Responsibility and Justice E-Book

Matt Matravers

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 296

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In this lively and accessible book, Matt Matravers considers the role of responsibility in politics, morality and the law. In recent years, responsibility has taken a central place in our lives. In politics, both Tony Blair and George W. Bush have claimed that individual responsibility is at the centre of their policy agendas. In morality and the law, it seems just that people should be rewarded or punished only for things for which they are responsible. Yet responsibility is a hotly contested concept. Some philosophers claim that it is impossible, while others insist on both its possibility and importance. This debate has become increasingly technical in the philosophical literature, but it is seldom connected to our practices of politics and the law.

Matravers asks, What are we doing when we hold people responsible in deciding questions of distributive justice or of punishment?. By addressing this question, he not only shows how philosophy can help in thinking about current political and legal controversies, but also how we can keep hold of the idea of responsibility in an age in which we are increasingly impressed by the roles of genetics and environment in shaping us and our characters.

Leseprobe

Responsibility and Justice

In memoriam

Colin Matravers

RESPONSIBILITY AND JUSTICE

Matt Matravers

polity

Copyright © Matt Matravers 2007

The right of Matt Matravers to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5586-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Printed in Malaysia by Alden Press Limited

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Contents

Acknowledgements

1

The Many Faces of Responsibility

2

Thinking about Responsibility

3

Responsibility within Distributive Justice

4

Responsibility within Retributive Justice

5

Responsibility and Justice

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgements

The completion of this book was made possible by the award of the Thank-Offering to Britain Fellowship by the British Academy for the year 2004–5. I am enormously grateful to the Fellows of the Academy for the Award, which gave me the time to think and write. Other academics reading this will know just how much that means.

Although the Thank-Offering Fellowship is very generous, my being on leave inevitably meant my colleagues in the Department of Politics taking on extra work. I am very grateful to them for doing so. I am also grateful to my wife, Julika; that she puts up with me at all is something I find constantly amazing. That she does so through the pains and pitfalls of the writing process is a miracle.

That York is a wonderful place in which to be a political philosopher is in no small part due to the continuing generosity of the C. and J. B. Morrell Trust, which funds research in the area (and which has done so for twenty-five years). I would like to express my thanks to the Trustees – Geoffrey Heselton, Nicholas Morrell, Margaret Morrell, and Martin Wainwright – for their support. It is also wonderful because of the people who make up the political philosophy group. Since I started thinking about the things in this book, I have enjoyed the intellectual (and social) companionship of Alex Callinicos, David Edwards, Catriona McKinnon, Susan Mendus, Peter Nicholson, Jon Parkin, and Tim Stanton. In addition, the group has been blessed with many fine graduate students. I am very pleased to be able to thank them all.

I would also like to thank Antony Duff and an anonymous reader for Polity for helpful comments on the manuscript. In addition, I have had very useful feedback on bits of this book from numerous audiences at a variety of seminars and workshops. Louise Knight at Polity has been patient and helpful at all stages, as have her editorial assistants.

In the acknowledgements to Justice and Punishment I had reason to offer particular thanks to Brian Barry and Anni Parker and to John Charvet. For a variety of reasons, they have had a less intimate connection with this book than they did with that one. That said, Brian and John read, and gave extensive comments on, a complete draft of this book. I haven’t, I am sure, managed to respond to, or incorporate, all their insights, but that is my fault, not theirs. However, their influence goes far beyond the comments that provide tangible evidence of their involvement. Brian and Anni managed (from New York) to continue to support me in ways that might seem insignificant to them, but that matter enormously to me. Brian’s and John’s ghostly philosophical voices press, query, and criticize from the back of my mind as I write. I have been very lucky in having them as teachers, mentors, and friends, and can only thank them again for everything.

My colleague Sue Mendus was also the object of particular thanks in Justice and Punishment. She, too, has read and commented on this book in its entirety. As ever, her comments were invaluable. She also shouldered the lion’s share of the work left by me when I went on leave. It is not only for those things, though, that I want to thank her, but also and simply for being the best friend and colleague imaginable.

My uncle, Colin Matravers, died unexpectedly and suddenly while I was working on this book. One of the themes of this book is that many good and bad things happen that are down to chance, but are not matters of fairness or justice. Another theme is that they are no less important for that.

Parts of this book borrow from my ‘Luck, Responsibility, and “The Jumble of Lotteries that Constitutes Human Life” ’, Imprints: A Journal of Analytical Socialism 6(1): 28–43; ‘Responsibility, Luck, and the “Equality of What?” Debate’, Political Studies 50(3): 558–72; and from ‘Philosophy as Politics: Some Guesses as to the Future of Political Philosophy’, in What Philosophy Is, ed. H. Carel and D. Gamez, London: Continuum, 2004. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to use this material. I would also like to thank Richard Dawkins for permission to use the quotation at the beginning of chapter 5.

1

The Many Faces of Responsibility

1   Responsibility in Personal Judgements

Responsibility, and concepts related to it, play a significant role in people’s lives: in particular, in their judgements of themselves and others. Yet, the idea of responsibility is a problematic one, and when pressed, many seemingly solid judgements of responsibility slip from our grasp. The purpose of this book is not to examine the philosophical arguments over what responsibility is, although there will have to be a certain amount of that (in particular, in chapter 2); rather, the idea is to focus on where the concept of responsibility fits in ordinary life and in thinking about questions of justice.

In our ordinary lives, judgements of responsibility play an important role. According to the philosopher Peter Strawson (1962) – whose arguments will be important later – social interaction of the kind with which we are familiar would be impossible without the notion of responsibility. To see this, consider our responses to other persons and compare them with our responses to objects, non-human animals, and so on. When a person acts in a certain way, we respond to that person with an appropriate ‘reactive attitude’ – gratitude, resentment, love, indignation, or whatever – as his behaviour demands. These attitudes are central in our relationships with one another and in our shared social world. Moreover, they describe responses that are qualitatively different from the ways in which we respond to things, objects, and non-human animals. We may be cross with a dog, but we cannot be indignant at its behaviour nor hope that it feels remorse. Similarly, we may be pleased when we train it to roll over on command, but we do not feel gratitude for its doing so. Indeed, the very fact that we think it appropriate to train a dog (and, in a different way, a child) is itself evidence of the difference in the way we take ourselves to stand to dogs (and children) on the one hand and (adult) persons on the other.