Odpowiedzialność w globalnej wiosce

ISBN 978-83-7507-047-7

[ format S6, s. 176, bibliografia, indeks nazwisk,
streszczenie w języku angielskim ]

Monografia popularnonaukowa z pogranicza
filozofii wartości, etyki, prawa i semiotyki.

=========
Spis treści
=========

Podziękowania
Wstęp
1. Znaczenia i podziały
-- Przedmiot
-- Instancja i podmiot
-- Podstawa
-- Poszkodowany
-- Sposób rozliczania
2. Odpowiedzialność a moralność
3. Warunki odpowiedzialności
4. Przemiany
-- Wolność, przewidywalność, tożsamość
-- Odpowiedzialność psychologiczna
-- Złożoność świata i efekt motyla
-- Realizm i obiektywizm
5. Remedia
-- Teoria
-- Praktyka
6. Sposoby badania odpowiedzialności
Responsibility in the Global Village (Summary)
Skorowidz nazwisk

*************************************
Responsibility in the Global Village
[Summary]
*************************************

The concept of responsibility denotes a many-term relation. Someone is responsible for something, towards someone, in the interest of someone's well-being, on some grounds, and in some specific manner. On some occasions, some of the terms of the relation in question can be omitted. For example, responsibility understood as a character trait is only limited to the subject. On some other occasions, the terms of the relation may be identical with one another, say, someone feels responsible for oneself or towards oneself. When some of the terms of the relation are omitted or are identical with one another, one can wonder whether we can still speak of responsibility and if so, whether its meaning is still the same.

Other difficulties arise from the fact that some people implicitly impose certain restrictions on some of the terms of the relation that other people need not be aware of. For example, the concept of responsibility may -- but need not -- carry the implication of financial sanctions.

The two primary distinctions are between internal and external responsibility (responsibility towards oneself and towards someone else), and between responsibility ex ante (involving future obligations) and ex post (involving the neglect or fulfillment of past obligations). As a result of intersecting the first distinction with the second one, we obtain four main types of responsibility. Following to a large extent (but with some modifications) the lines suggested by Ingarden, we assume that one can speak of responsibility not only within the domain of morality, but also with respect to the values of some other kinds. But responsibility is always moral in nature.

Certain ontological and epistemological preconditions need to be fulfilled for responsibility to be possible: the existence of values, of human beings and of the time-dimensional aspect of their existence (Ingarden also adds that the mode of existence is to be objective and that values are not to be reduced to ones of a utilitarian or relativistic character). Other assumptions involve: significant differences among the alternative courses of action with respect to the value of their consequences (say, possible threats involved in the actions), the relative stability and continuity of personal identity (in Ingarden's view, it ought to be absolute), freedom of action, predictability of the consequences of one's actions, ability to judge the value of possible consequences, and with regard to internal responsibility, also the presence of a relevant intention.

The extent to which these preconditions of responsibility are met in contemporary world differs somewhat from what it used to be. On the one hand, the range of possible courses of action is richer. On the other hand, there is growing understanding of genetic and environmental determinants. We can predict more, but at the same time the world grows more and more complex, and so our predictive power continues to be insufficient. One approach pointing to the difficulties and limitations of predictability and freedom of human actions is chaos theory. It reveals that the complex interconnectedness and interdependency of phenomena in contemporary world makes it difficult to determine the unique cause of a given phenomenon, and so to make someone uniquely responsible in a particular case. Subjectivism, relativism, and utilitarianism are becoming more and more widespread -- moral views which, according to Ingarden, preclude the possibility of responsibility. At the same time, global threats are definitely on the rise.

The application range of the concept of responsibility has shifted. The legitimacy of its application is nowadays being called into question in some situations where we used to apply it without hesitation, because the fulfillment of the preconditions of responsibility is questioned. For instance, unfavorable social conditions are perceived as attenuating circumstances or even a reason for acquittal. On the other hand, we have begun to apply this concept to new situations. For example, victims are held responsible for inciting the behavior of people who abused them. In those situations agent causation is confused with moral responsibility. Thus contemporary individualism tends to lay emphasis on responsibility for oneself, and marginalize responsibility for others. While this attitude may be appealing, it cannot be consistently sustained. In our global village it is impossible to demarcate the spheres of individual interests. People's interests are highly interdependent and strongly interwoven. One of the reactions to this is to violate the condition of the preservation of the identity of the subject, and to introduce collective responsibility, say, for the family or nation.

In contemporary world, with growing global threats and the erosion of values, responsibility gains special importance and may serve as the basis for restitution of moral values. At the same time, since the preconditions of responsibility are not fully met today, responsible action should also extend to making sure they are met to the highest possible degree. Since being responsible also involves being responsible for better fulfillment of the preconditions of responsibility, one can speak of second-order responsibility in this context. Some preconditions of responsibility are beyond our control but we may reconsider their status as something absolutely indispensable or essential. Such preconditions may include certain purely philosophical beliefs concerning the nature of values or time. It seems though that they can be weakened and that one can assume responsibility without sharing Ingarden's philosophical beliefs about its preconditions. One other way of promoting responsibility today is to emphasize positive responsibility directed towards future tasks instead of negative responsibility centered on guilt and punishment.

This last strand of thought, as well as the concept of second-order responsibility for the fulfillment of its own preconditions, are present in the philosophy of dialogue. In this philosophy responsibility is understood as an ontological characteristic of man, and sociological and psychological phenomena related to responsibility are considered secondary to this fundamental ontological constitution. From this perspective the analytic approach as well as Ingarden's conditional ontology seem to trivialize or miss entirely the essence of the phenomenon of responsibility. However, we do not have to accept this view, since the analytic approach seems essential to the investigation of the essence of responsibility, and moreover, the differences in results obtained by Ingarden and by the philosophy of dialogue are far less significant than they might seem from the dialogical perspective. In particular, Ingarden's work on the subject's ontological preconditions of responsibility seems closely related to the dialogical attempts to understand responsibility as the ontological essence of a man. Both research projects are proceeding in a similar direction. What is different is mainly terminology: Ingarden's `responsibility' pertains to sociological and psychological phenomena and his objective is to understand their deeper ontological preconditions, whereas in the philosophy of dialogue `responsibility' refers to the ontological essence of man itself.