Why We Need a New (Old) Idea of Responsibility

Abstract

The Anglo-American tradition has understood responsibility largely in terms of intentional agency or role-based duties. Yet this approach increasingly appears inadequate to deal with pressing new issues arising in connection with climate change, transformations being wrought by artificial intelligence, and bureaucratic institutions that diffuse accountability. Which alternative approaches to responsibility exist? Might they enable us to better address such issues? Or are these ideas equally problematic? This chapter sketches the current dominant Anglo-American idea of responsibility and two alternative approaches grounded in human nature and the human condition. I argue that none of these conceptions are adequate to the challenges we currently face and provide some reasons for why we would be better served by embracing a classical, Platonic concept of responsibility. This concept keeps the act of responding within responsibility and avoids reducing it to mere accountability.

…[T]he demands of the modern world on ethical thought are unprecedented, and the ideas …embodied in most contemporary moral philosophy cannot meet them; but some extension of ancient thought … might be able to do so.

—Bernard Williams