In this chapter, I discuss Heidegger's conception of responsibility for self. The chapter has two sections. In section one, I discuss Heidegger's conception of authenticity and the manner in which it is supposed to express responsibility for self. In section two, I then discuss Heidegger's notion of our everyday conception of self based on the social roles we occupy.

According to the forensic notion of a person, a person is to be understood primarily in terms of behavior for which she may be praised or blamed. Such behavior involves actions and consequences for which an individual can be held responsible. The key to this idea of being responsible for action is that one is somehow regarded as the source of the action. Persons are the kind of agents that are capable of acting on the basis of their own deliberations. This is why the question whether a person can be held responsible for a given action is regarded as at all to the point. The extent to which one is held responsible for one's actions, the extent to which one may be praised or blamed for one's actions, reflects the spectator's evaluation of the extent to which one performed that action independently of coercion.

There is a close historical connection between the notion of a person and that of an agent who can be held accountable for his or her actions. Use of the term “person” or rather “persona” (literally: “mask” or “role”) to refer to individuals actually originated in Roman law courts where it referred to individuals capable of bearing legal responsibility for their actions.