Abstract
Discussions of responsibility typically focus on the person who is held responsible: what are the conditions or criteria of responsibility; what can be done to or demanded of a person who is responsible? This paper shifts focus onto those who hold, rather than those who are held, responsible: what do we owe to those whom we hold responsible? After distinguishing responsibility as answerability from responsibility as liability, it attends mainly to the former, and points out the ways in which it is multiply relational: I am responsible for something to someone who has the standing to call me to account for it, under the norms of some particular practice. Responsibility as thus understood is also reciprocal: if you are to be answerable to me, I must treat you with a certain respect, attend seriously to your answer, and be ready to answer to you myself. The paper explores some of the implications of this point both for our moral dealings with each other, and for criminal law and the criminal trial.
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Notes
Accountability as thus understood is responsibility for what is wrong or untoward. I can also be responsible for welcome results and admirable actions, but the logic of responsibility for the bad and for the good differ, and I attend here only to the former. I also, for simplicity’s sake, focus on responsibility for actions and omissions.
Though the meaning of a guilty plea as an admission of guilt is undermined by the practice of plea bargaining, given which the plea becomes just a formal move in the game. A reductio of this practice is found in the Alford plea: the defendant pleads ‘Guilty’ whilst also denying his guilt (North Carolina v Alford 91 S Ct 160 (1970)).
See Fletcher 1978: 552–79, 683–758; Duff 2007: ch. 9. If the prosecution proves that the defendant committed the offence, he has the burden of offering evidence of a defence sufficient to create a reasonable doubt about his guilt. If he does produce such evidence, it is for the prosecution to disprove his defence.
On this conception of the criminal trial, see Duff et al 2007.
If I fail, for no good reason, to meet a friend for the drink that we arranged, I commit a (minor) moral wrong: but if a stranger seeks to hold me to account me for this failure, I might respond that it is not her business; I answer to my friend, and perhaps to the group of friends to which I and the person I wronged belong, but not to her. But contrast Scanlon 2008: 139–40: ‘the moral relationship’ that grounds the legitimacy of moral blame is a matter of the ‘mutual concern that, ideally, we all have toward other rational beings’.
She is paradigmatically called to answer as a citizen because defendants might not in fact be citizens of the polity in which they are tried; they might be guests (see Duff 2018: ch. 3.3).
UN Model Treaty on Extradition (http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/45/a45r116.htm); Extradition Act 2003.
Others might hold her accountable for what she does in response to his threat if it has implications for them; but he lacks the standing to do so.
What is it to be ‘ready to be persuaded’? I must at least have a conception of what would count as an adequate or exculpatory answer that would block either answerability or the inference from answerability to liability.
And part of the rationale for peremptory parental authority is that a young child is not yet a responsible agent.
It might be argued that this is not a feature of God’s authority over his creatures—that He does not owe us any explanation of his commands or why we should obey; but we can leave the mysteries of theology aside here.
There is of course an obvious lack of equality, within the practice of the university, between a professor and her students: she has an authority over them that they do not have over her. But that academic practice is also, or so we can hope, structured by an admittedly idealised conception of staff and students as equal participants in the intellectual endeavours that should characterise a university.
This is not to say that we can never justifiably come to see a wrongdoer as ‘beyond the pale’; but so to exclude a person is to give up on the possibility of calling him to account as a responsible agent.
Thanks to Maggie O’Brien for pressing this point.
Thanks to a reviewer for pressing a version of this question.
See St Matthew’s Gospel, 7: 1–5.
This is a significant aspect of trials at the International Criminal Court, where defendants are tried for horrific ‘crimes against humanity’: to put them on trial is to insist that they are answerable for those crimes—which is also to insist that we must treat them not as monsters who no longer belong in human community, but as human beings who can be called to account to and by their fellows.
I cannot discuss entrapment further here, but suggest that it can best be understood not as a defence by which the defendant aims to exculpate himself for his admitted commission of a crime, but as a bar to trial: the state whose agents induced the crime cannot now legitimately hold him to account for it (see Duff 2007: 187-91).
See e.g. R v Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court, ex parte Bennett [1994] 98 Cr App Rep 114; but contrast US v Alvarez-Machain 504 US 655 (1992). A further question that I cannot pursue here is whether in some of these kinds of case, of official misconduct in the process that led to the trial, the misconduct is so egregious that it irreparably undermines the integrity of the process—so that the defendant cannot properly be tried even if the officials concerned are also held to account for their misconduct.
See at nn 12, 15 above.
Perhaps because it seems to entail a strict version of ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone’ (St John’s Gospel 8: 7)—if we see calling another to account as a metaphorical stone-casting, and recognise that none of us is ‘without sin’.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to participants in a workshop ‘Responding to Wrongdoing: Resentment, Blame, Forgiveness, Punishment’ held at the University of Oslo Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, to members of the Northern Political Philosophy Group, and to two anonymous reviewers, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Duff, R.A. Responsibility and Reciprocity. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 21, 775–787 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9898-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9898-2