Acerca de la imagen de tapa: Ritmos Primarios, la Subversión del Alma, de Hugo Aveta, 2013.

In his comments, Daniel Nicholls succeeds in saying more than a few things that I had scarcely realized about the ways in which I write and, therefore, of what I tend to take for granted. He sees in what I write a capacity ‘to utilize the “obvious” whilst at the same time saying something about it.’ Not every philosopher would take that as a compliment. Many philosophers and philosophies have quite other pretensions – to transcend the illusions of common thought (...) and perception towards a higher plane of metaphysical philosophy – or of physics and mathematics. I find that Nicholls’s remark both compliments and complements my work, however. The use of everyday language and example to disturb that everyday world to ‘bring it into high relief’ as Nicholls puts it – is a significant part of philosophical method. To juxtapose the esoteric language of metaphysics (being-in-itself, being-for-itself, being-for-others) with the everyday (what there is, living for oneself, living for others) is to haunt the everyday with a metaphysical imagination even as it reveals what metaphysics had erased from the coinage of common words. (I am thinking, of course, of Derrida’s remarks about Anatole France’s satirical view of philosophical language as coinage from which all marking has been erased). (shrink)

Jan Patočka’s account of responsibility, as developed in Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, is configured through the philosopher’s entire model of history, seen less as a scale of progress, but rather as a rupture. Responsibility is possible only for a very specific form of humanity, centered on history, problematicity and selfdisclosure. This type of historic humanity is in profound contrast with the prehistoric one, focused on “daimonic participation.” Responsibility involves the passage from prehistory to history. Despite the fact (...) that it requires an intense “discipline of the soul,” the passage to responsibility cannot become pure and transparent, which in turn means that history is repeatedly threatened by falling back into prehistory. The positive involved in this assumption is that responsibility is not taken for granted; it is not a matter of following metaphysical principles, but rather a matter of a practical, “heretical” decision of embracing history, with its shaken problematicity, and of resisting the temptation of prehistory.La comprensión de Jan Patočka de la responsabilidad, tal como se desarrolladen Ensayos eréticos de filosofía de la Historia, viene configurada por el modelo completo de Historia, vista más como una ruptura que como una escala de progreso. La responsabilidad es posible sólo para una forma muy concreta de humanidad, centrada en la historia, la problematicidad y el autodescubrimiento. Este tipo de humanidad histórica se halla en profundo contraste con el tipo prehistórico, focalizado sobre la “participación demónica”. La responsabilidad implica el tránsito de la prehistoria a la historia. Pese a requerir una intensa “disciplina del alma”, el tránsito a la responsabilidad no puede tornarse puro y transparente, lo que a su vez significa que la historia está constantemente amenzada por una recaída en la prehistoria. El lado positivo que esta asunción envuelve es que la responsabilidad no se da por garantizada; no es una cuestión de seguir principios metafísicos, sino más bien cuestión de una decisión práctica, “herética”, de abrazar la historia, con su problematicidad conmovida, y de resistir la tentación de la prehistoria. (shrink)

The present volume discuss aspects of "Cause, Knowledge and Responsibility" from various theoretical points of view. The contributions provide input to intense discussions on these contested topics. The volume is based on results of the conference of the Institut International de Philosophie (IIP) in 9-13 September 2009, at the University of Coimbra.

Il problema della «nozione di responsabilità» che Alfred Schütz affronta in So­me Equivocations of the Notion of Responsability emerge sullo sfondo di una dimensione fenomenologica dell’azione morale. L’autore propone di di­stinguere internamente a questa nozione il punto di vista soggettivo e quello oggettivo, mettendo in luce come principi, norme, leggi e doveri morali assu­mano significato differente se riferiti alla coscienza individuale, in cui ven­gono autodeterminati ed elaborati, o se invece imposti dall’esterno. Giudicare ‘da se stessi’ la propria azione risulta (...) così su un piano etico di maggiore rile­van­za rispetto a quello in cui la responsabilità viene etero-determinata come ‘re­sponsabilità di qualcuno verso qualcosa’, quello in cui è soltanto il gruppo o l’au­torità, dall’esterno, a rendere un altro responsabile.The problem of the «notion of responsibility» which Alfred Schütz treats in So­me Equivocations of the Notion of Responsability comes out on the back­ground of a phenomenological size of the moral action. The author sug­gests distinguishing inside to this notion the subjective point of view and that one objective, sheding light upon as principles, rules, laws and moral duties grasp different meaning if ascribed to the individual conscience, in which are self-determined and elaborated, or if instead imposed from the outside. So ‘self-judgment’ on the action turns out on an ethical greater importance plan than that one in which the responsibility is hetero-determined as ‘responsibility of someone towards something’, that in which is only the group or the au­tho­rity, from the outside, to hold another person responsible. (shrink)

Acerca de la imagen de tapa: El Negro Matapacos, por Caiozzama. Noviembre 2019, Santiago de Chile.

El objetivo de este artículo es localizar, reunir y analizar las ideas de Jacques Derrida sobre el perdón. Para ello, el trabajo expone de manera breve en qué consiste la estrategia de escritura deconstructiva con el fin de hacer explícito el vínculo de la deconstrucción con el fenómeno del perdón. El perdón es considerado a partir de motivos deconstructivos y, alejado así de los parámetros tradicionales, puede insertarse en la estrategia derridiana a través de dos términos centrales de esta: decisión (...) y responsabilidad. Por lo tanto, el perdón acaece cuando se experimenta su imposibilidad, la aporía que le es propia y adviene como consecuencia la decisión y la responsabilidad. (shrink)

Liz Jackson’s Questioning allegiance: Resituating civic education arrived at the moment in which the Covid-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill. It made me wonder whether governments will...

This article examines how emerging technologies – particularly artificial intelligence – disrupt the moral and institutional foundations of contemporary military practice. While strategic documents from the United States, NATO, and other major actors anticipate profound institutional transformation driven by AI, their treatment of ethics largely confines itself to legal compliance and technical safeguards, leaving the ethical role of military leadership in managing disruptive change underexamined. Drawing on Seumas Miller’s distinction between social institutions that are merely instrumental to collective goods and (...) those whose defining ends are constitutive of such goods, the article argues that the military belongs to the latter category. Because the military’s core function – defending the sovereignty of a polity – is itself morally significant, technological disruption of its organizational structures simultaneously constitutes ethical disruption. The article thus reconceives change management during periods of technological transition as calling for a specific kind of military prudence, a practical wisdom exercised within and through the institution’s role-mediated ethical practices. By analyzing three concrete modes of techno-moral disruption, the article shows how AI may reshape ethical standards, redistribute professional knowledge, and alter organizational ethos, and why navigating these transformations responsibly is a central task of military virtue. (shrink)

This paper aims to address the ethical issue in the hermeneutics of givenness proposed by Jean-Luc Marion. The decision about how phenomena are shown implies an ethical responsibility insofar as modes that do more justice to the phenomenon than others are recognized. However, the way in which this hermeneutic discernment should be carried out is not developed by Marion. I propose to use the model of Aristotelian prudence as a possibility for discerning how to show phenomena.

This book contains five lectures which had been delivered at the Jesuit Faculty of Philosophy in Cracow. Each of them is different in subject-matter, but what makes them one book is the common concern for the social affairs. It is addressed to the general reader. Those readers who are uninitiated in the field of broadly-understood politology could find there a short dictionary of political-ethical terms. It would not just facilitate the reports' comprehension, but also widens an outlook by introducing the (...) semantic aspects of terminology that sometimes is left out of account. (shrink)

In her long-awaited Responsibility for Justice, Young discusses our responsibilities to address "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated, often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless.

David Shoemaker presents a new pluralistic theory of responsibility, based on the idea of quality of will. His approach is motivated by our ambivalence to real-life cases of marginal agency, such as those caused by clinical depression, dementia, scrupulosity, psychopathy, autism, intellectual disability, and poor formative circumstances. Our ambivalent responses suggest that such agents are responsible in some ways but not others. Shoemaker develops a theory to account for our ambivalence, via close examination of several categories of pancultural emotional responsibility (...) responses and their appropriateness conditions. The result is three distinct types of responsibility, each with its own set of required capacities: attributability, answerability, and accountability. Attributability is about the having and expressing of various traits of character, and it is the target of a range of aretaic sentiments and emotional practices organized around disdain and admiration. Answerability is about one’s capacity to govern one’s actions and attitudes by one’s evaluative judgments about the worth of various practical reasons, and it is the target of a range of sentiments and emotional practices organized around regret and pride. Accountability is about one’s ability to regard others, both evaluatively and emotionally, and it is the target of a range of sentiments and emotional practices organized around anger and gratitude. In Part One of the book, this tripartite theory is developed and defended. In Part Two of the book, the tripartite theory’s predictions about specific marginal cases are tested, once certain empirical details about the nature of those agents have been filled in and discussed. (shrink)

R. Jay Wallace argues in this book that moral accountability hinges on questions of fairness: When is it fair to hold people morally responsible for what they do? Would it be fair to do so even in a deterministic world? To answer these questions, we need to understand what we are doing when we hold people morally responsible, a stance that Wallace connects with a central class of moral sentiments, those of resentment, indignation, and guilt. To hold someone responsible, he (...) argues, is to be subject to these reactive emotions in one's dealings with that person. Developing this theme with unusual sophistication, he offers a new interpretation of the reactive emotions and traces their role in our practices of blame and moral sanction. With this account in place, Wallace advances a powerful and sustained argument against the common view that accountability requires freedom of will. Instead, he maintains, the fairness of holding people responsible depends on their rational competence: the power to grasp moral reasons and to control their behavior accordingly. He shows how these forms of rational competence are compatible with determinism. At the same time, giving serious consideration to incompatibilist concerns, Wallace develops a compelling diagnosis of the common assumption that freedom is necessary for responsibility. Rigorously argued, eminently readable, this book touches on issues of broad concern to philosophers, legal theorists, political scientists, and anyone with an interest in the nature and limits of responsibility. (shrink)

In this book Michael McKenna advances a new theory of moral responsibility, one that builds upon the work of P.F. Strawson.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) reflects an innovation paradigm that acknowledges that market innovations do not automatically deliver on socially desirable objectives, and requires a broad governance of knowledge coalitions of governmental bodies as well as industrial and societal actors to address market deficits. Responsible Innovation should be understood as a new paradigm for innovation which requires institutional changes in the research and innovation system and the public governance of the economy. It also requires the institutionalisation of an ethics of (...) co-responsibility as well as the introduction of new standards and certification processes for products. Dr. Dr. phil. von Schomberg will introduce Responsible Innovation against the background of 6 deficits of the (global) research and innovation system. (shrink)

How can we be responsible for our attitudes if we cannot normally choose what we believe, desire, feel, and intend? This problem has received much attention during the last decades, both in epistemology and ethics. Yet its connections to discussions about reasons and rationality have been largely overlooked. This book develops the foundations of an ethics of mind by investigating the responsibility that is presupposed by the requirements of rationality that govern our attitudes. It has five main goals. First, it (...) reinterprets the problem of responsibility for attitudes as a problem about the normativity of rationality. Second, it connects substantive and structural rationality by drawing on debates about responsibility. Third, it supports recent accounts of the normativity of rationality by explicitly defending the view that epistemic reasons and other ‘right-kind’ reasons are genuine normative reasons. Fourth, it breaks the stalemate between rationalist and voluntarist accounts of mental responsibility by proposing a hybrid view. Finally, it argues that irrationality can warrant moral blame, thus revealing an unnoticed normative force of rational requirements. Length of manuscript: 85,000 words. (shrink)

Intentional collective action -- Collective moral responsibility -- Collective guilt -- Individual responsibility for (and in) collective wrongs -- Collective obligation, individual obligation, and individual moral responsibility -- Individual moral responsibility in wrongful social practice.

Philosophers have long agreed that moral responsibility might not only have a freedom condition, but also an epistemic condition. Moral responsibility and knowledge interact, but the question is exactly how. Ignorance might constitute an excuse, but the question is exactly when. Surprisingly enough, the epistemic condition has only recently attracted the attention of scholars, and it is high time for a full volume on the topic. The chapters in this volume address the following central questions. Does the epistemic condition require (...) akrasia? Why does blameless ignorance excuse? Does moral ignorance sustained by one’s culture excuse? Does the epistemic condition involve knowledge of the wrongness or wrongmaking features of one’s action? Is the epistemic condition an independent condition, or is it derivative from one’s quality of will or intentions? Is the epistemic condition sensitive to degrees of difficulty? Are there different kinds of moral responsibility and thus multiple epistemic conditions? Is the epistemic condition revisionary? What is the basic structure of the epistemic condition? (shrink)

Which kinds of responsibility can we attribute to which kinds of collective, and why? In contrast, which kinds of collective responsibility can we not attribute—which kinds are ‘gappy’? This study provides a framework for answering these questions. It begins by distinguishing between three kinds of collective and three kinds of responsibility. It then explains how gaps—i.e. cases where we cannot attribute the responsibility we might want to—appear to arise within each type of collective responsibility. It argues some of these gaps (...) do not exist on closer inspection, at least for some collectives and some of the time. (shrink)

Responsibility & Desert advances a conversational theory of moral responsibility that relies upon desert as the normative basis for blame and punishment. A conversational theory understands the relationship between a blameworthy wrongdoer and those who hold her to account by blaming to be similar to the relationship between competent speakers engaged in a conversational exchange. Blame can therefore be appraised for being meaningful as a reply to a culpable party's conduct. But meaningfulness alone is inadequate to justify blame and punishment. (...) Might one appeal to fairness, reasonableness, or just utility? Perhaps. But desert is widely regarded as the proper basis for blame and punishment. Well, is it? Responsibility & Desert explores just what desert is within the domain of moral responsibility, when conceptualized within the framework of the conversational theory. It does not offer an unqualified defence, but it does offer a best case for treating desert as the proper basis for the communicative character of blame and punishment. To do so, familiar challenges to desert and retribution are taken up. Does deserved blame and punishment commit us to the noninstrumental goodness of harms to the blameworthy and criminally culpable? Is this mere vengeance? Does it also commit us to extremely harsh treatment in response to extremely egregious wrongdoing? Responsibility & Desert does not shy away from accepting hard truths about appeal to desert, but it does show that many of the most damning indictments of it are misguided. (shrink)

Recently, a number of philosophers have begun to question the commonly held view that choice or voluntary control is a precondition of moral responsibility. According to these philosophers, what really matters in determining a person’s responsibility for some thing is whether that thing can be seen as indicative or expressive of her judgments, values, or normative commitments. Such accounts might therefore be understood as updated versions of what Susan Wolf has called “real self views,” insofar as they attempt to ground (...) an agent’s responsibility for her actions and attitudes in the fact (when it is a fact) that they express who she is as a moral agent. As such, they seem to be open to some of the same objections Wolf originally raised to such accounts, and in particular to the objection that they cannot license the sorts of robust moral assessments involved in our current practices of moral responsibility. My aim in this paper is to try to respond to this challenge, by clarifying the kind of robust moral assessments I take to be licensed by (at least some) non-volitional accounts of responsibility and by explaining why these assessments do not in general require the agent to have voluntary control over everything for which she is held responsible. I also argue that the limited applicability of the distinction between “bad agents” and “blameworthy agents” on these accounts is in fact a mark in their favor. (shrink)

We understand responsible leadership as a social-relational and ethical phenomenon, which occurs in social processes of interaction. While the prevailing leadership literature has for the most part focussed on the relationship between leaders and followers in the organization and defined followers as subordinates, we show in this article that leadership takes place in interaction with a multitude of followers as stakeholders inside and outside the corporation. Using an ethical lens, we discuss leadership responsibilities in a stakeholder society, thereby following Bass (...) and Steidelmeier’s suggestion to discuss “leadership in the context of contemporary stakeholder theory” (1999: 200). Moreover, from a relational and stakeholder perspective we approach the questions: What is responsible leadership? What makes a responsible leader? What qualities are needed? Finally, we propose a so-called “roles model” of responsible leadership, which gives a gestalt to a responsible leader and describes the different roles he or she takes in leading stakeholders and business in society. (shrink)

This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral responsibility.

"International and domestic laws commonly hold states responsible for their wrongdoings. States pay compensation for their unjust wars, and reparations for their historical wrongdoings. Some argue that states should incur punitive damages for their international crimes. But there is a troubling aspect to these practices: States are corporate agents, comprised of flesh and blood citizens. When the state uses the public purse to finance its corporate liabilities, the burden falls on these citizens, even if they protested against the state's policies, (...) did not know about them, or entirely lacked channels of political influence. How can this "distributive effect" of state-level responsibly be justified? The book develops an answer to this question, which revolves around citizens' participation in their state. It argues that citizenship can be a type of massive collective action, where citizens willingly orient themselves around the authority of their state, and where state policies are the product of this collective action. While most ordinary citizens are not to blame for their participation in their state, they nevertheless ought to accept a share of the remedial obligations that flow from their state's wrongful policies. However, the distributive effect cannot be justified in all states. Specifically, in non-democratic states most citizens are not participating in their state in the full sense, and should not pay for their state's wrongdoings. This finding calls then for a revision of the way we hold states responsible in both the domestic and international levels"--. (shrink)

Drug use and drug addiction are severely stigmatised around the world. Marc Lewis does not frame his learning model of addiction as a choice model out of concern that to do so further encourages stigma and blame. Yet the evidence in support of a choice model is increasingly strong as well as consonant with core elements of his learning model. I offer a responsibility without blame framework that derives from reflection on forms of clinical practice that support change and recovery (...) in patients who cause harm to themselves and others. This framework can be used to interrogate our own attitudes and responses, so that we can better see how to acknowledge the truth about choice and agency in addiction, while avoiding stigma and blame, and instead maintaining care and compassion alongside a commitment to working for social justice and good. (shrink)