drawn by two questions that Aristotle asked and nobody has improved on. Did it come from them, or were they pushed? Did they know what they were doing?

Say no to either and blame weakens. Say yes to both and it holds, which is why coercion and ignorance are the standing excuses in every legal system.

The hard cases are the ones where both answers are yes and blame still seems wrong or seems misplaced. Someone acts entirely within their role and the result is a disaster nobody chose. Someone does exactly what their upbringing made certain they would do. Someone is one of two hundred people whose small contributions add up to a catastrophe with no author.

As a philosopher would put it

Aristotle's control and epistemic conditions are the core, and modern accounts refine rather than replace them. Strawson's Freedom and Resentment shifts the ground: responsibility is grounded in the reactive attitudes - resentment, gratitude, indignation - that are constitutive of relating to someone as a person, and no metaphysical thesis about determinism could rationally dislodge them.

Frankfurt separates responsibility from alternative possibilities, which allows someone to be responsible even where they could not have done otherwise, and reorients the question toward whether the agent identified with what they did.

The collective case remains unsolved. Where an outcome results from many people each acting acceptably, the problem of many hands leaves responsibility distributed to the point of vanishing. Arendt's analysis of Eichmann is the sharpest version: an official who does his job well within a criminal system, and whose ordinariness is the disturbing part. And moral luck cuts underneath everything - two equally careless drivers, one of whom hits a child, are judged and punished quite differently for identical conduct.

Where you meet it

On 28 January 1986 the shuttle Challenger broke up seventy-three seconds after launch. The Rogers Commission established the cause within weeks: the O-ring seals in the solid rocket boosters lost resilience in cold, and the overnight temperature had been near freezing.

What the commission also established is that engineers at the manufacturer had raised exactly this concern the evening before and recommended against launching. Their objection was reviewed, contested, and reversed within a management process that everyone followed correctly. No rule was broken. Nobody wanted the crew dead.

Richard Feynman's appendix argued that the organisation had come to treat repeated survival of an unanalysed risk as evidence that the risk was acceptable. That is a description of a system, not of a culprit, and it leaves the question of responsibility genuinely open - seven people died, several dozen individuals each behaved defensibly, and no available account distributes the blame in a way that anyone has found satisfying.

What is actually disputed

Whether responsibility survives determinism, and whether it can be collective.

Strawson's answer to the first is that the practice is not grounded in a theory and therefore cannot be undermined by one; hard incompatibilists reply that this describes what we do rather than justifying it, and that if nobody could have done otherwise then desert-based blame is unfair however natural it feels. The practical stakes are punishment, and the argument is live in sentencing law.

The second question is worse. Individualists hold that only persons can be responsible and that talk of institutional guilt is a metaphor which lets individuals off. Collectivists reply that some harms are produced by structures that no individual chose and that refusing to name them leaves the most consequential wrongs unattributable. Neither position handles Challenger comfortably.

Commonly confused with

Causation c. 330 BC Being the cause of something is not being responsible for it. A falling branch causes an injury and answers to nobody.
Duty 1785 A duty is something one ought to do beforehand. Responsibility is answerability afterwards, and the two can come apart in both directions.

Defined against

Determinism If every act follows necessarily from prior conditions, the ground of desert-based blame is exactly what is in question

Philosophers

Aristotle The two conditions, still in use
Immanuel Kant Responsibility grounded in the capacity to act from principle
Hannah Arendt Ordinary officials, criminal systems, and where guilt sits
Jean-Paul Sartre Responsibility as total and inescapable, with no excuse available
Peter Singer Responsibility extended to what one fails to prevent

Works

Nicomachean Ethics The original analysis
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals The rational grounds of imputation
The Origins of Totalitarianism Systems in which ordinary conduct produces atrocity
Being and Nothingness The denial that circumstances excuse
Reasons and Persons Where responsibility meets identity over time

Schools

Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism) Where the conditions are set
Thomism Where they are joined to an account of the will
Existentialism Where responsibility is made total
Classical Utilitarianism Where it is reframed around consequences rather than desert
Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) Where it is extended to social structures

Related concepts

Agency c. 340 BC · Free will c. 397 · Autonomy 1785 · Moral luck 1976 · Duty 1785

Aristotle's conditions - the act must originate in the agent and be done in knowledge of the circumstances - remain the framework that law and philosophy both use.