Being Responsible, Taking Responsibility, and Penumbral Agency
Heuer and Lang (eds.) Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Wiliams (OUP 2012)
42 Pages Posted: 19 May 2015
Date Written: May 16, 2015
Abstract
Taking as my point of departure Bernard Williams' influential thoughts about agent-regret, I distinguish between being responsible and taking responsibility. I argue that there is room in logical space for a normative power to make oneself – by an act of will – responsible for something (like the action of one's child, or one's country, or the unintended and unforeseen consequences of one's actions) where one would not have been responsible for that thing but for the act of taking responsibility. Furthermore, I argue that we may sometimes be under a moral duty to exercise this power rendering ourselves responsible. After elaborating on the sense of "responsibility" and the nature of the taking involved here, I show how the power (and sometimes duty) to take responsibility can explain and vindicate common intuitions about responsibility for events that are in the penumbra of our agency, like the actions of some close others, or indeed the consequences of our own actions in the kind of case that arguably gives rise to agent-regret. In this last kind of case, then, we have the beginning of an explanation of the phenomenon Williams drew attention to without a commitment to anything like moral luck.
Keywords: Responsibility, Moral Luck, Agency
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation