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- Value profile: responsibility
Capacity responsibility (conditions for imputing or assigning responsibility)
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Self-sameness (Identity): The agent caused the action and the agent's identity persists or continues from the moment of act to the moment of accountability. F.H. Bradley: "I must be throughout one identical person. We do not say, 'He is not the same man that he was,' but always in another sense, to signify that the character or disposition of the person is altered."
Ethical Studies , 5
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Moral Sense : The agent has skills pertinent to honing in on moral relevance and collecting thought, emotion, and will into responsive action. As Bradley puts it, "Responsibility implies a moral agent. No one is accountable, who is not capable of knowing (not, who does not know) the moral quality of his acts. Wherever we can not presume upon a capacity for apprehending (not, an actual apprehension of) moral distinctions, in such cases, for example, as those of young children and some madmen, there is, and there can be, no responsibility because there exists no moral will."
Ethical Studies 7
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Ownership : Minimally, this condition requires the absence of ignorance and compulsion. As Bradley puts it, "it [the act] must have belonged to me--it must have been mine....The deed must issue from my will; in Aristotle's language, the arche must be in myself. ["Arche" is the Greek workd for beginning or principle.]Where I am forced, there I do nothing....Not only must the deed be an act, and come from the man without compulsion, but, in the second place, the doer must be supposed intelligent; he must know the particular circumstances of the case;;;;If the man is ignorant, and if it was not his duty to know...then the deed is not his act."
Ethical Studies , 5-6.
- Ignorance and compulsion are not excusable if the they result from past, negligent actions. For example, if my failure to find crucial information in the past--"I don't want to know..."--caused my present ignorance it is not excusable. If my past actions and choices got me into the present compelling situation, then I am also responsible.
- Bradley's definition of compulsion is, roughly, the production in an individual of a state of mind or body that is contrary to his or her actual will. Holding a loaded gun to my head and telling me to sign the contract, is compulsion because the fear it produces in my mind leads me to an action that, absent the gun, I would not do. Tripping me produces a state of body--falling--that is contrary to my actual will of standing straight.
More on strawson
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Participant reactive attitudes : "What I have called the participant reactive attitudes are essentially natural human reactions to the good or ill will or indifferences of others towards us, as displayed in their attitudes and actions" Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," 10-11. For Strawson, responsibility arises when we hold one another responsible for living up to certain standards and when we respond with "reactive attitudes" when there is a failure to live up to these standards.
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Objective attitude : "on the other hand, [the objective attitude] withholds subjecting oneself and others to reactive attitudes. In cases of insanity, childhood, or some other relevant deficiency, the individual does ot fit in the network of relations supported by reactive attitudes." "Freedom and Resentment" 18-19.
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Examples : Resentment, Indignation, Shame.
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Positive Correlates : Gratitude, Admiration, Pride
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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