Hart’s Senses of ‘Responsibility’

Abstract

Over the course of his career, Hart wrote eight essays on responsibility. Much of Hart and Honoré’s Causation in the Law also focuses on responsibility. In several of the essays and in the book, Hart comments that ‘responsibility’ has more than one meaning. It is only in the eighth essay — reprinted as part I of the ‘Postscript’ to Punishment and Responsibility — that Hart attempts to provide a full-scale treatment of ‘the welter of distinguishable senses of the word “responsibility” and its grammatical cognates’.¹ The attempt results in Hart’s distinguishing four senses of the word ‘responsible’ or four varieties of responsibility: (1) role-responsibility, (2) causal responsibility, (3) liability-responsibility and (4) capacity-responsibility. This chapter examines and critically assesses Hart’s scheme of classification.