Taking Responsibility in an Unjust World (original) (raw)
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Justice Unbound: Responsibility in the Second Modernity
The article concerns an analysis of global social justice and presents justice as distributing responsibility in the second modernity. Central to the analysis are ‘modern risks’. They constitute the distribution problem in this new phase of modernity. Modern risks cause a constellation of problems that cannot be solved without foregoing the soil modern risks breed on: wealth and wealth production. The existence (or, as some may say, the experience) of modern risks puts the matter of global interdependency and responsibility at the centre of our attention: how to distribute responsibility for the effects of modern risks? To this end, the authors formulate two distributive principles that seek to attribute responsibility in an unequal way, as to compensate the social risk positions of the worst off in the second modernity and enquire into the role of law in respect of these two principles.
Responsibility, Justice, and Solidarity
This article examines, first, how the concept of personal responsibility figures in different theories of distributive justice, and second, what the relation is between ideas of personal responsibility and solidarity in the context of an account of justice. I discuss luck egalitarianism as a representative attempt to make the theory of distributive justice sensitive to an independent conception of personal responsibility. After clarifying the structure of the luck egalitarian approach, I raise doubts about whether it is possible to develop an account of personal responsibility for outcomes that does not itself rely on a prior theory of justice. I then contrast the structural role that personal responsibility plays in luck egalitarianism with the role it plays in Rawls's theory of justice. Finally, I show how these different roles in turn support very different accounts of the relation between ideals of personal responsibility and solidarity.
Democratic Moral Agency: Altering Unjust Conditions in Practices of Responsibility
Moral Agency and the Politics of Responsibility Edited by Cornelia Ulbert, Peter Finkenbusch, Elena Sondermann, Tobias Debiel
When we consider international wrongs, such as war crimes, systemic human rights abuses or global inequality, assigning responsibility is complex. Collective harms by their nature defy an individualistic understanding of moral accountability, as determining clean lines of causality is practically impossible and great numbers of people are implicated through their participation in harmful collective acts . Further, the attempt to assign responsibility to culpable individuals becomes deeply political, as identifying some agents as distinctly responsible over others is an exertion of power that excuses and blames for reasons exterior to the issue of strict causal accountability (Connolly, 1995, p.47-48). In light of this, I argue that we should understand the assignation of responsibility as a social practice, such that it is not a quality of individual actors but rather a quality of our social relationships . This means that responsibility is a practice through which we hold each other accountable to social norms in order to further specific customary moral ends. Therefore, I contend that we should develop a more democratic practice of responsibility not solely focused on the causal responsibility and moral culpability of individuals, but also concerned with how social interactions enable injustice, both by empowering some individuals to cause harm and through social structures that cause harm even when no individual intends to do harm (Young, 2011, p.73). This alternative approach to responsibility is characterised as democratic because it requires a shift in how we understand morally agency from a focus on individuals acting freely to a focus on how communities of individuals are implicated in collective harms, as well as to what extent social relations might be reformed to limit the capacity of individuals to cause harms to others and empower those who experience injustice to alter harmful social practices. This alternative is then illustrated by looking at how grassroots human rights groups in the US have attributed human rights abuses related to housing not only to individuals, but to collective actors and the interactions of communities of individuals. In response, they claim that understanding human rights abuses as a collective harm requires holding both individuals and social practices accountable. This forward-looking responsibility is fundamentally political as it entails a duty to seek the redistribution of political power and material resources to those affected by unjust social interactions, in the case of housing it entails a shift in the economic and political order, specifically in how we relate through practices of home ownership.
2018
The responsibility discourse raises the pressing question of the prospects of a responsible society. To address this question, it is necessary to consider the historical events and the reflexivity they induced in a range of actors as well as the concurrent dynamics and the associated theoretical reflections seeking to make sense of the age of responsibility. Beyond this task of making contemporary responsibility and its prospects intelligible, however, I intend to pursue a route not taken by the philosophers and social scientists who contributed to theorizing responsibility. My proposal is to adopt a critical cognitive sociological approach that makes available a theoretical conception of responsibility which not only accommodates the significance of the philosophical concept, but also makes it amenable to critical social scientific analysis. Under this rubric, three steps are taken. The first section reconstructs the emergence and establishment of the reflexive, counterfactual idea of responsibility forming part of the modern cognitive order. In the second section, the generation in social life of a variety of different competing, mutually contested and conflicting, yet in certain respects also potentially converging, interpretations and pursuits of responsibility made possible by this development is followed and systematized. The final section shifts the focus to the question of the formation of a cognitive cultural model of responsibility which could function as the concrete idée directrice of the maturing age of responsibility. Here the normatively informed critical thrust of the cognitive sociological approach adopted should become apparent.
Interpreting Responsibility Politically
Journal of Political Philosophy, 2017
P OLITICAL theorists and philosophers typically think of agents as morally responsible for injustice when two conditions obtain: the agents' behavior-their acts, attempts, and omissions-leads to or results in some wrongful event or condition (causation); and, that behavior is proscribed or violates moral requirements (culpability). 1 Few people doubt that when injustice follows straightforwardly from the culpable behavior of some agent, that agent "is responsible" or should be "held responsible" for it. This conception of responsibility captures a widely held understanding (at least in the West) of commonsense morality, 2 one that seems to connect agency to redress in the right way by linking causation and blameworthy behavior with an obligation to make amends, to put things right. Moral responsibility is only one species of responsibility: legal liability often (but not always) tracks moral responsibility (they diverge, for instance, in cases of strict liability). In addition, relationships can give rise to responsibility: I might have a special obligation to clear my neighbor's sidewalk of snow simply because she needs the help and is close to me. 3 Some theorists maintain that we have responsibilities to help others by virtue of our capacity to do so without giving up anything of moral significance. 4 Further, certain social roles create responsibility: *Many people have helped me in grappling with these issues through their generous criticism and encouragement. Special thanks are due to Brooke Ackerly, Lisa Ellis, Bob Goodin, Carol Gould, Rich Hiskes, Jeannie Morefield, Joan Tronto, and several thoughtful and conscientious reviewers. For their kind attention and their valuable suggestions I am grateful to audiences at: the Association for Political Theory; the