Responsibility

doi:10.1017/9781108591249.011

11 - Responsibility

from Part II - Aspects of Ethical Agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023

Catherine Trundle

Edited by

James Laidlaw

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James Laidlaw: Affiliation:
University of Cambridge

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Summary

Calls to ‘be responsible’ render relations, dependencies, and interdependencies visible, and they make demands and claims on others and on oneself. To speak about responsibility is to speak of our diverse attempts to build a good life within relational worlds, and our commonplace failure to do so. By exploring the modes and meanings of responsibility in an array of cultural settings, this chapter reveals how calls for responsibility hinge upon specific enactments of agency, freedom, intentionality, reflexivity, mutuality, responsiveness, and recognition. Yet there remains no stable or universal expression and arrangement of these enactments of responsibility; as an anthropology of ethics makes clear, responsibility’s seemingly self-evident or essential nature dissolves upon closer ethnographic attention. In explicating a multiplicity of responsibilities, this chapter explores how calls for responsibilities shift with scale, from the individual to the collective, within diverse temporal frames, and in response to technologies, techniques, and ideologies that bring new accountabilities and agencies to life.

Keywords

responsibility responsiveness mutuality collective responsibility blame accountability agency guilt attribution intentionality

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 281 - 308

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.011 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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