5.1 Theory building activities: "responsibility and incident at  (Page 3/7)

Proactive senses

1. Sharing Responsibility extends the sphere of responsibility to include those to whom one stands in internal relations or relations of solidarity. Shared responsibility includes answering for the actions of others within one's group. It also includes coming to the moral aid of those within one's group who have gone morally astray; this involves bringing to their attention morally risky actions and standing with them when they are pressured for trying to uphold group values. While sharing responsibility entails answering for what members of one's group have done, it does not extend to taking the blame for the untoward actions of colleagues. Sharing responsibility does not commit what H.D. Lewis calls the "barbarism of collective responsibility" which consists of blaming and punishing innocent persons for the guilty actions of those with whom they are associated.
2. Preventive Responsibility : By using knowledge of the past, one can avoid errors or repeat successes in the future. Peter French calls this the "Principle of Responsive Adjustment." (One adjusts future actions in response to what one has learned from the past.) According to French, responsive adjustment is a moral imperative. If one fails to responsively adjust to avoid the repetition of past untoward results, this loops back into the past and causes a revaluation of the initial unintentional action. The benefit of the doubt is withdrawn and the individual who fails to responsively adjust is now held responsible for the original past action. This is because the failure to adjust inserts the initial action into a larger context of negligence, bad intentions, recklessness, and carelessness. Failure to responsively adjust triggers a retroactive attribution of blame.
3. Responsibility as a Virtue : Here one develops skills, acquires professional knowledge, cultivitates sensitivies and emotions, and develops habits of execution that consistently bring about value realization and excellence. One way of getting at responsibility as an excellence it to reinterpret the conditions of imputability of blame responsibility. An agent escapes blame by restricting the scope of role responsibility, claiming ignorance, and citing lack of power and control. In responsibility as a virtue, one goes beyond blame by extending the range of role responsibilities, seeking situation-relevant knowledge, and working to skillfully extending power and control.

Blame responsibility

To hold fred responsible for the accident at morales, we need to...

1. Specify his role responsibilities and determine whether he carried them out
2. Identify situation-based factors that limited his ability to execute his role responsibilities (These are factors that compel our actions or contribute to our ignorance of crucial features of the situation.)
3. Determine if there is any moral fault present in the situation. For example, did Fred act on the basis of wrongful intention (Did he intend to harm Manuel by sabotaging the plant?), fail to exercise due care , exhibit negligence or recklessness ?
4. If Fred (a) failed to carry out any of his role responsibilities, (b) this failure contributed to the accident, and (c) Fred can offer no morally legitimate excuse to get himself off the hook, then Fred is blameworthy.