Hart on Responsibility

C. Pulman, C. Pulman, C. Pulman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137374431
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia etica e morale

A collection of essays discussing Herbert Hart's writings on responsibility. The essays focus upon Hart's work on causation in the law and on the justification of punishment. Specific topics discussed include senses of 'responsibility', voluntariness, Mill's harm principle, mens rea, excuses, the Hart-Wootton debate, and negligence.

1

Hart’s Senses of ‘Responsibility’

Karin Boxer

Over the course of his career, Hart wrote eight essays on responsibility. Much of Hart and Honoré’s Causation in the Law also focuses on responsibility. In several of the essays and in the book, Hart comments that ‘responsibility’ has more than one meaning. It is only in the eighth essay – reprinted as part I of the ‘Postscript’ to Punishment and Responsibility – that Hart attempts to provide a full-scale treatment of ‘the welter of distinguishable senses of the word “responsibility” and its grammatical cognates’.¹ The attempt results in Hart’s distinguishing four senses of the word ‘responsible’ or four varieties of responsibility: (1) role-responsibility, (2) causal responsibility, (3) liability-responsibility and (4) capacity-responsibility. This chapter examines and critically assesses Hart’s scheme of classification.

1 Hart’s senses of ‘responsibility’

Hart opens his discussion of the different senses of ‘responsibility’ with the tale of a drunken sea captain ‘told in the terminology of responsibility to illustrate, with stylistically horrible clarity’ the different senses²:

As captain of the ship, X was responsible₁ for the safety of his passengers and crew. But on his last voyage he got drunk every night and was responsible₂ for the loss of the ship with all aboard. It was rumoured that he was insane, but the doctors considered that he was responsible₃ for his actions. Throughout the voyage he behaved quite irresponsibly_1a, and various incidents in his career showed that he was not a responsible_1a person. He always maintained that the exceptional winter storms were responsible₂ for the loss of the ship, but in the legal proceedings brought against him he was found criminally responsible_4a for his negligent conduct, and in separate civil proceedings, he was held legally responsible_4a for the loss of life and property. He is still alive and he is morally responsible_4b for the deaths of many women and children.³

I have added subscripts to Hart’s text corresponding to the different varieties and sub-varieties of responsibility that he distinguishes. In order of assigned subscript, they are

1.role-responsibility

2.causal responsibility

3.capacity-responsibility

4.liability-responsibility

a.legal liability-responsibility

b.moral liability-responsibility

Notice that I have not listed a sub-variety of responsibility under role-responsibility even though I distinguished a ‘responsible_1a’ in the text. The reason is that although Hart discusses responsible_1a under the heading of role-responsibility – hence my labelling of it – to my mind, he should have classified it as its own sense. I argue for this claim just below as part of my discussion of role-responsibility. I examine each of Hart’s other varieties of responsibility in turn.

2 Role-responsibility

‘As captain of the ship, X was responsible for the safety of his passengers and crew.’ Seeing to their safety was his responsibility. Other of his responsibilities as captain included guaranteeing the ship’s cleanliness and seaworthiness and the safe handling of its cargo and ensuring that its documentation was up to date. These are things for which he was responsible in the role sense of ‘responsibility’.

In characterizing the role sense of ‘responsibility’, Hart writes that ‘whenever a person occupies a distinctive place or office in a social organization, to which specific duties are attached to provide for the welfare of others or to advance in some specific way the aims or purposes of the organization, he is properly said to be responsible for the performance of these duties ... Such duties are his responsibilities.’⁴ Hart acknowledges that the idea of a distinct role or place or office is vague. His own usage is fairly relaxed. He extends the notion of a ‘role’ to cover temporary assignments of a task to a person, whether by agreement or otherwise. Hart gives the example of two friends on a mountaineering expedition who agree that one shall tend to the food and the other to the maps. He is happy to speak of the one as responsible for the food and the other for the maps and to consider it an instance of role-responsibility.⁵ At the same time, he points out that not every task or duty belonging to a person in virtue of a role, in even a strict sense of ‘role’, would normally be regarded as a ‘responsibility’. Hart offers the example of a soldier commanded by his superior officer to form fours or present arms on a given occasion or to pick up a single piece of trash. As for what separates those tasks or duties belonging to a role that are classified as responsibilities from those that are not, Hart confesses not to be sure. His best guess is that those classed as responsibilities are ‘duties of a relatively complex or extensive kind, defining a “sphere of responsibility” requiring care or attention over a protracted period of time, while short-lived duties of a very simple kind, to do or not to do some specific act on a particular occasion, are not termed responsibilities’.⁶ This seems right, although I am not sure that much harm would come from speaking of all duties as responsibilities.⁷ More important is that if the category ‘role-responsibility’ is to encompass all extensive duties ‘defining a “sphere of responsibility” requiring care or attention over a protracted period of time’ or all of the duties that possess the characteristics that Hart associates with responsibilities, then ‘role’ will have to be further extended and detached from talk of a distinctive place or office in a social organization so as to cover the description ‘moral agent’.⁸ Like Hart, I attribute the identity ‘moral agent’ to all normal adult human beings. With the identity comes duties ‘defining a “sphere of responsibility” requiring care or attention over a protracted period of time’. The protracted period of time is a normal human being’s entire adult lifetime or, at least, that portion of it during which she retains her mental capacities. The sphere of responsibility requiring the agent’s care and attention is her own actions and character. As moral agents, all normal adult human beings are responsible for ensuring that all actions they undertake and all principles they accept comply with morality’s requirements on actions and character.⁹ On one of the term’s many uses, to say that someone is a ‘morally responsible agent’ or ‘morally responsible for her actions’ is to point to the fact that she has such responsibilities. While Hart notes that the phrase ‘morally responsible for her actions’ can be used to refer to capacity-responsibility and moral liability-responsibility, he should have noted that it can also be used to refer to the role-responsibility a normal adult human being has for her own actions.

Hart maintains that responsibility_1a – as exemplified in the statement that the captain ‘behaved quite irresponsibly_1a, and various incidents in his career showed that he was not a responsible_1a person’ – requires a reference to role-responsibility for its elucidation. His own elucidation is that ‘[a] responsible person is one who is disposed to take his duties seriously; to think about them, and to make serious efforts to fulfill them. To behave responsibly is to behave as a man would who took his duties in this serious way.’¹⁰ Hart appears to view this use of ‘responsible’ – what I refer to as the honorific use or sense – as a sub-sense of role-responsibility.

This view of the honorific is incorrect. First, it is not clear that elucidating the honorific does require a reference to role-responsibility. Haydon and Duff attempt to elucidate it by appeal to the idea of answering for one’s conduct.¹¹ A responsible person, Duff argues, is one who is ‘well-placed to answer for her actions’.¹² Because of her conscientiousness and her ‘awareness of [her] situation as an agent in the social world’, she is, Haydon argues, ‘likely to be in a position to give a satisfactory account of her conduct in situations where an account might be called for’.¹³ This way of explaining the honorific strikes me as artificial. Comparatively, Hart’s idea that a responsible person is one who takes her duties seriously seems far more basic than the idea that she is likely to be in a position to account satisfactorily for her conduct. Indeed, once a reference has been made to her taking her duties seriously, mention of the fact that she is well placed to answer for her actions seems superfluous. (The superfluity comes across particularly clearly in Duff’s account of what it is to be a responsible parent, where he references the latter immediately after referencing the former.) In any case, the fact that a responsible person is well placed to answer for her actions seems to be a consequence of her being a responsible person in the honorific sense, not what it is to be a responsible person in the honorific sense. To my mind, a more promising way to elucidate the honorific would be to appeal to capacity-responsibility. A responsible person, one might argue, is one who has perfected the capacities that render one a responsible person in the capacity sense of responsibility: roughly, her capacities to appreciate moral and non-moral reasons and to act in accordance with her appreciation.¹⁴ To behave responsibly is to behave in the manner in which a person who had perfected these capacities would behave.

In addition, there is a second and more important reason for maintaining that the honorific should not be viewed as a sub-sense of role-responsibility – a reason that holds even if elucidating the honorific requires or is best accomplished by referencing role-responsibility. The honorific behaves too differently from the role-responsibility sense of ‘responsible’ to qualify as a sub-sense of it. Used in the role-responsibility sense, ‘responsible’ can be modified by ‘morally’ or ‘legally’; used in the honorific sense – as when we refer to someone as a responsible parent or teacher – ‘responsible’ cannot be modified by ‘morally’ or ‘legally’.¹⁵ The opposite of being responsible in the role-responsibility sense of ‘responsible’ is being non-responsible; the opposite of being responsible in the honorific sense is being irresponsible. Finally, being responsible in the role-responsibility sense is a necessary condition not just of being responsible, in the honorific sense, but of being irresponsible.

3 Causal responsibility

‘[O]n his last voyage [the captain] got drunk every night and was responsible for the loss of the ship with all aboard. ... He always maintained that the exceptional winter storms were responsible for the loss of the ship.’ These statements are statements of causal responsibility. As the second statement illustrates, where ‘responsible’ is used in the causal sense, it is not just persons that can properly be considered responsible for consequences or outcomes; inanimate objects or forces – as well as non-human animals, the actions and omissions of human animals, non-actional events, and states or conditions – can also be considered responsible. Hart directs the reader’s attention to the use of the past tense in statements attributing causal responsibility to a person. This is to be contrasted with the use of the present tense in statements of liability-responsibility involving a living person as subject. Thus, if it is said of a living person that she was responsible for some consequence or outcome, ‘responsible for’ is being employed in the causal sense. If, on the other hand, it said of a living person that she is responsible for the consequence or outcome, ‘responsible for’ is being employed in a liability sense. (Hence Hart’s statement concerning the drunken sea captain: ‘He is still alive and he is morally responsible for the deaths of many women and children.’) In relation to a person no longer living, the statement that she was responsible is ambigu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Hart’s Senses of ‘Responsibility’
• 2  Voluntary Interventions
• 3  Causing Things and Doing Things
• 4  A Framework for Punishment: What Is the Insight of Hart’s ‘Prolegomenon’?
• 5  Legal Responses to Consensual Sexuality between Adults: Through and beyond the Harm Principle
• 6  Revisiting the Hart/Wootton Debate on Responsibility
• 7  Hart’s Choices
• 8  Hart, Punishment and Excusing Conditions
• 9  Hart and Punishment for Negligence
• Bibliography
• Index