8 - Conclusion: Accountability and the Possibility of Community

Summary

We are by nature social animals, and in the intricacy of our communal life we often do each other harm and wrong. These are the circumstances of morality and justice. Fortunately, our power to hurt one another, whether out of malice or indifference, is but the unhappy side of our other great power – to make a community. Aristotle offers the appropriate metaphor: The hermit may be compared to an isolated game piece, stripped of meaning and function when taken out of its relation to the other elements of the game.1 A person is given meaning and purpose by the responses of others. It is through praise and blame, reward and punishment, resentment and forgiveness, that we define and thicken the bonds that make us a community.

I hope my attention to matters of harm and repair has not overshadowed my essential purpose in scrutinizing these matters, which was to understand the values that sustain a community. We hold ourselves and each other accountable not because reproach is righteous and shame a virtue, but because in responding to one another we foster the relationships that make our lives good. Much philosophical writing about moral responsibility takes a juridical perspective, from which the disinterested writer metes out the appropriate deserts to the offending agent. This tendency is unfortunate, not just because it often transmutes gestures of repair into punishment, but because it wholly fails to capture the way in which actual agents and respondents are mutually engaged in moral, social, and legal relationships. Out of context, a reproach can be nothing more than an enumeration of an agent's demerits.