CONDITIONED RESPONSIBILITY, BELONGING AND THE VULNERABILITY OF OUR ETHICAL UNDERSTANDING

Abstract

In this paper I explore the ethical responsibility of agents who find themselves in situations characterized by what I call the Individual Ethical Gap (IEG). Individual Ethical Gap situations are structured so as to rule out holding individuals responsible for their actions and omissions by virtue of the intentions behind or the consequences of their actions. I argue that, in IEG situations, individuals can nevertheless, depending on the circumstances, be held ethically responsible for their actions and omissions by virtue of the conditions in which they find themselves operating. Individual Ethical Gap situations therefore give rise to what I call conditioned responsibility: responsibility stemming from the conditions in which one finds oneself enmeshed. This notion of an ethics stemming from conditions (rather than from consequences or intentions) gives rise to a particular form of vulnerability to error in our self- and other-ascriptions of ethical responsibility: a vulnerability in our ethical understanding. In the final section of the paper I use Pamela Sue Anderson’s discussion of vulnerability and of Kantian autonomy to show that this vulnerability arising from the conditioned aspect of our ethical responsibility need not be regarded as a threat to ethics but, on the contrary, as an element of belonging and of understanding that renders possible a more honest encounter with others and with the world.

Keywords:

• responsibility
• vulnerability
• moral scepticism
• structural injustice

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This paper was written as part of the research project PGC2018-093982-B-I00, Intercultural Understanding, Belonging and Value: Wittgensteinian Approaches, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the European Union.

1 Pamela Sue Anderson, “When Justice and Forgiveness Come Apart: A Feminist Perspective on Restorative Justice and Intimate Violence,” Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 5 (2016): 113–34; Pamela Sue Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability: Towards a Politics of Care?” in Exploring Vulnerability, eds. Heike Springart and Günter Thomas (Göttingen and Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck, 2017) 147–62.

2 Clearly, responsibility for climate change lies most centrally on high-impact corporations and institutions. For the purposes of the present paper, however, my interest lies primarily in the question of the responsibility of individuals.

3 Iris Marion Young discusses versions of the former two examples in her Responsibility for Justice (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2011). However, as we will see below, her treatment of these scenarios is different from mine.

4 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007) 150–52.

5 John Broome, Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (New York: Norton, 2012) 66–68, 73–117.

6 Young 52–53.

7 Hannah Arendt, “Collective Responsibility” in Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. James William Bernauer (Boston: Springer, 1987) 43–50; Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, eds. H. Arendt and J. Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005) 121–32; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963). For the purposes of this paper, I will leave to one side the complex exegetical question of the extent to which Young captures Arendt’s views correctly in full.

8 Arendt, “Collective Responsibility” 43–47; Arendt, “Organized Guilt” 124–26; Young 76–90.

9 Young 92.

10 Arendt, “Collective Responsibility” 45–47; Arendt, “Organized Guilt” 124–29; Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem 251; Young 76–90.

11 Young 91–92.

12 These would include apolitical adult civilians who went along with the Nazi regime because of considerations of self- and family-preservation. This category includes those “family men” (as defined by Arendt) who, unlike Eichmann, found themselves in a position of insignificant causal impact. For a discussion of this notion of the apolitical “family man,” see Arendt, “Organized Guilt” 129; Young 84.

13 Arendt and Young do not restrict themselves to those adult civilians who fit the IEG; their discussion also covers civilians with higher causal impact, for instance. However, it is clear that their discussion includes civilians who fit the IEG profile.

14 Arendt, “Collective Responsibility” 45.

15 Young 79.

16 Ibid. 87.

17 Ibid. 90–92.

18 Ibid. 81.

19 Ibid. 86.

20 Nussbaum, Foreword in ibid. xxi.

21 It is important to note that this notion of “error” need not be associated with a form of realism or objectivity about the conditions that give rise to responsibility. The question of whether there is a form of realism or objectivism at work in my view is a complex one, which cannot be addressed in detail at this stage. Here, suffice it to note that some understandings of pluralism admit of robust notions of error that would be compatible with my view. See, for instance, the notion of “melioristic pluralism” developed in José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) 283–84, 289–97.

22 Notably Anderson, “When Justice and Forgiveness Come Apart”; Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability: Towards a Politics of Care?”; Anderson, “Autonomy, Vulnerability and Gender,” Feminist Theory 4.2 (2003): 149–64.

23 This idea of honesty arising from a clearer understanding of one’s position in the world also emerges, albeit in a different form, in Wittgenstein’s early treatment of ethics. On this, see Chon Tejedor, The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).