Responsibility Defined

By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY

The July 7-8 meeting of the G-20 in Hamburg brought out the predicted protesters and anarchists and unfortunately led to three days of violence. It also brought out a vast amount of media commentary.
The G-20 was designed as an international forum to annually bring together representatives of the twenty major economic nations and their central bank governors. Its aim is the discussion of policy issues promoting international financial stability. Those issues apart, it also provides an opportunity for discussion of a number of related topics, from immigration policy to the discussion of the obligation of rich nations to poorer ones. “Protectionism vs. Free Market Populism” is the headline given one essay following the conference.
The conference also provides the opportunity for dissenters to air economic claims against the present generation for deeds that took place in times past.
In an effort to sort things out, what follows is an attempt to define “responsibility” and the misuse of the concept, particularly when it is used to extract concessions or reparations of one sort or another.
Economic and other data show clearly the gap between the “developed world” and the “developing “or “undeveloped world.” The poverty and misery of the latter are shown daily on the front pages of major newspapers and on worldwide television. That data recognized, the moral judgment is made: Those who “have” should do something to alleviate the lot of the “have-nots.”
Responsibility of the First World to the Third World is taken for granted. But one may ask, on what basis? President Donald Trump, after a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on July 13, may have struck the right note when he said, “Both President Macron and I understand the responsibility to prioritize the interests of our countries and at the same time be respectful of the world in which we live.”
Churchmen talk about a fair distribution of the world’s goods, without any reference to how those goods are produced, let alone how they might be distributed.
Rich nations, poorer nations, First World, and Third World are abstractions, yet these designations are used to support the notion that one collective may be responsible for another collective, even across the centuries. One finds a disturbing tendency to hypostatize abstractions and even make them bearers of value. Linguistic devices that make for succinctness of expression may be useful for their metaphorical or elliptical meaning, but are sometimes mistaken for literal truth.
Readiness to accept the notion of “collective responsibility” and its correlate, “collective guilt,” no doubt stems from discussions following a number of egregious cases where societies taken as a whole were deemed accountable. The twentieth century alone provides numerous examples of societies acting, if not as a whole, at least with sufficient unity, to implement morally unacceptable policy.
For example, Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin. Both governments systematically eliminated so-called enemies of the state.
In the aftermath of World War II, there arose the question: To what extent are the German or Soviet peoples responsible for the atrocities committed within the borders of their nations? There was no question that the German state was to be held responsible, but the German people as a whole?
Not even the Allied officials thought that. Judge Robert H. Jackson, the American member of the team prosecuting the Nazis at Nuremberg, repudiated the notion of collective responsibility. Gen. Robert M. McClure took a similar approach. The U.S. Army, he thought, should approach the German people, not on the basis of guilt and punishment, but on the basis of cause and punishment.
Other examples of the misappropriation of collective guilt abound. When the New World was celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s 1492 voyage, dissenting voices emerged to condemn the colonization that had followed. It was not uncommon to find not only Christopher Columbus but European civilization as a whole held responsible for all the ills that befell the native population in the years following the discovery of America. The affirmative action movement in the United States may be taken as an example of one generation’s assuming responsibility for the ills of another.
Peoples, generations, classes, races, industries, and religious bodies are often held accountable, not only in a vague, public opinion sort of way, but before courts of law. From tort law as practiced in the United States to affirmative action policy, blame is often assigned to groups sometimes no longer in existence, and sometimes to mere conceptual entities. Retribution is not infrequently extracted from groups or heirs of groups without any responsibility for harm on their part being established.
To cite one notorious example from the United States, one that may have its counterpart in Europe, consider the concept “market share,” where corporate defendants may be assessed damages even after proving that they could not have created the harm done.
Courts in several states have employed market share when several corporations marketing the same product are held responsible for harm done to a plaintiff who doesn’t remember whose product was used. Damages in such cases are distributed among the manufacturers on the basis of their percentage of the market, with no concrete responsibility being established.
Broad notions entertained in the framing and implementation of law are almost always the product of previous academic discussion. Before the concept of market share could have become current, certain philosophical discussions of collective responsibility, collective guilt, and punishment had to take place.
The German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, for example, thought the German people as a whole were responsible for the death camps. No one questioned national accountability or the requirement of reparations, but Jaspers would not leave it at that. He reasoned that insofar as the German people shared a common language and a common culture, and insofar as they were nourished by a common literature, common music, and distinctive patterns of civic behavior, they could be said to be a collective.
In Jaspers’ analysis there seemed to be enough solidarity to produce a national psyche such that one generation could make claims on another. Although that concept was challenged, he insisted on the psychic responsibility of the German speaking peoples as a whole.
Some may recall the case of Pfizer, a pharmaceutical drug company, being held accountable and fined an extraordinary sum because a drug salesman in an isolated case had suggested that a particular product could also be used in the treatment of an illness for which it was not approved by the Federal Drug Administration. No harm to patients for unapproved use was ever established, but the administrative action and subsequent fine were upheld by the courts.
A debate is currently taking place regarding the scope of the property-seizure program utilized in many states. Designed to target drug traffickers and other criminals, the law allows local law enforcement officials to take cash and other assets from individuals without proving that they have done anything wrong. The current debate is between those who think that conviction of a crime requires proof beyond any reasonable doubt, and those who are willing to settle for a preponderance of evidence.
Common sense tells us that responsibility cannot be assigned willy-nilly. There is an objective, ontologically grounded moral order in which responsibility is both recognized and limited. As philosophers through the ages have recognized, responsibility is determined on the basis of causality.
Of the various senses of responsibility, that fostered by charity is not to be equated with moral or legal responsibility. The Christian may recognize an obligation in charity that others may not. But no sense of responsibility, charitable or other, can be engendered at the psychic level as Jaspers would have it.