Abstract
Normative responsibilities have a central role in everyday moral thinking, largely because they are taken to ground requirements to act and react in certain ways. If parents are responsible for the wellbeing of their children, for example, this might mean that they are morally required to feed them, attend to their emotional needs, or make sure that someone else does. But normative responsibilities are not well understood as lists of requirements to act or react, for such requirements will depend on what options and information the agent has available. In the first part of the paper, we instead propose to understand normative responsibilities as requirements to care about what one is responsible for: about the wellbeing of one’s child, about performing a certain action, or about playing the sort of role that one’s profession requires. Such requirements, we argue, are just the sort of things that will give rise to requirements to act and react given the right context. In the second part, we survey and discuss a variety of considerations that might give rise to normative responsibilities: capacities and costs; retrospective and causal responsibility; benefits; promises, contracts and agreements; laws and norms; and roles and special relationships.
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Notes
- 1.
It is a matter of contention whether we should acknowledge other kinds of retrospective moral responsibility, distinct from the relation that grounds blameworthiness, and if so how many. See e.g. Smith 2012.
- 2.
For an influential discussion of different meanings of “responsibility”, see Hart 1968: ch. 9 (cf. Vincent 2011). For manner responsibility, see e.g. Munthe 2011: ch. 5, and discussions of a “duty of care” in tort law. What concerns us here is most closely identified with what Hart calls “role-responsibility”. See also Robert E. Goodin’s notion of “task responsibility” (Goodin 1995: ch. 5; Schmidtz and Goodin 1998: 150–54).
- 3.
Talk of moral requirements, as defined here, is arguably closely related to and perhaps equivalent to much ordinary talk of moral obligations, of what one ought to do, and of what it would be morally wrong not to do. However, uses of “wrong”, “ought”, “obligatory”, or “required” in moral contexts are far from univocal, and there is legitimate talk of blameless wrongdoing and blameless failures to discharge obligations, or do what one ought or is required to. Defining a notion of moral requirements in terms of liability to blame (and later analyzing responsibilities in terms of such requirement) lets us avoid these ambiguities.
- 4.
- 5.
Generally, being required to φ seems to imply being able, in some sense, to φ, though the required kind of ability has been notoriously difficult to spell out.
- 6.
In addition to different strengths of required care, one might want to distinguish differently strong requirements to care about something to a certain degree, perhaps with reference to the degree of blame that one would be liable to for failing to care about it to that degree.
- 7.
Hart (1968: 213) tentatively suggests that some duties are “singled out as responsibilities” because they “require care and attention over a protracted period of time”. However, it is natural to talk about responsibilities even in the case of very simple but highly significant actions.
- 8.
- 9.
As noted above (n. 4), moral requirements are arguably closely related to moral obligations. For motivation of the corresponding account of moral obligations, see Björnsson 2014: 114–116.
- 10.
The appropriateness of blame directed at corporations or loosely structured groups of people is a controversial matter. For some defenders, see e.g. Held 1970; French 1984; Rovane 1998; Kutz 2000; List and Pettit 2011. For criticism, see e.g. Corlett 2001; Haji 2006; McKenna 2006, Miller 2006. For our defense, see Björnsson 2011, 2014; Björnsson and Hess 2016. For some relations between individual and group responsibilities or requirements, see Björnsson (forthcoming).
- 11.
Related phenomena are those of delegated and transferred responsibility, as when parents leave their child in the care of a babysitter for a few hours, delegating some of their responsibilities, or when they place a child for adoption, transferring responsibilities to the new parents. For discussion of ethical issues with abandoning a child, as compared to putting it up for adoption, see Giordano 2007.
- 12.
In focusing on special responsibilities, we ignore the question of whether there are universal responsibilities, e.g. a consequentialist responsibility to make the world a better place or deontological responsibilities to, respectively, help and not harm, and how those would be grounded. (So-called “imperfect duties” in deontological theory roughly correspond to what we call “responsibilities”. Such duties are not requirements to perform specific actions on every occasion of a certain sort, but can naturally be thought of as requirements to care.)
- 13.
One might think that responsibilities based on capacity and costs follow straightforwardly from universal responsibilities to produce morally important outcomes (cf. note 13 above): if one cares about this, one will care particularly about contributing in cases where one can easily and effectively do so.
- 14.
Regarding collective cases, see Ashford 2007; Pogge 2007; cf. also the “polluter pays principle” in the context of environmental impacts. For discussion of joint retrospective responsibility, with a note on how it depends on normative requirements, see Björnsson 2011. Interestingly, it has been suggested that causal responsibility might be unnecessary for retrospective responsibility in collective contexts: the latter might only require that one has participated (non-causally) in a harmful collective action (Kutz 2000).
- 15.
Cf. Barry’s (2005, 280) contribution principle, which holds “that agents are responsible for addressing acute deprivations when they have contributed, or are contributing, to bringing them about”.
- 16.
Cf. Archard’s (2010: 127) suggestion that “those who cause children to exist thereby incur an obligation that they are adequately cared for”.
- 17.
See Arneson 2013 for discussion and amendments or clarifications of the principle in response to criticism.
- 18.
For a helpful introductory discussion, see Jeske 2014.
- 19.
The problem of tacit consent has received much attention in political philosophy from Hobbes, Locke, and onwards, in connection with the problem of political obligation, i.e. of when a person has a moral duty to obey the laws of her country or state. For an introductory overview of this problem, see Wolff 2006.
- 20.
Here, Hart extends the sociological notion of a role “to include a task assigned to any person by agreement or otherwise” (p. 213). However, Hart takes only a subset of the duties connected to roles to constitute responsibilities (cf. n. 9).
- 21.
See e.g. Hardimon 1994.
- 22.
Cf. Feinberg (1968), who takes relations of solidarity to ground collective responsibility.
- 23.
Similar things can be said about relations figuring in Iris Marion Young’s (2013) “connection model” of forward-looking responsibility for injustice.
- 24.
Cf. Bell (2013), section 3, for a useful distinction between three types of communities, namely communities of place, communities of memory, and “psychological communities”, or “communities of face-to-face personal interaction governed by sentiments of trust, co-operation, and altruism”.
- 25.
Cf. Scheffler (1997), who suggests that special relationships only give rise to responsibilities when people have reason to value these relationships.
- 26.
For an earlier discussion of some of these issues, see Brennan and Noggle (2007).
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Björnsson, G., Brülde, B. (2017). Normative Responsibilities: Structure and Sources. In: Hens, K., Cutas, D., Horstkötter, D. (eds) Parental Responsibility in the Context of Neuroscience and Genetics. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 69. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42834-5_2
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