Lubomira Radoilska Think Kent transcript Rethinking Responsibility Hello everyone, my name is Lubomira Radoilska, I'm Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. In this talk, I would like to invite you to rethink the central concept that of responsibility. In particular, I'm going to identify and explore with you four puzzles that derive from current thinking about responsibility and then propose a possible way forward. My work on this has been supported by the British Academy and the Mind Association and I would like to acknowledge their contribution to this exciting project. To begin with, let us address two very basic questions: what is responsibility and why should we care about it? One thing that we can immediately say is that responsibility is a familiar concept, we talk about responsibility in a variety of everyday contexts. For instance, we talk about parental responsibility when we want to point out that parents have specific obligations towards their children. We also talk about the social responsibility of businesses and this is in order to highlight that there's broader expectations in addition to legal duties. We also talk about professional in addition to personal responsibility, collective in addition to individual responsibility, political in addition to legal responsibility. From these examples it would seem as though we all know a lot about responsibility; why give it a further thought. Well one reason would be that the familiarity of a concept is not necessarily a straightforward advantage. If we all thought to be clear about responsibility we might simply overlook possible tensions and contradictions that are at work in this concept and this is important because of the practical implications of responsibility. It helps us define some key concepts such as just punishment in the criminal system but also more broadly within society so it will be well worth our while giving responsibility some further thought. Looking at the initial examples we already can say what responsibility is not. It can be quite clearly defined as something that goes beyond causal responsibility and also beyond something that we know as strict liability in the law. A couple of examples will help us make that distinction. If, in your sleep, you move and you cause the alarm clock that you have placed nearby to break you will be causally responsible for this. Now this is a statement of fact, it is not a judgement about what you should or shouldn't have done. In a similar vein, when a product has a defect and that defect causes an injury the manufacturer is liable to pay compensation to the injured party. This is not to say that the manufacturer has been negligent, it only wants to say that the person who has to pay for the damage is the manufacturer. By contrast, the concept of responsibility we're after looks about looks after something much more significant. We are not merely interested to protect ourselves from damages or to get compensation, we are after a very different kind of concern. There are different ways of fleshing out the concern, some philosophers say that this concern is what underlines the whole idea of responsibility and it has to do with our interest in the quality of will that people show us when they interact with us. Are they well-intentioned, are they ill-intentioned, are they simply indifferent as to our well-being. So these are the kinds of questions that actually dominate our interest in responsibility. What is it that people tell us with their action, we're not interested primarily in the outcomes of the actions be they beneficial or not, we are interested in the kind of communicative message that we receive by means of those actions. Now, if we think about the agency through the lens of quality of will approaches we would see that actions are interpreted in terms of moral address. What this means is that actions are seen as morally significant to the extent that they tell us something about our standing within the moral community. For instance, if we are treated with ill-will or indifference our equal standing has been undermined, we are not given the kind of consideration that we are entitled to expect. Alternatively, when we are treated with goodwill our standing has been acknowledged, we are given due consideration. This is the deeper connection between action and agent that responsibility requires and it is in virtue of this connection that certain responses become appropriate vis-a-vis agents, these responses are known as reactive attitudes. Reactive attitudes vary greatly as the quality of will to which they respond so they might include, on the one side resentment and anger, but also on the other side they can lead to gratitude and even admiration. They're indicative quite simply of the personal involvement that there is in holding someone responsible, it means that we take them seriously as agents who act for the sake of reasons and can answer for their actions when they're asked to do so. It also means that we take ourselves seriously as equal agents and we're also capable not just of giving reasons to others but also of demanding reasons, receiving reasons and assessing reasons. So by holding each other responsible in this kind of way, we reaffirm our equal standing within the moral community and we also affirm our shared membership of it. We have now sketched the contours of the concept of responsibility that we are interested in and can go on to the four puzzles that I promised at the start of this talk. In essence, these puzzles arise from looking more closely into some natural lines of thought about the nature and scope of responsibility that on reflection might be difficult to square. So the first puzzle is as follows: why focus on negative at the expense of positive responsibility. Wrongdoings are often considered a central case of responsible action, this line of thought associates implicitly responsibility with blameworthiness and culpability but if this is the case the scope of responsibility assessment would be rather narrow, only concerned with telling us whether a person is correctly blamed for wrongdoing or not. The focus on transgressions may of course be natural within our concerns with criminal responsibility, with criminal justice, however if we applied the same starting point for the overall practice of holding each other responsible where reactive attitudes such as gratitude and admiration are as much at home as anger and resentment, then that might be misleading. One problem will be that by modelling responsibility proper on to criminal responsibility we are going to marginalise expressions of goodwill and treat them as less significant. This is because if responsibility is all about incurring or avoiding blame, praise is simply left out of the picture and so praiseworthy actions are not given the same weight as wrongdoings, they are as a matter of fact relegated to the margins of responsible agency. The second puzzle also relates to the scope of responsibility, it is as follows: why focus on actions at the expense of attitudes? Now, you may be tempted to say why not, didn't I just say that responsibility is about the deeper connection between actions and agents but still if what actually matters is the quality of will that people express towards one another then a narrow scope on individual actions becomes rather perplexing. Good or ill-will or indifference can be expressed in all sorts of ways, for instance forgetting your friend's birthday or ignoring a colleague's achievements. They are things that we do but they don't easily fit into the model of responsible action if that means doing something intentionally with a clear purpose in mind. We don't set out to forget, nor to ignore, we may decide to pretend to forget and we may decide to ignore but these are very different sorts of activities. So, attitudes are not directly under our control and this seems to be the kind of thing that makes them particularly well-suited to expressing our quality of will just as forcefully as intentional actions. This leads us to the third puzzle about responsibility, which is about the significance of control in things that we do. The puzzle derives from a compelling intuition according to which it seems unfair to hold people responsible for things that are not up to them. In the case of actions we can take as example instances of coercion and force, in these cases we can clearly see how loss of control also leads to diminished responsibility. Coerced actions do not really express an agent's will because the coerced agent is not in control of those actions. From this it seems natural to conclude that voluntary control is crucial condition on responsibility, the less voluntary control there is over an action the less responsible that action is. The trouble is that this notion of control does not apply to attitudes, we don't choose to forget people's birthdays yet as we saw from the second puzzle involuntary attitudes are well-suited to express our will and in their case lack of control does not seem to undermine responsibility. The fourth and final puzzle takes a similar form, this is because it involves another apparently central condition on responsibility, knowing what one is doing. Like the control condition there is a powerful intuition behind if a person doesn't know what they're doing how could it be the case that the action, performed unawares, is an expression of the quality of their will. Still, not all sorts of ignorance are that readily discounted. The notion of negligence, for instance, implies direct criticism. In this case, knowledge is not treated as a condition on responsibility but is quite simply taken to be the very object of responsibility assessment. What is more in some cases ignoring what one is doing is at the very heart of expressing one's will. Consider, for instance, Huck Finn the much-discussed character from Mark Twain's novel. Huck is a 10-year-old who's been brought up to believe that slavery is justified. When he befriends Jim, a runaway slave, he feels guilt- ridden because he finds himself unable to betray Jim. Now the fact that Huck is unaware of the moral quality of his actions, that he wrongly believes them to be blameworthy, does not detract from the praise that he's due for showing genuine goodwill to Jim. This is how we can see positive responsibility can sometimes go hand-in-hand with ignoring what one is doing. We've now completed the exploration of the four puzzles about responsibility. To recap, we looked firstly at the standard focus on negative as opposed to positive responsibility, we then moved to the apparent precedence given to actions at the expense of attitudes and finally we discussed a couple of challenges arising from the control and knowledge conditions on responsibility. So where does that leave us with respect to the Stokes proposal of rethinking responsibility. One option would be to simply give up on a single concept of responsibility, if so we can look at different scenarios and explain emerging tensions such as the four puzzles we just discussed in terms of borderline cases where separate responsibility concepts are jointly at work. We could distinguish, say blame or praiseworthiness from answerability or accountability since these concepts have separate purposes, by definition, we'll have no reason to worry if they don't turn out to fit a coherent picture after all. We could say for instance that control is an important condition on accountability but has no bearing whatsoever on praise or blame worthiness. I think that a lot can be said for this approach and we can learn a lot of it but since we should also be wary not to lose sight of something fundamental, the very thing that makes responsibility so vital to us, that thing is the meaningful exercise of our agency across a variety of diverse contexts and situations failing to recognise that unifying all could undermine the distinctness of moral address by breaking it down into a variety of unrelated spheres of localised expectations. By contrast, the alternative way of rethinking responsibility I currently develop aims to resolve the tensions illustrated by the four puzzles we discussed, to do so I place responsibility at the heart of a new comprehensive theory of action. In essence, this theory says that every action is a kind of achievement and as such deserves some recognition. Starting from there, we could begin to rethink responsibility on the model of authorship and in so doing we can avoid the pitfalls of both negative and fragmented frameworks. If you'd like to learn more about this project, please visit my website www.radoilska.com Many thanks