Responsibility

By Melbourne University Publishing Ltd

The concept of responsibility permeates social life. While it has many meanings, they often centre around questions of practical and moral accountability, culpability and liability. One can learn a great deal about a social formation by looking at the way the meanings of responsibility are deployed within it, the way they vary from one social space to another, and the way they are often at the centre of a political struggle over how we define and apportion blame. The essays in this book do more than examine such processes. Each in its own way also invites the reader to push existing assumptions about what individual, political, ecological and corporate responsibility entails.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780522862287

Book preview

Responsibility

Responsibility

Edited by Ghassan Hage & Robyn Eckersley

Contents

Introduction

Ghassan Hage and Robyn Eckersley

Part I: The Subject of Responsibility

1. Obedience to Authority and Its Discontents

John Cash

2. More Irresponsibility for Everyone?!

Jens O Zinn

3. Responsibility, Noel Pearson and Indigenous Disadvantage in Australia

Emma Kowal

4. Responsibility for ‘Doing Justice’

Jennifer Balint

5. Responsibility for Providing Human Security

David Mickler

Part II: Spaces of Responsibility

6. Who Is Watching? Context, Blame and Responsibility

Peter D Dwyer and Monica Minnegal

7. Between Soldier and Bystander: Negotiating Peacekeeper Responsibility in the Rwandan Genocide

Nesam McMillan

8. Responsibility in the Lebanese Transnational Family

Ghassan Hage

9. Facebook and the Other: Administering to and Caring for the Dead Online

Tamara Kohn, Bjorn Nansen, Michael Arnold and Martin Gibbs

10. Responsible Judgement: Forced Marriage, Culture and Feminist Responsibility

Maree Pardy

Part III: Ecological Responsibility

11. Taking Political Responsibility for Climate Change

Robyn Eckersley

12. Rethinking ‘Remoteness’: The Space-Time of Corporate Causation

Erin Fitz-Henry

13. The Toolondo Fishman: Humananimals and Forms of Response-ability

Kalissa Alexeyeff

14. Beyond Control and Compassion: Towards an Ontology of Responsibilities

John Rundell

References

Index

Preface

As with the MUP volumes that preceded it, Waiting (2009) and Force, Movement, Intensity (2011), the making of this volume was a genuinely collective effort and pure intellectual pleasure. The volume marks the Department of Anthropology’s move to join the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. It therefore represented an instance of the new School’s coming together intellectually as well as institutionally. So I am particularly happy that Robyn Eckersley from the Department of Political Sciences has agreed to join me as a co-editor of the volume. It is not without some pride that I note that this is a very strong volume that can only reflect the strength of the School itself. I am thankful for MUP press, and particularly Elisa Berg, for the enthusiasm and efficiency with which the manuscript has been received and produced.

Ghassan Hage

Introduction

The language of responsibility permeates social life. While it has many meanings, several of which are examined by the authors of this book, its everyday usage is more often than not closely associated with questions of causality and the formal/legal, or informal, attribution of liability. This usage refers predominantly to human action. Although we do speak of responsibility in relation to non-humans, such as ‘the faulty wires were responsible for the fire’, faulty wires can only be declared responsible, they cannot be, in our culture, held responsible as humans are. For, in the case of humans, responsibility not only denotes causality but also includes questions of duty, accountability and morality. One can say that only in the latter meaning is responsibility true to its etymological roots in the Latin word respondeo, which highlights the question of answerability.

Interestingly, in Arabic, responsibility is derived etymologically from the word ‘question’ rather than ‘answer’. Al’mass’ool, the person responsible, also means, literally, the person who is asked a question. So in both linguistic traditions the emphasis is on the ability to reflect on one’s action which is implied in both the capacity to answer and the capacity to be questioned. These meanings are at the core of the modern conception of responsibility, which implies both a capacity to be accountable—this necessarily includes some notion of free will—and a capacity to reflect on this accountability. Very few other concepts touch on so many essential dimensions of our daily lives as this human-centred conception of responsibility. All spheres of belonging that encompass our social being are delimited by explicit or implicit attempts at defining, assigning, assuming, questioning or resisting such conceptions of responsibilities and their scope. This is so whether we are speaking of our belonging to the family or the nation, or of our belonging to workplaces and social clubs.

Even more fundamentally, humans in many cultures have considered that the capacity to assume responsibility for one’s action is at the heart of what distinguishes us as humans. This is done by highlighting the relation between responsibility and free will and by positing both as core markers of the boundary between humans and animals; or indeed between the human and everything else. Only those who have free will are or can be made answerable for their actions and only humans have free will, or so this tale goes. Like many human-created and deployed boundaries between the human and the animal—such as those erected around notions of rationality, for example—they are also used to demarcate differences between humans themselves.

Here the pattern of argumentation travels a well-trodden colonial and patriarchal route: whites have been considered more responsible than blacks, who easily allow themselves to be guided by their instincts. Men are more responsible than women for, as some societies have it, women are a bit like blacks in being guided by their instincts and their emotions, or, as some other societies have it, responsibility is a capacity for self-control and women, biologically, do not have this capacity: they cannot control the boundaries between the inside and outside of their bodies, they menstruate. And, of course, adults are more responsible then children (which is why blacks—and women—are like children).

With this last discursive formation, the boundary shifts from being only socio-spatial to being also diachronic. Most of us, at some point in our childhood, have been told by an adult that the time has come where we have to assume responsibility for our actions. When and why is there such a time is in itself an interesting bio-social question. What is certain is that, like all socially constructed inter-human and inter-species boundaries, the social threshold between responsibility and the lack of it is continuously shifting. Even the division between humans who can assume responsibility for their action and animals who can’t is not as stable as it is often believed to be. While it is hard for many people today to imagine animals being formally held responsible for their action, this has not always been the case. As the well-documented history of animal trials in medieval Europe attests, animals were not only seen as informally responsible but were also held legally responsible, taken to court and put on trial.¹ And as pet owners know only too well, while they would not be likely to argue the case that animals should be held responsible for their action, if on arriving home they find that their pet has done something to displease them, their first instinct is indeed to hold them responsible.

Despite the way it pervades social life, responsibility is actually a thoroughly modern concept. Consequently, as Paul Ricoeur indicates in his seminal essay on responsibility, in the Western philosophical tradition the term only makes an explicit appearance in post-Kantian philosophy.² Nonetheless, philosophers have always addressed closely related themes, starting with Aristotle’s reflections in his Nicomachean Ethics on when it is appropriate to consider a person liable for the consequences of his or her action, and under what conditions should the person be perceived as blameless.³ Kant’s deliberations on the relation between morality and rationality, and his reflections on the relation between intention and action are seen today as a way of thinking responsibility.⁴ This also goes for Nietzsche’s conception of humankind as the ‘animal that has the right to promise’,⁵ which is taken up later by Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, where she also posits responsibility as a key differentiator between humans and animals.⁶ The question of responsibility is even more foundational in Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism, which sees us as condemned to be free and always faced with the responsibility of assuming our freedom.⁷ Since then hardly a philosopher has not confronted the question of responsibility.

Because of its modern beginnings the question of responsibility has been explicitly present as a concept in the social sciences right from the start. Indeed it has been at the core of the basic explanatory/determinist impulse of social scientific inquiry: how can one proclaim an individual responsible and yet analyse them and their actions as constituted by a variety of social forces? Durkheim and his entourage dealt explicitly with questions of this kind. But unlike others who took ‘responsibility’ as a starting point along with the assumption of absence of determination it carries with it, Durkheim favoured taking the existence of a sentiment of responsibility as given and asked questions concerning its nature and its impact. Whether we objectively have such a thing as ‘free will’ is certainly open to debate, but the existence of a sentiment of responsibility is not.

This sentiment of responsibility was also of interest to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a contemporary of Durkheim and one of anthropology’s foundational figures. In his 1884 PhD thesis, titled The Idea of Responsibility, Lévy-Bruhl attempts to think about responsibility by transcending the two dominant modes of understanding human consciousness and human will at the time: a Hegel-inspired school that saw it as a spiritual and mysterious substance that lies outside nature, and an August Comte–derived mode of thinking that saw it as a product of the organic development of humans across the ages. For Lévy-Bruhl, in a view that echoed Durkheim’s position and which became influential, responsibility was to be understood in neither spiritualist nor organic terms but as the outcome of the relational/social nature of being.⁸ Independently of the above, Max Weber was also developing a sociology in which an ‘ethics of responsibility’ (Verantwortungsethik), foregrounding the agent’s responsibility vis-a-vis the consequences of his or her action, played an even more important role. It is no coincidence that Weber’s ethics of responsibility was particularly associated with his political sociology,⁹ nor that Lévy-Bruhl tried to apply his conception of responsibility to the study of criminality,¹⁰ for it was precisely in the legal definitions of various forms of criminal liability, and in the political attempts to define the nature of governmental responsibility that the concept made its emergence in the modern world. It is not surprising therefore to find that the concept has also a solid presence in the political sciences. Responsibility, in the sense of accountability or answerability to others, is a fundamental feature of modern representative democracy. The idea of ‘responsible government’ is a cornerstone of the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, where the executive government is responsible to parliament, and the parliament is ultimately responsible to the people. Responsibility qua accountability to others is also basic to the practice of deliberation and critique in the public sphere, and it is also embodied in one form or another in most modern governance structures, from the local football club to the shareholders meeting of global corporations.

In international relations, states have a range of responsibilities that attach to membership in the international society of states, such as not committing acts of aggression, providing diplomatic immunity and generally observing international law. More recently, this has extended to a ‘responsibility to protect’ citizens from genocide or gross human-rights violations. However, the deeply skewed distribution of material capabilities among states has led to the practice of more capable states claiming or being assigned greater or ‘special’ responsibilities to address international problems. For example, many great powers have followed the maxim ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ (made famous by the Spiderman film) to justify having a greater say in managing the global order (for example the G20), or in taking it upon themselves to police the international order by virtue of their superior military power. On other occasions, international treaties have conferred special responsibilities on those states with the relevant capability to address particular global problems. Examples include the UN Charter, which gives a permanent seat on the Security Council to five great powers, or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 1992, which confers an obligation on developed states to take the lead in mitigation according to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and capabilities.¹¹

The essays in this book are grounded in this long social, political and intellectual history. The first part of the book is concerned with the nature of the subject of responsibility. What is a responsible subject, what are they responsible for, how does the process of making one a responsible subject occur? Because of its positioning between freedom and necessity, the individual and the social, the sovereignty over oneself and the sovereignty of others over us, the modern imaginary of the responsible subject has always fluctuated between the fear of two extremes: individualist anarchy and unreflexive obedience. Both are perceived as an abdication of responsibility towards the collective. It is here that one can locate John Cash’s essay examining Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments concerning ‘obedience to authority’. Milgram tested how far people would go in obeying authority figures when instructed to administer severe electric shocks as punishment to others deemed failing to learn. His findings and the way the findings are reported showing that people were willing to simply obey and administer up to the 450-volt shock pandered to the phobia of unreflexive obedience. Cash’s revisiting of the studies demonstrates the ambivalence at the heart of obedience and the fact that subjects hardly ever obey without a resistant desire to be responsible for what they do. His essay reflects upon ‘the drama of subjectivities in process as they negotiate responsibility, in often partial, fragile and still-born, but sometimes resolute, ways, always under the shadow of the call to obey’. The responsible subject is never either responsible or not but is always in such a state of fragility and ambiguity.

The fluctuation between free will and determinism, agency and structure, the individual and the communal that marks the social and political sciences is often replicated at the level of social policy. In social policy, aiming to deal with broad social structures and seeing them responsible for social problems is often countered by another tendency which considers individuals responsible. While it was common in the 1970s to hear someone note the social background of a criminal in his or her defence, today to highlight such a background is more likely to be dismissed as irrelevant. As such the extent to which individuals are responsible for their actions is a highly political and historically fluctuating phenomenon. Jens Zinn’s essay explores how, in our world, increasingly less space is left for fate or accidents, which are often only accepted after scrutiny. But, as Zinn asks: ‘who would take decisions when the options and outcomes are highly uncertain and the likelihood of being punished for negative outcomes is high?’ He suggests that while ‘responsibilisation’ is useful in many respects, successful deflection of responsibility is also desirable though the ability to do so is unequally distributed in society.

In Australia, nowhere has the above-mentioned fluctuation between holding individuals and holding social structures responsible left a mark as deep as in the domain of Indigenous social policy. While in the 1970s and 1980s it was far more the norm to highlight structural issues when dealing with Indigenous affairs, today an increasing number of voices see such an attitude as standing in the way of Indigenous people taking responsibility for their own lives. No one has articulated such a view more strongly or more eloquently than the Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, and it is his views that are the subject of Emma Kowal’s essay. Analysing Noel Pearson’s The Right to Take Responsibility, Kowal interrogates how Pearson deploys responsibility in his arguments. It argues that Pearson’s rhetorical success rests on his ability to separate blame from responsibility in Indigenous affairs.

If Zinn deals with the increased responsibilisation of individuals in the face of risk and Kowal with the increased responsibilisation of Indigenous people for the conditions of life they are creating for themselves, Jennifer Balint’s essay deals with a broader historical shift. Her interest is in situations in post-conflict societies where, in the wake of mass harm, we see a dominant focus on truth commissions and on individual and communal reconciliation practices. There the responsibility, both for the act itself and for its redress, is placed with the individual and with particular communities, rather than the state or state practice. A similar trend is noted in domestic legal practice. The essay considers the implications of this move from a purely state-based justice perspective and what this shift in responsibility means for the practice and outcomes of justice.

While the previous essays concern individual and state responsibility within nation-states, in the last essay of this section David Mickler is interested in the formation of international subjects of responsibility and their object. His essay reviews recent changes in international-relations thinking concerning the responsibility for providing security for civilian populations vulnerable to violence inside their own state. These changes have given rise to the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine, which prescribes a ‘sequencing’ of responsibility to protect civilians. States have the primary responsibility, but if they act ‘irresponsibly’ by failing to protect their people—or actively threatening them—then international actors (ultimately, the UN Security Council) have a secondary responsibility to hold states accountable and, where necessary, to use force to intervene to protect civilians in dire need. The essay examines the difficulty facing such a doctrine in terms of the significant power differentials among international actors and the absence of adequate mechanisms for holding actors accountable regarding their secondary responsibility.

The fact that the subject of responsibility is not given a priori points to the fact that responsibility is always contested. Part II of the book is devoted to essays dealing with those spaces of contestations where the questions of who is responsible and who is to blame for what are continuous objects of struggle. Dwyer and Minnegal provide a paradigmatic analysis of these spaces of contestation. Their essay, grounded in specific ethnographic examples, draws out intimate connections between the politics of blame and the embodiment of responsibility, arguing that neither can be understood in isolation from the contexts that frame the dynamics of judgement at play.

A particularly difficult case of contextualised politics of blame is provided by Nesam McMillan’s essay dealing with the responsibility of individual peacekeepers who are called upon to help local populations facing persecution. Taking the 1994 Rwandan genocide as its case study, the essay explores how peacekeeper responsibility has been conceptualised in academic and public discourse and peacekeeper and survivor testimony. The essay shows how each account of responsibility seeks to negotiate the tensions between different understandings of what it means to be a soldier or a bystander. In a similar vein but within a different context, Ghassan Hage’s essay deals with the various perspectives on familial responsibility that surface in the wake of a conflict that erupts between various members of a Lebanese transnational family. Hage shows how each conception of responsibility denotes a particular mode of participating and a particular mode of experiencing the family as a global entity.

With the rise in various forms of social interactions and modes of sociality on the net, its specificity as a space of responsibility raises interesting questions. Kohn et. al.’s essay explores such questions as they emerge around the erection and defacement of two Facebook memorials for deceased persons. Mapping who is responsible for what in these cases involves considering the expressed and sometimes contested responsibilities of institutions (in particular, Facebook administrators), of individual and communal mourners (family, friends, strangers), of trolls and others who set out to subvert and pervert the affective functions of the site, and of agents of the state, in particular the police and the legislature.

The last essay in this section takes us into spaces of responsibility marked by cultural difference. Maree Pardy deals with the feminist responsibility to respond to forced marriage within multicultural societies. Her essay seeks to negotiate a path through the feminist divide between those who suggest that urgent intervention is required to protect women from such harmful cultural practices and those who claim that such haste is unseemly, racist and politically detrimental. The essay’s main interest is in the relation between responsibility and judgment, the relation between the feminist responsibility to judge and the need to judge responsibly.

While Part I dealt with the construction of the subject of responsibility in broad historic terms and Part II explored a variety of spaces of responsibility, Part III is concerned specifically with the question of ecological responsibility, which is beyond doubt the most important socially and politically today. Yet it is also among the most wicked because ecological responsibility is a collective responsibility that is easy to evade, and because ecological problems and risks are the routine by-products of ‘normal’ production and consumption. Neoclassical economics and rational-choice theory offer a simple explanation for ecological irresponsibility: it is more ‘rational’ for self-seeking agents to privatise gains and socialise costs. As the famous parable of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ makes clear, this occurs even though agents can foresee that such behaviour may lead to collective ecological ruin. While there is plenty of evidence of such behaviour by consumers, firms and states, rational-choice theories provide a limited window through which to understand environmental responsibility. Indeed, they naturalise or normalise such behaviour by failing to examine the social structures that produce self-seeking (or ecologically ignorant) agents that lack any sense of extended responsibility to others through space and time. Nor can they explain behaviour that transgresses their particular form of rationality, such as the rise of environmental NGOs, or the corporate social responsibility or ‘extended producer responsibility’ movement. The essays in Part III provide a glimpse of the rich variety of different ontologies of self, society and nature through the ages, and across and within different cultures, and an equally rich variety of different accounts or ‘sentiments’ of environmental responsibility towards both the human and the more than human world.

In her essay on climate change, Robyn Eckersley draws on Iris Marion Young’s ‘social connection model’ of political responsibility for structural injustices to develop an account of political responsibility for climate change as a responsibility to change social structures that inflict undeserved harm on others, now and in the future. She shows that political leadership is crucial for the discharge of this responsibility, but that it is often hard to find, and she highlights the various strategies and arguments enlisted by political elites in Australia to avoid or evade responsibility.

Erin Fitz-Henry is also interested in the evasion of responsibility, but insofar as it is done by corporations who cause environmental harm across national boundaries. In particular, her essay focuses on the question of geographical remoteness: the idea found in some legal opinions that causality cannot be established between corporations located in the west and the harm they might be accused of doing in third world countries simply because the geographical distance between the corporation and the supposed effect is too great and is mediated by a long causal chain that makes a single cause hard to establish. Drawing on the way the 18th-century anti-slavery movement emphasised a connection between slave catchers and slave owners that existed despite geographical and temporal distances, Fitz-Henry traces the efforts of contemporary environmental activists to develop new vocabularies of greatly expanded causality and responsibility across growing geographical distances.

But if responsibility as causality emphasises a self/other distinction and a