Responsibility
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the (ethical) Responsibility page
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In an operational sense, responsibility refers to an obligation to perform certain functions to achieve specific results.
The judgment that a person is morally responsible for their behaviour involves attributing certain powers and capacities to that person, considering their conduct as a consequence of their having and exercising those powers and capacities.
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Core ideas
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Reponsibility and the reference to human dimensions
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Responsibility and power
What power do responsible people exercise over their actions? One (partial) answer is that the person concerned could have acted differently than performing the action in question.
If causal determinism were to hold, every event (including events involving human deliberation, choice, and action) would be inevitable because causally necessitates the facts of the past and future by the laws of nature. Determinism fixes the facts about the present and the future with the facts of the past so that the present and the future can unfold in only one way.
Free will requires the ability to act otherwise. It is easy to see why free will is incompatible with causal determinism. If determinism were true, then our actions are the consequences of the laws of nature and the events of the distant past. But we have no control over what happens before birth, and it is not up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present actions) are not up to us.
(Interests)
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Reasons-Responsiveness
People's responsibility is based on their capacity to be appropriately sensitive to the rational considerations that influence their actions. What is needed is 'guidance control', which manifests itself when a person directs his behaviour in a specific direction, regardless of whether it was open to him to direct his behaviour otherwise. 'Guidance control' depends in particular on whether the psychological mechanism in a person's behaviour is responsive to reasons.
(Values)
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Forward looking
Future-oriented approaches to moral responsibility justify responsibility practices by focusing on the beneficial consequences of performing these practices. Who is responsible is a question concerning the correct point of application of the motive. Our general system of responsibility practices appeals to our suitability for fostering moral agency and acquiring the required capacity.
(Goals)
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