Responsibility, Morality, and Power Relations

Three senses of 'responsibility'

Philosophy is largely concerned with OED definitions 2.a.i and 2.a.ii of 'responsibility':

i. The state or fact of being accountable; liability, accountability for something.
ii. The state or fact of being the cause or originator of something; the credit or blame for something.

In sense i, there is another to whom one is responsible, to whom one owes an account or justification. That other is a passive recipient of this account. In sense ii, there is also an other, but this other is active, they judge and sanction the responsible person (RP).

Both these roles for the other can be internalised by the RP, often resulting in emotions like guilt (the emotion associated with lacking a justification in the eyes of others) or shame (a form of blaming oneself). The positive emotion of pride seems to cover both feeling justified and taking credit.

However, there does seem to be a third sense of responsibility, which neither involves an other nor internalises an other: a sense in which one can be responsible for one's actions while being entirely indifferent to what others think. Rather than internalising the other, in this sense the RP justifies their action to themselves and blames or praises themselves. This reflexive responsibility should also be distinguished from versions of i and ii where the other to whom one is accountable and who has standing to blame is some non-actual or idealised person (captured by the phrase 'in the eyes of God'). The reflexively responsible person may be very realistic about their own limitations and thus only be holding themselves up to those standards. They do not have to be striving for sainthood, just doing their best, which may be less than the best possible in the circumstances.

iii. The state or fact of being accountable to, or justified by the lights of, one's own standards

One might think that sense iii, reflexive responsibility, is pointless, for it has no teeth to make the RP a better person, to bring about change in their behaviour. Someone with low standards for their own behaviour, someone who endorses greed or deceit for example, may be reflexively responsible in their bad acts.

But that isn't quite right for two reasons. Firstly, we should take care not to underestimate our fellow humans by overestimating how many do in fact hold themselves to such low standards, at least under reflection. And for those who do, we might think that being accountable to and blamed by others is unlikely to make much difference., unless backed by the 'full force of the law'.

Secondly, it seems unnecessarily authoritarian or paternalistic to insist that the best, or even only, mechanism to bring about improvement in the standards of behaviour someone holds themselves to is by giving another power over them, in the form of being owed a justification and having a standing to blame. What of more 'therapeutic' methods which stimulate and nurture change from within, when the person is ready, under their own control and volition?

Power and Moral Responsibility

There are certainly many uncontroversial cases where individuals are responsible in senses i and ii. Responsibility in sense i often arising from the RP holding an office or performing a role, so they are not responsible qua individual but qua where they sit in a social structure of offices and roles.

Responsibility in senses i and ii is widespread can be created by social structures as big as governments and as small as local residents' associations. For this to happen, that social structure has to introduce power relations which do not hold independently of the social structure. A group of friends having a picnic in a park is quite an elaborate, if ephemeral, social structure, but it does not create responsibilities in senses i and ii because it does not introduce new power relations between those friends. IN contrast, if a random person on a train asks you where you are travelling to, you have no responsibility to answer, but if the ticket inspector asks you, you do. The social structure of public transport creates responsibilities because it introduces power relations between people that did not previously exist.

It follows that if - as many believe - moral responsibility involves responsibility in senses i and ii, and not just sense iii, morality is a structure which introduces power relations between individuals.

But where do those power relations come from? They do not derive from social structures and the roles they create. Of course one could argue that some roles or offices come with particular moral responsibilities, but not everyone who has moral responsibility for their actions is a doctor or a politician, and even those people can be morally responsible when acting in a private capacity.

Moral Theory

If we are committed to moral responsibility in senses i and ii, then we must develop a moral theory which makes morality an independent source of power relations between individual agents. Independent from social structures which create power relations, that is.

A traditional solution to this is to imagine a hierarchy of natural roles or offices, exemplified in families or castes perhaps, with God at the top as the ultimate source of these moral power relations.

A secular and egalitarian alternative is the idea of moral rights: each individual as a domain over which they are sovereign and in virtue of this sovereignty have certain rights with respect to every other individual, each of whom can be held responsible for infringements of those rights.

In a moral theory which introduces moral rights, the power relations required for moral responsibility derive from the absolute power each individual has with respect to their own domain and the consequent directed power over specific individuals in virtue of those individuals wronging them by infringing on that domain.

What if ...?

What if we drop the commitment to moral responsibility in senses i and ii and restrict moral responsibility to the reflexive responsibility of sense iii? What would be lost? Resentment? Indignation? Blame? Good riddance.

More generally, understanding moral responsibility as involving responsibility in senses i and ii means that some people have power over others merely in virtue of the latter being morally responsible for their actions. This creates a sense of entitlement to interfere in the lives of others, where they are perceived to be morally responsible for something.

And if we do that, whatever use we might have for talk of moral rights, they will not function like legal rights in generating claims of one against another.