Difficulties of Ethical Life

8Before Whom and for What? Accountability and the Invention of Ministerial, Hyperbolic, and Infinite Responsibility

8 Before Whom and for What? Accountability and the Invention of Ministerial, Hyperbolic, and Infinite Responsibility R O B E R T B E R N A S C O N I Responsibility and Accountability The term responsibility is so ubiquitous in discussions of ethics and politics today that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it has been in use for only a little more than two hundred years and that philosophers have seen a need for it in ethics for only about half that time. More precisely, it is a term that cannot be found in classical Greek or Latin and indeed appears first as a noun only in French and English around 1787. In this essay I explore the history of the term responsibility in order to introduce a certain revolution in ethical thinking, initiated by Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas, that has been underway since the 1940s. I believe that this thinking provides crucial resources for addressing some of the most difficult problems that threaten the world today, both the long-standing problems of hunger and poverty, but also new problems that arise from the advent of technology, such as global warming, gene manipulation, and cloning.1 It is not only because their thinking on responsibility answers to these pressing problems that it merits our attention. The idea that human beings should not and cannot evade these problems any longer is widespread . Responsibility is, as it were, an ethical invention, but it is also a challenge.2 The novelty of the idea of responsibility, and not just the word, comes into focus when one distinguishes it from accountability. Accountability, as I am using the term, is primarily backward-looking, focusing on the 131 rectification of past crimes or failings. Issues of accountability were addressed in the law courts, and it is possible to see these issues being taken up into the philosophical literature in Plato’s Laws and at the beginning of the third book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle addresses the question of whether certain acts that draw praise or blame are done wittingly or unwittingly.3 Attention to the legal context leads Bernard Williams to claim that any apparent difference between the Greek and the contemporary notions of responsibility must be traced back to a difference between their and our conceptions of law and does not ultimately reflect different views on responsibility.4 However, this approach overlooks the transformation of the conception of ethics in the West through the Christianization of morality, which made ethics a matter of conscience. Once the will came to take a central place in ethics with Saint Augustine, and subsequently the question of the intention of the agent was given prominence by Peter Abelard, the separation of the primarily legal conception of accountability, which for the most part focuses on what was done, from the moral conception, whose focus is on what the agent was thinking, became more pronounced. Nevertheless, the legal model for a long while retained its preeminence insofar as the moral meaning of an act was determined by the judgment of God in much the same way that its legal meaning was determined by the judgment of the courts. Furthermore, the philosophical study of ethics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to be dominated by casuistry, which, among other things, had the task of setting limits to one’s duties and providing the excuses one needed when confronting one’s creator, much as a defense lawyer provides a client with extenuating circumstances and alibis.5 Much of the history of ethics can be read as the history of excuses. History of the Term Responsibility In this section I argue that the term responsibility was introduced in an attempt to render more precise a network of legal relationships that arose within the West in the context of the advent of representative democracy, shaped as it was by the rise of capitalism. The radical individualism created by this new form of society destroyed the existing bonds of society and highlighted in a one-sided way the independence of each from the others. It made it necessary to formulate an answerability to others that many other forms of society have tended to take for granted. I show here how philosophers attempted to assimilate this new notion of ‘‘responsibility ’’ to the old idea of legal accountability and that these attempts were in large measure successful for a time. It was...