Chapter 12 discusses accountability in regulation. Accountability is part of a family of concepts that relate to the exercise of power and its abuses. It construes the relationship between regulators and regulatees according to principal-agent theory and explains how accountability can be an important mechanism for requiring answerability, ensuring that agents (regulators) do not drift from the interests of regulatees. The chapter explains that accountability consists of four elements: (i) a duty to explain; (ii) exposure to scrutiny; (iii) a potential ‘sanction’ or a consequence of some kind; and (iv) the possibility of being subject to independent review.

Is logic intrinsically normative? Given that we often make errors in reasoning, one might hold that logic is not about how we do think but about how we ought to think. However, logical laws say nothing about thinking. How does logic gain normative traction on psychological processes such as belief formation or reasoning? To answer this question, the chapter begins by examining the debate between descriptivists, who hold that logic simply describes truth-preserving entailment relations, and normativists, who hold that logic is intrinsically normative. Husserl was a descriptivist, and Heidegger’s early work follows him. But Heidegger’s phenomenological account of the truth-predicate as grounded in the comportment of assertion, and his analysis of the “hermeneutic as” that grounds such comportment, affords a different perspective on the debate. Logic provides constitutive norms for the practice of reason-giving, a kind of rationality – being answerable to others – that is not an essential property of, but is nevertheless demanded by, Dasein’s being as “care.” The chapter concludes by showing how Heidegger’s phenomenological approach can affirm the main claims of descriptivism while insisting that “the reign of logic” in philosophy “disintegrates into the turbulence of a more original questioning.”

Different studies in the human rights sector and in the water and sanitation sector have explored the concept of accountability and aimed to formulate how the concept might be applied to the specificities of the sector. However, there is no widely understood or agreed definition of the concept, in particular in the context of the realization of the human rights to water and sanitation. Therefore, clarification of the concept is essential for that sector, which involves a variety of actors related to the realization of those rights, including government entities (i.e., central and local governments and regulators), international organizations, transnational and national corporations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). There is also a feeling that a strong accountability benefits the improved access to water and sanitation services.

Prima facie, so-called ‘quality of will’ accounts of responsibility are better placed to deal with troublesome cases such as pure omissions. But, as I am going to argue, they face the important additional task of spelling out precisely which kind of faults or mistakes on the agent’s part make the agent the appropriate target of specifically moral blame. In this paper, I will try to fill out what I take to be an important lacuna in ‘quality of will’ approaches, by providing at least the beginning of an answer to this question. As I will argue, the most promising way to fill out this lacuna is to take up a version of what Joseph Raz has called the Rational Functioning Principle, according to which we are responsible for conduct – and omissions – if this conduct “is the result of the functioning, successful or failed, of our powers of rational agency, provided those powers were not suspended in a way affecting the action.” (2011, 231). While this account will need some further qualification, I do think it provides, in outline, the best approach to understanding responsibility in general and for pure omissions specifically. However, making good on this claim will require some argument for why our behaviour or our omissions’ being the result of a failed or deficient functioning of our rational powers is precisely what makes us morally responsible for them. The argument I will develop will be based on the idea that moral blame involves essentially judging an agent by reference to a specific set of norms which are inescapable and binding him in a characteristic way (i.e. the way which is characteristic for specifically moral norms). And the rational powers whose failed or deficient exercise was responsible for the behaviour or omission will have to be precisely those powers whose possession makes moral norms inescapable and binding for us.