Book Review on Responsibility ed. Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul
Introduction
The concept of responsibility lies at the heart of a number of central questions in moral philosophy and legal theory. Under what condition is it appropriate to praise or blame agents for their action actions (or their omissions)? When is it legitimate for legal system to hold an agent accountable for the consequences of his behavior? Are people's decisions and actions in some sense causally determined, and, if they are, is this determinism compatible with our moral and legal practices of assigning responsibility?
The essays in this volume address these questions and confront related issues. Some analyze different theories of causality, asking which theory offers the best account of human agency and the most satisfactory resolution of troubling controversies about free will and determinism. Some essays look at responsibility in the legal realm, seeking to determine how the law should assign liability for negligence, or whether the courts should allow defendants to offer excuses for their wrongdoing or to claim some form of diminished responsibility. Other essays explore libertarian views about positions on consent, contract law and responsibility are consistent, or whether restitution is superior to retribution or deterrence as a basis for a theory of corrective justice. Still others examine the notion of partial or divided responsibility, or the relationship between responsibility and the emotions.
Review about the Book
The first six essays deal with various issues relating to legal responsibility. Michael S. Moore's "Causation and Responsibility" explores the concept of causation which id presupposed by the liability doctrines of Anglo-American tort and criminal law.
On this view, causation is not mere correlation; nor is every necessary condition of some harms a cause of that harm. Causation is a scalar property: something can be more or less of a cause. What's more, causation can be diminishing over the number of events through which it is transmitted; and causal chains can be broken by intervening causes. The "Negligence," Kenneth W. Simons examines the moral underpinnings of our practice of holding people legally responsible for negligence- that is, the creation of an unjustified and low probability risk of causing harm. Simons contends that the common- sense moral precept that one should not be negligent reflect neither a coldly calculating economic or utilitarian conception of morality, nor an absolutist deontological conception that ignores all costs or disadvantages of taking precautions against risk. The libertarian view of contract law is the subject of Leo Katz's contribution to the volume, "Responsibility and Consent: The Libertarian's Problems with Freedom of Contract." The central argument of Katz' essay is that libertarians' beliefs about consent and freedom of contract are in conflict with their beliefs about responsibility.
Roderick T. Long is concerned with libertarian view on legal responsibility. In "The Irrelevance of Responsibility", long argues that judgments about whether a wrongdoer is responsible or no responsible should not determine how he should be treated by the legal system.
The notion of "diminished responsibility" is the focus of John Staddon's contribution to this volume, "On Responsibility in Science and Law." Stadden begins by noting that responsibilities are discharged by action, not thought; and he goes on to challenge the idea that if behavior is casually determined, a person cannot be held responsible for his actions.
Michael Stocker's "Responsibility and the Abuse Excuse' deals with a particularly prominent basis for claims of diminished responsibility: the idea that being a victim of past abuse can in some sense lessen one's culpability for a crime committed against one's abuser (or against someone else). Stocker challenges opponents of abuse excuses who would seek to disallow them in every case.
He focuses on the work of James Q. Wilson and other critics, who claim that allowing abuse excuses threatens our sense of responsibility and encourages jurors not to judge the behavior of defendants but to try to encourages jurors not to judge the behavior of defendants but to try to explain it- a practice that plays on jurors' sympathies and leads to excessive leniency.
Goldman explores responsibility in the political realm-specifically, in the context of elections. In his essay "Why Citizens Should Vote: A Casual Responsibility Approach," Goldman observes that responses to the question of whether citizens should vote usually center on the fact that it is highly unlikely, in large elections, that a single voter's ballot will be decisive.
Goldman's essay suggests that responsibility for the outcome of an election can be shared among a group of individuals, and the theme of shared or distributed responsibility is taken up ob Hery S. Richardson in his essay "Institutionally Divided Moral Responsibility."
Susan Sauvé Meyer offers a historical perspective on responsibility and causation in her contribution to this volume, "Fate, Fatalism, and Agency in stoicism." Meyer examines the doctrine of determinism – the view that everything that happens is determined antecedent causes – and asks whether it is compatible with the practice of holding agents responsible for their actions. The compatibility of determinism and responsibility is also the subject of Alfred R. Mele's essay "ultimate Responsibility and Dumb Luck." The idea of ultimate responsibility, Mele notes requires the falsity of causal determinism: agents are possessed of such responsibility only if they are causally undetermined sources of at least some of third decisions or choice.
In the collection of final essay, "Taking Responsibility for our Emotions," Nancy Sherman explores watts in which people might be held to have some responsibility for their emotional states. Sherman notes that we often praise people for their compassion think less of them for their self- righteousness or unjust anger.
Conclusion
The notion of responsibility occupies a crucial position in ethical and legal theory. The eleven essays in this volume present the views of leading scholars on the nature of responsibility and its relationship to questions about human agency, free will, caudation, and corrective justice.
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