Symposium on Just Responsibility: Ackerly response

This article examines, first, how the concept of personal responsibility figures in different theories of distributive justice, and second, what the relation is between ideas of personal responsibility and solidarity in the context of an account of justice. I discuss luck egalitarianism as a representative attempt to make the theory of distributive justice sensitive to an independent conception of personal responsibility. After clarifying the structure of the luck egalitarian approach, I raise doubts about whether it is possible to develop an account of personal responsibility for outcomes that does not itself rely on a prior theory of justice. I then contrast the structural role that personal responsibility plays in luck egalitarianism with the role it plays in Rawls's theory of justice. Finally, I show how these different roles in turn support very different accounts of the relation between ideals of personal responsibility and solidarity.

ethic@ - An international Journal for Moral Philosophy

Within the global justice debate the demandingness objection is primarily aimed at utilitarian theorists who defend a version of the 'optimizing principle of beneficence' to deal with the problem of global poverty. The problem of demandingness, however, is hardly ever raised within the context of the dominant institutional theories of global justice that see severe poverty as a human rights violation. Nor are the fundamental underlying questions posed by many of these theorists. Which specific responsibilities do individual moral agents have regarding institutional and structural forms of injustice (1)? Which political spheres, organized public spaces, or political practices are necessary to create a setting in which these responsibilities can be discharged (2)? Does a 'defensible and psychologically feasible conception of responsibility' (Scheffler 2002, 62) exist that is restrictive-yet demanding-enough to deal with the complex challenges of our globalizing age (3). This paper addresses questions (1) and (3) on the basis of a critical analysis of Iris Marion Young's social connection theory of responsibility.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2013

Humanitas Journal of European Studies, 2010

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2021

Some of the most invidious injustices are the seemingly results of impersonal workings of rigged social structures. Who bears responsibility for the injustices perpetrated through them? Iris Marion Young-the preeminent theorist of responsibility for structural injustice-argues that we should be responsible mostly in forward-looking ways for remedying structural injustice, rather than liable in a backward-looking way for creating it. In so doing she distinguishes between individualized responsibility for past structural injustice and collective responsibility for preventing future structural injustice. We reject both those arguments but embrace and extend Young's third line of analysis, which was much less fully developed in her work. We agree that people should take a stand against structural injustice, even if it is likely to prove futile. That is in fact a position that is widely endorsed in social practice.

Journal of Political Philosophy, 2017

P OLITICAL theorists and philosophers typically think of agents as morally responsible for injustice when two conditions obtain: the agents' behavior-their acts, attempts, and omissions-leads to or results in some wrongful event or condition (causation); and, that behavior is proscribed or violates moral requirements (culpability). 1 Few people doubt that when injustice follows straightforwardly from the culpable behavior of some agent, that agent "is responsible" or should be "held responsible" for it. This conception of responsibility captures a widely held understanding (at least in the West) of commonsense morality, 2 one that seems to connect agency to redress in the right way by linking causation and blameworthy behavior with an obligation to make amends, to put things right. Moral responsibility is only one species of responsibility: legal liability often (but not always) tracks moral responsibility (they diverge, for instance, in cases of strict liability). In addition, relationships can give rise to responsibility: I might have a special obligation to clear my neighbor's sidewalk of snow simply because she needs the help and is close to me. 3 Some theorists maintain that we have responsibilities to help others by virtue of our capacity to do so without giving up anything of moral significance. 4 Further, certain social roles create responsibility: *Many people have helped me in grappling with these issues through their generous criticism and encouragement. Special thanks are due to Brooke Ackerly, Lisa Ellis, Bob Goodin, Carol Gould, Rich Hiskes, Jeannie Morefield, Joan Tronto, and several thoughtful and conscientious reviewers. For their kind attention and their valuable suggestions I am grateful to audiences at: the Association for Political Theory; the

Responsibility and Distributive Justice, edited by Carl Knight and Zofia Stemplowska. Oxford University Press, 2011

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the recent debate about responsibility and distributive justice. It traces the recent philosophical focus on distributive justice to John Rawls and examines two arguments in his work which might be taken to contain the seeds of the focus on responsibility in later theories of distributive justice. It examines Ronald Dworkin's ‘equality of resources’, the ‘luck egalitarianism’ of Richard Arneson and G. A. Cohen, as well as the criticisms of their work put forward by Elizabeth Anderson, Marc Fleurbaey, Susan Hurley, and Jonathan Wolff. Key concepts such as responsibility (individual and collective), luck (thin and thick; brute and option), control, desert, and equality of opportunity are delineated, and the implementation of responsibility-sensitive accounts of justice is considered. The chapters of this book are positioned in relation to the wider literature on responsibility and distributive justice, and a brief outline of the chapters is provided.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

A new era of responsibility seems poised to overshadow the human rights discourse in international law. To be justified, however, introducing the perspective of responsibility must result in an added value if compared to the former predominant approach. In fact, however, some justifications are inconsistent and the most radical interpretations jeopardize the very core of the modern theory of social and legal order, namely the centrality of the individual. On the other hand, the incorporation of responsibility into the discourse on rights may help to overcome some of its most evident shortcomings. Nonetheless, despite some positive outcomes which the new attention on responsibility may bring about, the concept is flawed by at least two major deficits. First, the reference to responsibility tends to presuppose the possibility of taking the position of a privileged observer. This implicitly rejects the idea that the moral and legal community is essentially constituted by human individuals who freely recognize each other as equal members and rightful holders of entitlements. The second deficit is instead related to the intrinsically particularistic character of responsibility, which makes it rather difficult to apply to the field of international law and relations. An analysis shows that we are confronted with a conflict: while responsibility can, in fact, be assumed to bring an added value, the costs for this are exceedingly high, since they amount to no less than the abandonment of the core concept of modern moral and political philosophy. By recurring to the communicative paradigm of rationality and social order, a possible solution is outlined according to which responsibility is re-interpreted in the sense of a time-, space-, composition-and content-related expansion of mutual recognition.

Ethics and Global Politics, 2016

The paper examines Thomas Nagel's 'political conception' of justice that holds that the requirements of socioeconomic justice apply only among those persons who are subject to the authority of the same political institutions. The paper has two aims. The first aim is to clarify the theoretical motivation for Nagel's theory, which it identifies in what it calls the 'responsibility thesis', i.e. that inequalities may be considered as unjust only if some agents are responsible for them, and to reconstruct the account of collective responsibility that, together with the responsibility thesis, may support his substantive conclusions. The second aim is to show that Nagel's conclusions must be rejected even if the account of collective responsibility that may support it is correct. This is so, first, because the responsibility thesis cannot be defended, and second, because even if the thesis is assumed to be correct, it does not succeed in restricting the scope of the requirements of justice to fellow citizens of particular nation states. In light of Nagel's own account of the link between legitimate authority and justice, the standards of the latter ought to apply to the state system as a whole, and not to particular states, taken separately.

Verifiche, 2021

Sally Haslanger identifies three standard philosophical approaches – conceptual, descriptive, and ameliorative – and defends an ameliorative analysis of race and gender as the most effective at addressing social injustice. In this paper, I assign three influential theories of moral responsibility to these categories, and I defend the ameliorative approach as the most justice-conducive. But I argue that existing ameliorative accounts of responsibility are not ameliorative enough – they do not adequately address social injustice. I propose a new ameliorative model that defines ordinary responsibility as part of a political apparatus of power that polices and enforces oppressive norms. And I argue that we should create new, counterhegemonic discourses about responsibility through collective political resistance.