There are many ways to avoid responsibility, for example, explaining what happens as the work of the gods, fate, society, or the system. For engineers, “technology” or “the organization” will serve this purpose quite well. We may distinguish at least five (related) senses of “responsibility”: a) responsibility-as-causation (the storm is responsible for flooding), b) responsibility-as-liability (he is the person responsible and will have to pay), c) responsibility-as-competency (he’s a responsible person, that is, he’s rational), d) responsibility-as-office (he’s the responsible person, that is, the person in charge), and e) a responsibility-as-domain-of-duties (these are her responsibilities, that is, the things she is supposed to do). For all but the causal sense of responsibility, responsibility may be taken (in a relatively straightforward sense)—and generally is. Why then would anyone want to claim that certain technologies make it impossible to attribute responsibility to engineers (or anyone else)? In this paper, I will identify at least three arguments for that claim and explain why each is fallacious. The three arguments are: 1) the argument of “many hands”, 2) the argument from individual ignorance, and 3) the argument from blind forces. Each of these arguments makes the same fundamental mistake, the assumption that a certain factual situation, being fixed, settles responsibility, that is, that individuals, either individually or by some group decision, cannot take responsibility. This mistake seems almost built into the social sciences (which, after all, tend to try to understand individual acts as products of social forces). I conclude by pointing out the sort of decisions (and consequences) engineers have explicitly taken responsibility for and why taking responsibility for them is rational, all things considered. There is no technological bar to such responsibility.

If we understand responsibility as answerability, we can see that it is doubly relational: I am responsible for something, to some person or body who has the right to call me to answer for it. To be a responsible agent is thus to be someone who can participate in that wide range of human practices in which responsibilities, both prospective and retrospective, are ascribed and accepted.
There are two dimensions to such participation. A responsible agent is, first, one who can accept and discharge prospective responsibilities: that is why responsibility can be explained as a matter of reason-responsiveness. But, secondly, a responsible agent must also be able to answer for her actions (and omissions) — able to explain herself to those who may call her to account, and to justify, excuse or accept blame for what she has done.
This perspective throws light on the different ways in which responsibility operates in the criminal law, in our moral interactions, and in other aspects of our social and personal lives. It also provides further support for a (roughly) Strawsonian argument that the truth or falsity of some determinist thesis is irrelevant to human responsibility.

Philosophical treatments of free will have typically been driven by concerns about moral responsibility, and much recent work has benefited from a more refined understanding of those practices and attitudes involved in regarding someone as morally responsible. A good deal of that refinement has been generated by a narrowing of focus – or since this is part of a larger historical trend, one might say an acceleration of a narrowing of focus – on a particular type of responsibility, one associated primarily with blaming practices and the accompanying attitudes of guilt, resentment, and indignation. Some recent work by Stephen Darwall strongly suggests that this form of responsibility is grounded normatively in a contractualist ethic. Though certainly important, near exclusive attention to responsibility in this guise contributes to a truncated portrait of the moral life. The aim here is to raise the profile of another aspect of responsibility — what Gary Watson has dubbed the “aretaic” face of responsibility. In doing so, I hope also to highlight an oft-overlooked sense in which one’s will can be said to be free, and why such freedom and responsibility is likely grounded in something other than a contractualist ethic.

(1) The question of who are responsible for something is the question of whose free actions or omissions contributed how much to it — all responsibility is shared. (2) Freedom has been understood by philosophers as either (i) free will or origination or (ii) voluntariness — either uncaused control or causation by desire without constraint. There may also be (iii) an individuality or accountability, a matter of the nature of consciousness. (3) Free will does not exist, partly since determinism is probably true despite philosophical/scientific interpretations of quantum theory. (4) The question of who are to be held responsible for something or credited with responsibility, in terms of both judgement and such action as punishment and reward, is the question of whose voluntary actions or omissions wrongly or rightly contributed to the thing — wrong or right being a matter of attitudes, including self-interest, moral judgements, political ideologies, social conventions. (5) The defensible attitude, consistent with human nature, is the Principle of Humanity: Take rational means (effective, hence not self-defeating) to the end of reducing the numbers of bad lives, the latter understood in terms of fundamental human desires. Superior to the unprincipled self-interest of conservatism and the connected retributivism, the vapidity of Kant, liberal conventionalism of Rawls, self-deception as to necessities, reliance on hierarchic democracy etc. (6) The harder question is the factual one of what the rational means are — societies, institutions, kinds of democracy, resistance to convention and to the making of ignorance and stupidity, terrorism, war, terrorist war. (7) Giving responsibility and getting to take responsibility to be understood similarly to holding responsible and crediting with responsibility. (8) The idea that neuroscience is within light years of contributing to these questions cannot survive a half-day in an ordinary court room considering whether one neighbour was responsible for scratching the car of another.

Some people design and create the environments in which other agents must act and bear responsibility. Pilots, surgeons, fire fighters, soldiers, managers, and operators (users) ought respectively to transport persons, save lives, extinguish fires, rescue innocent citizens from the hands of the enemy, create jobs and prevent explosions. They are however dependent for their moral performance on those who supply them with the proper tools (engineers). The fact that users are dependent on engineers in this sense does not fully excuse them in case they fail as a result of certain design features of their work environment, since users not only have task responsibilities and role based duties in situ (e.g. landing the plane, checking the temperature in the reactor, removing a tumor) but they also have what I call a “meta task responsibility”, i.e. an obligation to assess prior to the task performance whether the environment in which they will have to work, is likely to allow them to do what they ought to do in situ and to ascertain that it at least does not prevent them from doing what they ought to do. The checklist the pilot goes through before take off is a protocol that assists him in honouring his meta-task responsibility. The flight system interface, the cockpit and the output devices, (in combination with procedures and protocols, instructions), should be such that they provide the pilot with reliable signals about the state of the aircraft and to gauge whether he will be able to do what is morally required of him. The possibility to switch from auto-pilot to manual during landing is a design for agency or discretion of the crew.
An important part of an engineer’s responsibility therefore is not only task responsibilities, i.e. obligations to see to it that things are made in a particular way in accordance with functional requirements (e.g. regarding strength, capacity, robustness, etc.), but also of a special meta-task responsibility, i.e. an obligation to see to it that users can (check whether they can) see to the things they ought to see to. Part of the responsibility of engineers thus concerns the responsibility and agency of users.
I will characterize the work of engineers from different perspectives (wideware engineering (Clark & Chalmers) and choice architecture (Sunstein & Thaler)). This will serve to bring out it’s special moral importance and show that the historical dimension and design history of environments in which users’ work should be taken into account in an adequate theory of professional responsibility of engineering.

Drug dependence or addiction is seen as both a serious threat to self-control and as the outcome of a series of failures of self-control or self-regulation. Recent work in addiction neuroscience seems to support claims that drug use can impair or ‘hijack’ the brain by conditioning or altering neural pathways in ways which adversely impact on the capacities identified as necessary for self-control and responsibility.  But what, more precisely, is self-control, how is it exercised, and what kinds of internal and external circumstances can undermine it? In part one of this talk, I will lay out a standard philosophical framework for thinking about self-control and discuss some recent work in cognitive science which bears on that framework. In part two, I will expand the account to consider social and cross temporal aspects of autonomy. Here I argue that responsible agency requires an autobiographical conception of self.  The executive capacity to reach back into one’s personal past, and to imagine a personal future, in reflection, evaluation, and decision making, is essential to self-regulation. So too is the social availability of options which can secure agential commitment. Both aspects are relevant in considering the responsibility of drug dependent individuals.

Collective responsibility plays a prominent role in the supposed justification of two sorts of collective punishment today. First, war is seen as a legitimate response if it is a sort of punishment for a community that is said to be collectively responsible. Israel recently claimed that its war against Gaza was justified in part because the people of Gaza voted for the Hamas regime that was now launching rockets into Israeli territory. Second, detention is seen as legitimate against groups thought to be collectively responsible since some of its members pose security threats. The United States used this rationale for incarcerating large numbers of people found on the “battlefield” in Afghanistan and sending them to prison in Guantanamo. I examine both sorts of arguments, finding the first much more difficult to sustain than the second, and yet ultimately finding the second argument to succeed only in rare cases. I begin by looking back in time to the debates in the Just War tradition about collective punishment.

We can distinguish between collective responsibiltiy for actions, understood as bodily behaviour, and collective responsibility for epistemic states such as beliefs. This paper concerns the latter and, in particular, responsibility in the context of communication and information systems.

Responsibility is a major theme in ethics that has been variously elaborated in theology, law, politics, and philosophy, and then taken distinct forms in the practice of science, engineering, and medicine. Especially in relation to science and technology, efforts to exercise responsibility have led to developments that can be synthesized under the concept of co-responsibility: responsibility shared among experts and among experts interacting with non-experts. Adapting the epistemological distinction between correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories of truth, this presentation will suggest that co-responsibility in the ethics of science, engineering, and medicine can be conceived as a kind of correspondence theory of ethics, in contrast to coherence ethics (rule following deontology) and pragmatic ethics (consequentialist utilitarianism). In addition to its importance for the practice of professional ethics in science, engineering, and medicine, the theory of co-responsibility also has implications for work in science and public policy.

The new neuroscience poses two challenges to traditional moral and legal models of personal responsibility: the threat from the truth of determinism (or something quite close to it), and the claim that the folk psychological account of practical reason plays no causal role in human behavior.  Neuroscience allegedly provides, finally, a persuasive deterministic account of human behavior, and evidence from neuroscientific and psychological studies purport to demonstrate that “conscious will” is an illusion.  If either challenge is successful, then rationality would require that we abandon robust notions of responsibility that have a strong deontological component.  This paper argues, in contrast, that neuroscience produces no new determinist threat to responsibility and that current neuroscience does not prove that mental states are epiphenomenal or that we are automatons deluded about our human capacities.
The deterministic challenge is entirely familiar.  In principle, it is no different from earlier material, deterministic arguments, whether they arose from sociology, psychology or biology. This paper accepts the truth of determinism and concedes that no one has contra-causal freedom. It suggests, however, that free will is not a genuine criterion for our positive moral or legal responsibility doctrines and practices.  More important, compatibilism has sufficient resources to ground robust, traditional responsibility.
Compatibilism cannot save responsibility, however, if conscious will is an illusion.  All responsibility doctrines and practices accept that responsibility is based on our status as creatures whose mental states play a crucial role in explaining behavior.  If this is false, responsibility as we know it is impossible tout court, and concepts such as desert have no rational basis.  This paper argues that this threat is real, but that the scientific and conceptual support is at present lacking.  At least for now, we are entitled to continue to accept the folk psychological account of behavior that grounds responsibility and desert.  Future discoveries might change that conclusion, but the paper suggests why this is unlikely.

Psychopaths are less than 1% of the population but commit around 40% of serious felonies in the US. Because they are so dangerous, psychopaths need to be incapacitated somehow. Nonetheless, I will argue that they should not be held fully criminally responsible because they lack substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of their conduct. Although some research suggests that psychopaths report normal moral judgments, I will cite recent studies using indirect measures (such as reaction times, brain activations, and correlations with IQ) to support the alternative view that psychopaths merely pretend to be normal in their moral judgments and do not really make moral judgments in the normal way. Psychopaths’ lack of appreciation of wrongfulness is also suggested by inconsistencies in how they talk about morality, by their lack of moral motivation and emotion, and by their failure to draw the moral-conventional distinction. More research is needed, but psychopaths seem to have disabilities that prevent them from being fully responsible for their horrendous acts.

According to the standard story of human action, a story that we have inherited from David Hume, an agent’s actions are those of her bodily movements that are produced in the right way by her desires and beliefs.  A good question to ask is whether this standard story of human action can explain how and why agents may act and yet be out of control. I will argue that it cannot.  If we wish to fully to understand how and why agents can act in an out of control manner, we have no alternative but to suppose that their actions are explained in part by a failure to exercise a capacity they have to have the right desires and beliefs.  This is the capacity to be orthonomous.  An account of what orthonomy consists in will be proposed; some examples of the ways in which orthonomy can be exercised or fail to be exercised will be given; and the connection between orthonomy and responsibility will be explored.

The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change promises to hold nations responsible for the climate-related harm that they cause through their greenhouse gas emissions, but in doing so faces several objections based in philosophical theories of responsibility.  Unlike individual persons, collectivities are not able to exhibit the requisite states of mind for fault to be assigned, and collective responsibility for complex global environmental problems like climate change strains the direct causal chains that are expected of liability models of responsibility.  Moreover, at least some persons that are faulted and held liable for contributing toward harmful outcomes under assessments of national liability are made vicariously liable for outcomes that they may actively oppose, in apparent violation of the connection between fault and options to do otherwise.  In this paper, I consider these various objections to using a fault-based conception of collective responsibility as the basis for assigning remedial burdens in global climate policy, ultimately defending such a standard against such charges.  Citizens of democratic states, I shall argue, can be held collectively responsible for their contributions to climate change, as these are at least in part the product of collective activities like participation in a national culture or system of social norms.