Personal Responsibility

In Philosophy

In philosophy, the modern notion of “personal responsibility” consists of two threads woven together: one entailing what we should do and the other what we can do. In the political, normative sense, being responsible is acting out the duties that flow from our position in the social order and our status as moral agents. Immanuel Kant (Kant 1785) argued that we had – as rational agents – a responsibility to act only in ways that could be made into universal law (i.e., without human institutions falling apart as result). The second, metaphysical thread involves our ability to be the determining cause of our own actions. For most philosophers, this means that personal responsibly rests on the possibility that we could have done otherwise. Accordingly, this type of responsibility is closely associated with the notion of free will. Kant argued that the fact we should fulfill our personal duties and responsibilities proved that we are, indeed, free to do so; or, in other...