2 - The Deep Structure of Individual Accountability

Summary

INTRODUCTION

My aim in this chapter is to define a conception of individual accountability for individual harms that overcomes the limitations of the individualistic conception I discussed in Chapter 1, particularly the way it excluded the significance of the accountable subject's relations to others. I called this exclusive focus on the subject a kind of ethical solipsism, and suggested that it was radically mistaken. Instead, as I argue here, our practices of accountability are both positional and relational The responses that agents warrant because of their connection to a harm depend upon both prior moral and social relations among the parties, and the particular perspective of the respondent. The relational and positional conception of individual accountability for individual harms that I define and employ in this chapter will serve later as a basis for understanding individual accountability for collective harms. But I will not address problems of collective harms here. Instead I focus upon what I have called the retributive or desert-based model of individual accountability, which is relationally and causally solipsistic. I will analyze the shortcomings of this model by comparing it with our actual practices and will then suggest a nonretributive alternative conception of responsibility that better fits those practices.

In the sense in which I want to use it, accountability is somewhat narrower in meaning than responsibility. Although sometimes used synonymously with accountability, responsibility bears two distinct senses, an internal and an external sense. Given a certain relation of an agent to a harm, the first sense of responsibility refers to a set of internal psychological competencies a person must have in order to be answerable for the harm.