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ABSTRACT
In the last two chapters of his book ‘From Normativity to Responsibility’, Joseph Raz developed, in outline, an intriguing account of responsibility, which is based on what he called the Rational Functioning Principle and on the idea of a domain of secure competence. With these two ideas, Raz argued, we could best delimit the scope of ‘responsibility’ in the sense of something ‘being to one’s credit or discredit as a rational agent’. In the following, I will argue that, while identifying some crucial aspects of our being agents ‘in the world’, Raz’s account does not fully capture the extent of the kind of responsibility he was interested in. In particular, unintentional failures that are due to the malfunctioning of capacities which are too unreliable to count as secure competences may well fall within the scope of responsibility thus understood. I will suggest Raz’s account should be supplemented by considerations drawn from ‘quality of will’ approaches, which can (inter alia) deal better with such cases.
Acknowledgements
I would like to add how sorry I am l never had the chance to discuss these issues with Joseph himself. He was a wonderful thinker and a philosophical giant, and has been a highly inspiring figure to me, from the time I had the very good fortune to have tutorials with him in Trinity Term 2006. I will always remember his generosity, intellectual rigour, kindness and his ability to challenge one to think so much harder about the philosophical questions at hand. For very helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper I am much indebted to Stefan Brandt, David Heering, John Hyman, Christian Kietzmann, Ufuk Özbe, Sergio Tenenbaum and Konstantin Weber, as well as to the audience at the workshop on ‘Reasons and Normativity: Themes from Raz’, in June 2022 in London. I am also very grateful to the organizers of that workshop and editors of this special issue. Work on this text was also supported by funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project number 439616221 (Capacities and the Good).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Manuel Vargas, who is also worried about how to understand the notion of responsibility at issue in Raz’s text, criticizes Raz for failing to situate his notion of responsibility within the taxonomy of currently used senses, in Vargas ‘Razian Responsibility’ (2014) 5(1) Jurisprudence 161, 163 fn 5. But failing to do the latter is not, in my view, a shortcoming, and I am not raising this worry here. For a more extended discussion of the relation between Raz’s notion and others which are widely used in the debate see Gary Watson, ‘Raz on Responsibility’ (2016) 10(3) Criminal Law and Philosophy 395, 398 ff. I suspect that Watson is right in noting a similarity between Raz’s notion and his own notion of attributability-responsibility (ibid 399, fn 11), and this may well be the closest more ‘established’ notion of responsibility. Still, both notions are clearly not the same.
2 Raz wants to do more than merely provide necessary and sufficient conditions for responsibility2; he also wants to provide at least the basis for an explanation of why we are so responsible under the specified conditions. So, attributing to him a ‘theory’ of responsibility2 seems appropriate.
3 Joseph Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (OUP 2011) 227.
4 ibid 228.
5 HLA Hart, ‘Postscript: Responsibility and Retribution’ in HLA Hart, Punishment and Responsibility (2nd edn, OUP 2008) 212.
6 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 256–57.
7 ibid 251.
8 ibid. As Watson, ‘Raz on Responsibility’ (n 1) 398–99, rightly points out ‘[w]e might even say … that being open to normative assessment for performing or misperforming as a rational agent is itself a kind of “liability”’ in some contexts, though, of course, a liability clearly different from legal liability or liability to moral blame.
9 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 249.
10 See also Watson, ‘Raz on Responsibility’ (n 1) 405: ‘seeing the conduct as bearing on my conduct as a reasons-responsive agent’.
11 See R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Harvard University Press 1994) chapter 4.
12 ‘Liability to normative assessment’ itself, see n 8, which may be the characteristic consequence of responsibility2, is, I take it, just a cover-term, which covers an enormously heterogeneous class of normative assessments – with correspondingly divergent preconditions – one may be subject to.
13 An additional reason why it does not do so is that Raz’s theory is meant to be, in part, a normative theory. See Joseph Raz, ‘On Normativity and Responsibility: Responses’ (2013) 8(1) Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies 220, 223.
14 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 231.
15 ibid 229.
16 See the list of competences mentioned ibid 250.
17 ibid 231.
18 From how Raz uses the terms ‘rational powers’ and ‘capacities’, it sometimes seems as if he only allowed secure competences as genuine ‘powers of rational agency’ or ‘rational capacities’. This would diverge from ordinary usage, where we speak of such ‘capacities’ even when these are not sufficiently reliable to count as ‘secure competences’. (‘She has the ability to solve mathematical puzzles of this sort, even though, given how easily she allows herself to be distracted when doing them, she can hardly rely on succeeding when she tries.’) But Raz seems to be aware that his usage may be somewhat non-standard here (see his formulation “a failure of our powers of rational agency, in the meaning of this principle”, ibid 244 (emphasis added)).
19 ibid 250.
20 ibid 244–45. It is an interesting question how Raz would classify capacities where the agent would be entitled to such confidence, but lacks it, due to self-diffidence. As I understand him, he would not classify such capacities as secure competences, with the consequence that they wouldn’t extend the area of responsibility2. Accepting this subjective element in our assessments of responsibility2 would fit what he says about cases of asserting your competence in spite of doubts about whether you can still reliably do X, ibid 245. (For a critique of this subjective element in Raz’s account of secure competence, see Vargas ‘Razian Responsibility’ (n 1) 166 ff.)
21 One can see this from Raz’s specific insistence on the role their malfunctioning plays for responsibility2, and from his rationale for their inclusion in his theory.
22 “Only then is the action due to a failure of our powers of rational agency, in the meaning of the principle”. Ibid 244.
23 For what I have found a helpful reconstruction of Raz’s argument here, see Ori J Herstein, ‘Responsibility in Negligence: Discussion of From Normativity to Responsibility’ (2013) 8(1) Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies 167, 173 ff.
24 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 268.
25 Herstein (n 23), 174 ff.
26 ‘that is crucial to our understanding of agency, we all have, and must have to be persons with capacity to act, spheres of secure competence.’ Raz, ‘On Normativity and Responsibility: Responses’ (n 13) 223.
27 ‘the sphere of secure competence demarcates the basic domain in which we are competent rational agents, capable not only of planning and intending, but of acting.’ Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 246.
28 Not all secure competences do that in the same way, though. Secure skills to perform an action of type X will make the option to do X one we can simply choose in the way described above. Abilities for reflection or for acting with confidence, by contrast, will provide a background we rely on in deliberating and choosing, ibid 250.
29 ibid 245.
30 Raz, ‘On Normativity and Responsibility: Responses’ (n 13) 223.
31 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 268.
32 ibid 248. As Watson nicely puts it: ‘Their success is our success. By the same token, their failure is our failure.’ Gary Watson, ‘The Possibility of Pure Negligence’ in Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco and George Pavlakos (eds), Agency, Negligence and Responsibility (CUP 2022) 117.
33 Raz’s own remarks seem to fully acknowledge that our identity is only partly shaped by our competences and that attitudes play an essential role, too (Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 238–39). This makes it rather surprising that he goes on to only use the former to extend the scope of responsibility2.
34 This is Raz’s own view, as he defends a version of the guise of the good thesis (see ibid chapter 4).
35 What is important to us can restrict our possible choices with different degrees of stringency. It does so in a particularly drastic manner in what Harry Frankfurt has described as cases of ‘volitional necessity’, see Harry G Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love (CUP 1999). But just as there are abilities we can only partly rely on, there are also less stringent ways our values constrain our choices.
36 For a good characterisation of skill-blame take the following description of Björnsson: ‘Noticing and locating objects based on visual information, remembering things, or solving mathematical problems are activities that can be performed more or less skilfully, with greater or lesser excellence, and in all these areas we can be blamed or credited for resulting successes and failures.’ Gunnar Björnsson, ‘Explaining Away Epistemic Skepticism about Culpability’ in David Shoemaker (ed), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. Volume 4 (OUP 2017) 143.
37 See e.g. Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 250.
38 As Raz himself would agree: See Joseph Raz, Engaging Reason (OUP 1999).
39 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 230–31.
40 Peter Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’ in Gary Watson (ed), Free Will (OUP 2003) 84.
41 This is not meant to deny many important differences between Smith’s and Strawson’s accounts of responsibility. In particular, I’m leaving aside here the more ‘rationalist’ elements of Smith’s account and the crucial connection that exists, for her, between responsibility and the appropriateness of “ask[ing] a person to give a rational defense” of her actions and attitudes. Angela M Smith, ‘Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life’ (2005) 115(2) Ethics 236, 269. These differences will, however, not be important for the following discussion.
42 Angela M Smith, ‘Unconscious Omissions, Reasonable Expectations, and Responsibility’ in Dana K Nelkin and Samuel C Rickless (eds), The Ethics and Law of Omissions (OUP 2017) 52.
43 Smith calls it ‘eligibility for demands of justification’ or ‘answerability’, see e.g. Smith, ‘Unconscious Omissions, Reasonable Expectations, and Responsibility’ (n 42) 51.
44 This is a different point from the one I have made earlier that not all kinds of blame based on responsibility2 (for conduct beyond the reach of the Guidance and Intention Principles) are forms of skill-blame. While I think, as stated earlier, that Raz would indeed take skill-blame to be the paradigmatic form of criticism here, he does not, to my knowledge, explicitly make this claim. And with regard to the extension of responsibility2 as he sees it, he could still argue that the two cases discussed in the preceding section fall within the extension as set out by the Rational Functioning Principle because they involve the successful functioning of some secure competences.
45 Watson, ‘Raz on Responsibility’ (n 1) 399–400.
46 I must admit that, as far as moral responsibility and blameworthiness are concerned, I lack clear intuitions about this case. But it does seem right that there is some recognisable sense of responsibility on which the father is responsible here and on which his failure to take the child from the car is ‘to his discredit as a rational agent’.
47 A variant of Clarke’s often discussed case, Randolph K Clarke, Omissions: Agency, Metaphysics, and Responsibility (OUP 2014) 164.
48 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 230. It may coincide for some domains, if you subscribe to a constitutivist theory of the truths and reasons in these domains. But Raz did not do so, nor is constitutivism plausible for all domains of reasons.
49 ibid 262.
50 One might respond that if it requires such an exertion from a doctor, maybe she has chosen the wrong profession and should not be a doctor in the first place. But given the actual speed of development in medicine, this would be an unduly harsh verdict.
51 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 249 and 250.
52 I thus disagree with Watson’s verdict that “the moral fault manifest in pure negligence is not poor quality of will but faulty self-governance” (Watson, ‘The Possibility of Pure Negligence’ (n 32) 113.) (if only because the two latter features cannot be so neatly separated).
53 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n 3) 252.
54 Especially Raz, Engaging Reason (n 38) chapter 1.
55 For the latter claim I follow Raz, ibid 41, who argues that such diminution is necessary with regard to the initiation of a purely expressive action. Though he would still regard such actions as intentional and therefore involving some amount of control.
56 By contrast, if she had deliberately smashed the cups in order to let off steam (what Raz calls the ‘non-identical twin’ of the purely expressive action above, ibid), we could make a comparative assessment about what is more important to her: having a full set or letting off steam.