Abstract
There are many ways to avoid responsibility, for example, explaining what happens as the work of the gods, fate, society, or the system. For engineers, “technology” or “the organization” will serve this purpose quite well. We may distinguish at least nine (related) senses of “responsibility”, the most important of which are: (a) responsibility-as-causation (the storm is responsible for flooding), (b) responsibility-as-liability (he is the person responsible and will have to pay), (c) responsibility-as-competency (he’s a responsible person, that is, he’s rational), (d) responsibility-as-office (he’s the responsible person, that is, the person in charge), and (e) a responsibility-as-domain-of-tasks (these are her responsibilities, that is, the things she is supposed to do). For all but the causal sense of responsibility, responsibility may be taken (in a relatively straightforward sense)—and generally is. Why then would anyone want to claim that certain technologies make it impossible to attribute responsibility to engineers (or anyone else)? In this paper, I identify seven arguments for that claim and explain why each is fallacious. The most important are: (1) the argument from “many hands”, (2) the argument from individual ignorance, and (3) the argument from blind forces. Each of these arguments makes the same fundamental mistake, the assumption that a certain factual situation, being fixed, settles responsibility, that is, that individuals, either individually or by some group decision, cannot take responsibility. I conclude by pointing out the sort of decisions (and consequences) engineers have explicitly taken responsibility for and why taking responsibility for them is rational, all things considered. There is no technological bar to such responsibility.
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Notes
See for example, Nissenbaum (1996). Though her focus is, as her title suggests, computer scientists, her argument fits engineers as well—and some of her examples include engineers.
Though responsibility-as-good-cause seems the mirror image of responsibility-as-faulty-cause, it is overlooked in most discussions of responsibility—perhaps because there is no obvious credit version of responsibility-as-liability or responsibility-as-accountability. The term for this missing sort of responsibility might be “responsibility-as-reward” (or perhaps “creditability”).
Responsibility-as-power often appears in discussions of professional ethics. See for example, Alpern (1983), for an early example applied to engineering.
Hart (1968, 210–223) seems to have been the first to distinguish four of these senses: responsibility-as-role (which I have divided into “office” and “task”), responsibility-as-simple-cause, responsibility-as-liability, and responsibility-as-competency (“capacity”). Ladd (1982, esp. 64–65) seems to have been the first to distinguish accountability (which, unfortunately, he treats as a merely organizational notion—as if a perfect stranger cannot “call me to account” for something untoward I did as a mere individual). Kuflik (1999, esp. 174–175) offers six senses—some significantly different from mine. For example, he distinguishes responsibility-as-simple-cause (using a hurricane example) from responsibility-as-function (“the heart is responsible for pumping blood”). Though a useful distinction for some purposes, it would only complicate discussion here. Nevertheless, that distinction is a reminder that my list is neither exhaustive nor canonical.
Those who distinguish between “backward-looking liability” and “forward-looking liability” seem to me to have confused responsibility-as-liability with responsibility-as-simple-cause or responsibility-as-faulty-cause. The reason for that confusion seems to be that blame is (generally) backward-looking. We generally blame people for what they have done, not for what they will do, and liability (it is thought) must work in the same way. The mistake is to assume that other blame-related concepts must be just as backward-looking as blame itself. While it may be true that blaming someone for doing such-and-such is to say of her that she did something she should not have (or failed to do something she should have), that is, to refer to the past, to say of someone that they deserve blame (or that they are blamable) is not only another way to blame them; saying that also sets out a set of tasks (blame them in various ways until the reason for blaming is gone), that is, says something about the future (as blaming does not). Deserving blame differs from responsibility-as-liability only in not assigning the tasks to anyone, though it gives each of us a reason and a right to do the tasks.
There should be a corresponding problem about engineers and good causation, but no one seems to want to deny engineers credit for their good works even though the same arguments that undermine liability and accountability would seem to undermine credit. Where there can be no blame, there can be no praise (or so we generally think).
Indeed, holding persons responsible without fault is not the limit of what the law can do. The law can also hold non-humans responsible. For example, in 1595, in Leiden, Provetie, an ordinary dog, was tried for the murder of a child whose death it caused. The dog nipped the child’s hand while taking meat from it, the wound became infected, and the child died as a result. All this having been proved, Provetie was found guilty and publicly hanged. There was no claim that Provetie intended to harm the child, that it foresaw the harm, or that it even should have foreseen the harm. It was enough to hold the dog responsible for the death that it did what it should not have, nipped the child’s hand, however innocently, and the child died as a result. (Arthur and Shaw 2006, 245–246).
So, for example, morality is silent concerning the legal punishment of dogs. Since reason no longer seems to recommend such punishment, we may wonder why it ever did (if it did). One answer at least is obvious: Going through the forms of criminal trial may have been the simplest way to deal with an unusual case. There is some evidence that this obvious answer may also be the right one. The official summary of the case includes language probably standard at the time but wholly inappropriate to this particular case, for example, “all of which appears from the prisoner’s own confession, made by him without torture or being put in irons.” Arthur and Shaw, 246. How could the dog “confess”?
Ladd (1982), 67. Note that Ladd explicitly connects moral responsibility with power (my fifth sense of responsibility), for example: “one of the principal factors that creates moral responsibilities for one person rather than another is a difference of power, which usually consists of superior knowledge and ability to affect outcomes.”
Those who are not competent (in the appropriate respect) cannot (it is assumed) be at fault (with respect to that). Neither can those who could not have foreseen the harm they caused be at fault in that respect. Competence and knowledge (of the appropriate sort) are (it is assumed) at least preconditions of fault.
For those who think that I should have included “control” among the list of necessary conditions, I recommend Sher (2006). As will be plain, nothing important turns on this omission.
Her inaction is, in this respect, quite different from the inaction of a lifeguard assigned to watch a stretch of beach. His inaction is a causal factor in any drowning death he might have prevented precisely because another lifeguard would have been there had he not been. The beach would not (we may suppose) be open for swimming if a lifeguard were not present.
Lawyers like to interpret “cause” as necessary condition (“but for”). The problems with so interpreting “cause” are well-known (for example, an inability to make sense of redundant causes or to limit the number of causes). We need not concern ourselves with those problems here. The objection made here stands even if those problems can be solved. For recent work on omissions as causes (more or less consistent with what I say here), see: McGrath (2005), Dowe 2004), Boniolo and De Anna (2006), Pundik (2007), and Baumgartner (2008).
Curtis Forbes tells me that this comment may reveal me to be an urbanite. He has noticed that those who grew up in the countryside, as he did, are much less likely to feel this responsibility. He may be right, but even if this sense of responsibility (and the moral judgment of “worse” it supports) is “cultural-centric”, it relies on a conception of responsibility independent of choice (and does not appear to be incoherent because it does), which is all I need to make my point.
Now, it might be objected that this example is really about a duty to aid because one is in a position to do so, rather than a duty to aid because one caused the problem. I do not think there is a decisive way to disprove this objection. But I do think there are good reasons to dismiss it. The most important is that the duty to aid usually involves serious danger to another—not, as in this case, merely cleaning up a mess. The only people who are likely to see much force to this duty to aid, apart from the causal connection, are act utilitarians, supposing I have no better way to use my time than looking after the dead cat.
I am not the only one to notice this sort of responsibility. See for example, Kutz (2002), p. 558: “Sometimes an agent’s mere causal linkage with harm may warrant a response….agents can reproach themselves for faultless conduct that causes a harm, even when their victims, and onlookers, do not reproach them.” The first half of Kutz (2002) is worth reading for the way his “Strawsonian” interpretation of responsibility tends to reach the same conclusions I do in this section.
To see how important context is, suppose the cat had been a rat or other non-pet. Would we feel the same obligation to stop? Should we feel any? Then suppose the cat had been a child or youth. Would we not feel an even stronger obligation to stop and help?
There is, I think, a close analogy between this view of responsibility as primarily imposed and what is called “the external” perspective on law. The external perspective on law misses essential features of law that the internal perspective includes, especially its authority. See especially, Hart (1961), pp. 101–102. From the outside, responsibility may seem to be primarily about having to answer to others for what one does (what Kant would call “heteronomy”). From the inside, responsibility may seem to be primarily about being trustworthy, someone capable of answering for what he does, a certain (virtuous) disposition (what is recognizably Kant’s “autonomy”).
Nissenbaum (1996, 29).
I am inclined to think that discussions of responsibility suffer from supposing, however implicitly, too close an analogy between moral and legal responsibility. While legal responsibility is primarily about holding others responsible, moral responsibility is at least as much about holding ourselves responsible as holding others responsible. The structure of moral responsibility may (despite many overlaps with legal responsibility) have far less to do with punishment, compensation, or even blame than legal responsibility has. For more on this, see Cane (2002).
Nissenbaum, 30, has therefore confused the problem of many hands with the problem of many causes. She is not the only one. See for example, Bovens (1998, esp. 45–50), a section titled “Accountability: the problem of many hands” and beginning with the Thompson quotation used above, but consisting of several interesting examples all of which illustrate the problem of many causes rather than many hands.
The failure to take account of such differences between professions is one reason why Bovens’ treatment of professional responsibility (Bovens 1998, 161–163) is—like that of most social scientists and the philosophers who follow their lead—decidedly misleading.
The obligation to keep good records, though helpful to accountability (should giving an account become necessary), is not itself accountability but a liability (an obligation to do something other than give an account).
Some other engineering codes have similar provisions. See for example, IEEE (2006): “7. to seek, accept, and offer honest criticism of technical work, to acknowledge and correct errors, and to credit properly the contributions of others”. (I cite codes of engineering ethics in this paper to demonstrate that I am not making up what I claim to be facts about engineering. The codes constitute evidence, though not decisive evidence, of what responsibilities engineers have taken on.)
Well, relatively simple. There are conceptual problems about how to treat redundant causes, alternate causes, and the like (as noted already)—and these affect (and are affected by) how we conceptualize cause itself. See especially, Hart and Honoré (1973).
Of course, engineers do blame one another sometimes, but there is nothing especially interesting about that. Their blaming will have much the same structure as ordinary blaming—though it will take into account the special responsibilities engineers have taken on.
Feinberg (1970), 205, eventually calls the engineering criterion “the handle criterion”, having in view the expression “to get a handle on it”.
Whether this is a good idea is a separate question. Compare Bucciarelli (2002).
There is a fourth flaw which raises deeper questions about causation. Premise 1 also seems to be false because redundant causes can be causes. Suppose two hunters shoot the same bystander at the same moment (because he has come between them and a duck they are both aiming at), that both their bullets enter his body at the same time, and that either bullet would be sufficient to cause death. Neither hunter is necessary for the bystander to die. The death is “over-determined”. Yet, it would seem odd to let both off because neither was the cause, or even a cause, of the bystander’s death. I ignore this flaw (and several related ones) here because I promised charity on the subject of necessary conditions for responsibility.
So, for example, a claim like the following seems to me clearly mistaken: “As an engineer, I think we take ourselves too seriously if we think we are ever going to influence what society decides to do by looking at the problem of ethics within the context of technology itself.” Wiseman (1980), p. 166. This argument has an extension to society as a whole not relevant here. See for example, Winner (1995).
See for example, Florman (1978), 323: “An engineer designing a rapid transit cannot become expert in acoustics, urban planning, and the habits of woodland birds, and at the same time be an expert in the design of monorails. Nor can he do his best work if he is excessively apprehensive about the consequences of his every move.”
Of course, engineers are interested in avoiding blame, just as they are interested in avoiding legal liability. All I claim is that, as engineers, that is (and should be) what they are least concerned about—just as lawyers, as such, are (or at least should be) most concerned with legal liability. As individuals, avoiding blame may be their chief concern.
See for example, Schnädelbach (1980), 28: “‘We dealt only with the technical problems and had no influence on the determination of goals’—this is a type of excuse frequently advanced in order to separate technical from ethical responsibility after political and moral catastrophes.” While Schnädelbach does a good job of stating the argument from neutrality, he in fact rejects it—even for applied science. I am still looking for a contemporary thinker who endorses it.
For a good survey of this debate, see Sundström (1998). By “technology”, I simply mean all those systems of people and things that constitute the world humans have made, everything from bridges, computer programs, and dictionaries to hybrid corn, hot dogs, and Labrador retrievers.
Think, for example, of programmers who claim to be “artists rather than engineers”—or scientists who rely on the neutrality argument discussed in the last section.
Compare Ladd (1982), 66: “responsibilities are not incurred or acquired like obligations. Rather one finds oneself responsible for something or other as a result of being in a certain position, e.g. of power.” The responsibility the engineer took here is (Ladd notwithstanding) incurred like an obligation, not by having the power to help but by a specific voluntary act, claiming to “see the problem”. Had the engineer remained silent, he would have had no responsibility to fix the guillotine.
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Acknowledgments
I should like to thank Ibo van de Poel and Vivian Weil for many helpful comments on earlier one or another drafts of this paper.
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Davis, M. “Ain’t No One Here But Us Social Forces”: Constructing the Professional Responsibility of Engineers. Sci Eng Ethics 18, 13–34 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-010-9225-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-010-9225-3