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This module profiles the value, responsibility. After presenting its root metaphor, it provides a discussion of key features, kinds and senses, and useful frameworks. Responsibility is a complex value. The route this module takes through this complexity is to pull together its different senses and kinds as variations of "response to relevance." Two exercises at the end will provide an anchor for students to work with responsibility's root meaning and to see how it develops and changes as it appears in different cases. This first publishing is subject to revision as author gathers assessment data and carries out further research into moral responsibility.

Introduction: the root meaning of responsibility

The College of Business Administration at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez has recently adopted a Statement of Values. Rather than allowing this document to become static, this community is committed to challenging the Statement of Values. The first challenge, brought about by students, was to translate the Statement of Values into Spanish. (The original was drafted in English in order to be integrated into Business Administration's efforts at AACSB accreditation.) This module forms part of a series of modules that profile in detail each of the constituent values of Business Administration's Statement of Values: justice, responsibility, respect, trust, and integrity. Its purpose is to provide the basis for a conceptual challenge to the Statement of Values. Different constituents or stakeholders of Business Administration, students and staff, have expressed interest in more sharply distinguishing key values (e.g. trust and responsibility) and in exploring the overlap and distinctions between values (e.g., integrity and responsibility). This module profiles responsibility. Others will profile the remaining values, justice, respect, trust, and integrity. Finally, an introductory module will introduce students to value-based decision making while a concluding module will present a value realization framework taken from software engineering. This module profiles responsibility by providing its root metaphor, key features, kinds and senses, and useful frameworks. It concludes with exercises designed to help students understand responsibility's root metaphor, response to relevance, and how it has been metaphorically projected onto increasingly "higher" moral spaces, moving from the negative to the positive, the minimal to the exemplary, and the reactive to the prospective.

Root meaning: response to relevance

Herbert Fingarette's formula, "responsiveness to essential relevance" pulls together two strains used to test for criminal insanity, the cognitive test which lies in the ability to appreciate the moral quality of one's actions and the volitional test which lies in the ability to act on one's perception of moral relevance. This module converts the test for legal competence, "responsiveness to essential relevance," into a the root metaphor for moral responsibility, namely, "(moral) responsiveness to essential (moral) relevance." Moral responsibility brings together two skills. First, the responsible agent has the ability to zero in on the morally relevant aspects of a situation. This comes from cultivated emotional and perceptual sensitivities. (You are sitting on a crowded bus and begin to feel empathically the uncomfortableness of the elderly lady standing in the center.) Second, while keeping the morally relevant aspects in focus, the responsible agent is able to design and execute a morally responsive action that answers to the moral relevance in a situation. (You rise from your seat in the bus and offer it to the elderly lady.) This volitional ability requires cultivating powers of control, skill and knowledge. The root meaning of responsibility is, thus, (moral) responsiveness to essential (moral) relevance. See Fingarette, The Meaning of Criminal Insanity, 186-7.

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Source:  OpenStax, Statement of values. OpenStax CNX. Jul 27, 2013 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11467/1.4
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