Freedom and Terror by Gabriel Weimann Abraham Kaplan

Author:Gabriel Weimann, Abraham Kaplan [Gabriel Weimann, Abraham Kaplan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138840904
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

9

Moral responsibilities and political realities

Nowadays, political criminals claim responsibility while government officials and corporation executives disclaim it. None of these three is acting responsibly. Philosophers are caught up in the puzzle of how anyone can ever be responsible if all action is the effect of genetic and environmental causes. Jurists debate the significance of intent as a condition of responsibility. The practical, working understanding of responsibility does not rest on any generally accepted theory of responsibility. This does not keep moralists from continual exhortations to responsible behavior. Moral demands are weakened by their repetitive urgency. A healthy moral life is replaced by spiritual hypochondria – a perpetual sense of moral crisis. Anxious virtue is always suspicious.

For political analysts there is a special problem. They neither decide policy nor execute it, but at most recommend. Advice, too, can be responsible or irresponsible. Giving advice is an act like other acts, and like them subject to moral and political norms. In some circumstances, advice amounts to a virtual decision, like a physician’s prescription. What corresponds here to malpractice is yet to be explored. A framework for such an exploration must first reaffirm the reality of responsibility as well as the reality of its limits. Neither causes nor intentions are decisive. Responsibility is answerability; it relates always to some community of obligation. A sense of community is as essential to responsible behavior as is a sense of obligation.

The locus of responsibility is always the individual. Responsibility is assigned to collective entities, like states and corporations, not in reference to acts of fictitious persons, but in reference to decisions of real persons to act collectively in certain ways. Responsibility is both political and moral. Political exigencies do not cancel moral responsibility; they give it substance. In turn, political forms reflect the structure of moral responsibility. Both policy-makers and policy analysts can be held responsible. Only in a realistic perspective can this be done responsibly.

Several propositions about responsibility should be taken as axiomatic. First is the Axiom of Differences: the responsibilities of one person are not those of another. Religious teaching, from the Talmud to Dostoevsky and beyond, is that everyone is responsible for everything: we are all to blame. Whatever the spiritual truth of this teaching, it is an ethical falsehood. To impute an unwarranted responsibility is as unjust as it is to disclaim a genuine responsibility. Who is responsible for a given situation and what are the responsibilities of a given person are central questions of morality; “Everyone” and “Everything” are not useful answers.

Closely related to the Axiom of Differences is the Axiom of Realism: there are some responsibilities. That no one is ever really responsible for anything is also an ethical falsehood. The problem of responsibility is not to prove that anyone can ever be responsible. The problem is to illuminate what confers greater or lesser responsibility in particular cases.

Third is the Axiom of Objectivity: disclaiming a responsibility does not free one from it. We do assume responsibilities, but they may be ours whether or not we assume them.

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