Abstract
How does morality allocate responsibility for what it requires? I am concerned here with one fundamental part of this question, namely, how morality determines responsibility when multiple agents are capable of contributing to or completing a moral task, and special relationships capable of generating duties with respect to the task are non-existent, insufficient as a moral response, or partly indeterminate. On one view, responsibility falls to the agents who can bear it with the least burden. I show why this is initially attractive and mistaken. Instead, I defend an equity-based approach that accommodates the intuitions that both support and trouble the least-cost principle. One upshot is that sometimes we ought prefer a distribution of responsibility that is more expensive and less local than needed to complete the task. I illustrate the practical significance of the argument in terms of the human rights of refugees.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For a summary and link to data sources, see http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html.
Leif Wenar, “Responsibility and Severe Poverty,” in Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor?, ed. Thomas Pogge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Calabresi (1970). I follow Calabresi’s naming of the idea as he was the first to articulate and elaborate it, though his was a narrower purpose of identifying a liability rule for accident law specifically. The analogy with accident law is narrow. I do not intend to suggest that refugee crises are fully akin to accidents within a social scheme, the latter being to some extent inevitable. Rather, they are comparable in that both raise the issue of how we should distribute responsibility for protecting vitally important interests.
Miller’s use of the term “remedial responsibility” in explicating his “connection theory” encompasses a variety of bases for responsibility allocation in matters of deprivation or need, and hence differs from the specific sense of “primary responsibility” I define here. Miller is interested in what is common to the various principles that can pick out an agent as responsible for alleviating deprivation. For instance, community membership, negligence that leads to deprivation, and special ability to assist can all, Miller observes, be sources of responsibility. We treat them as such, Miller argues, because they establish a connection between those requiring assistance and particular agents capable of providing it. Miller. Whatever the truth of the connection theory, my concern is narrower, with the baseline distribution of responsibility that holds in the absence of special interactions or relations.
Or, these sorts of grounds might be partly explained by the primary principle. See the discussion of Wenar below. I remain agnostic on this here, focusing instead on the characteristics of the principle of primary responsibility.
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.
For instance, see again Miller; Young.
This is not to say that all retrospective assignments of responsibility are fault-related. Sometimes they are not, and law recognizes several categories of liability without fault. For overview and discussion, see Feinberg (1970). The point here is merely that what an agent is responsible for doing is non-trivially involved in other kinds of responsibility attributions, and this lends propriety to describing it in the language of responsibility.
“If a right provides the rational basis for a justified demand that the actual enjoyment of the substance of the right be socially guaranteed against standard threats, then a right provides the rational basis for insisting upon the performance, as needed, of duties to avoid, duties to protect, and duties to aid.” Ibid., 54–55.
For a full discussion and defense of the idea of standard threats, see Reeves (2015).
My concern here is largely with responsibility allocation in the political sphere, as the focus on human rights suggests. I do take the argument I am making, however, to generalize across interpersonal morality, as some examples in Section 4 will indicate. A focus on politics is appropriate, though, as the international political context offers a both practically important and theoretically interesting case study for considering the question of primary responsibility, as will also become clear. We might, however, wonder whether there is any question of responsibility allocation in a Hobbesian state of nature. Hobbes, of course, thought that we have extremely limited (though not zero) other-regarding obligations in such a circumstance. For discussion, see Sreedhar (2010). Thus, on his view, there is mostly no allocative question (unless, perhaps, such a question arises when a very evident opportunity for leaving the state of nature presents itself to a group). Still, we might (as many theorists have) reject his moral conclusions, even for social circumstances descriptively satisfying his vision of the state of nature. Further, even if we are thoroughgoing Hobbesians about the preconditions for robust moral requirements, it is unlikely that the international sphere embodies a state of nature in a way that would render moralizing about it inapposite. See Beitz (1979).
Again, CCA plays a somewhat narrow role in Calabresi’s analysis, namely, to identify responsible parties for purposes of reducing primary accident costs via deterrence. The rationale for his restriction need not concern us here, as I take him to be drawing on some general ideas. Calabresi (1970) 135–40.
It might seem strange that it could be sensible to hold TV manufacturers liable since they have no direct role in the enterprise. CCA, however, ties responsibility to efficient capability, not causal contribution to a circumstance or participation in an undertaking (though, these are often relevant to efficiency). Hence, CCA treats all capable agents as eligible for bearing responsibility. Also, keep in mind that our concern here is narrowly primary responsibility.
Though, on Calabresi’s analysis, manufacturers would pass on the costs to consumers, who are then effectively insuring against accident costs.
Wenar, 260.
Ibid., 256–68. Notably, then, Wenar treats the least-cost principle as a basis for other principles of responsibility, at least when that responsibility concerns basic needs. Familial responsibilities, for instance, are accounted for in terms of the least-cost principle. Wenar is not explicitly working with the concept of primary responsibility, but it is worth saying that this sort of claim is not essential to substantiating such a principle. As indicated in Section 1, we could grant that special ties generate responsibility on independent grounds, and still wonder about the character of the default allocation.
Ibid., 270–74.
In international law, the principle of subsidiarity is often seen as the basis for state responsibility for addressing human rights. However, both its content as legal doctrine and rationale remain disputed. See, for instance, Besson (2016). CCA would be especially attractive, then, if it could supply a defensible rationale. In the argument to come, I will reject the idea that CCA provides sensible moral advice in a social circumstance like the international environment.
It is worth noting that other considerations can also favor local priority independent of CCA. Distance itself may even be a morally relevant consideration. See Kamm (2000).
The obverse of the principle of diminishing marginal utility.
Singer (1970). This is a helpful type of scenario for the topic of responsibility allocation in human rights in that it involves an uncontroversial, non-transactionally acquired obligation, non-fulfillment of which would plausibly wrong the child. Moreover, the scenario is typically presented such that the obligation is to achieve an only modestly burdensome rescue, i.e., a rescue before the point of excessive burden.
The remaining swimmer would have to take up the slack. For a rigorous defense of this conclusion, see Karnein (2014).
In fact, if they knew what was coming, they would opt for Swimmer 1 to pay Swimmer 2 $500 to rescue every time – which gives us the aggregate result CCA desires, while respecting equity. I will say more on this important point in the coming pages of this section.
Another potential issue of fairness for CCA concerns how it treats the motivations of agents in the cost calculus. If an agent is resistant to bearing responsibility for some task, it might be expensive to generate a willingness to comply (or even for the agent herself to overcome her aversion). If CCA permits those expenses to count, an agent who would otherwise be the cheapest cost avoider might then be sheltered from responsibility by virtue of not wanting to do what she (otherwise) should. Yet, transferring responsibilities simply because of unjustifiable resistance appears manifestly unfair to those who are willing to shoulder the duty when others are not. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for noticing the problem. I think this is a real issue for CCA, but one way for it to avoid the objection is to discount the costs associated with certain ‘non-cooperative’ motivations from its calculus. This would not be entirely ad hoc. If an allocation principle enabled agents to avoid duty by being averse to it, this would create an incentive to develop such attitudes. The premise of the objection is that such attitudes elevate costs. On that assumption, a greater prevalence of these attitudes would generate greater responsibility costs in aggregate (and perhaps fewer moral tasks completed). Thus, the moral aspiration of CCA provides some rationale for restricting its cost calculus as suggested – the restriction would, on the whole, reduce responsibility costs.
CCA can also understand “cost” in terms of subjective burdens imposed on capable agents. In fact, such an understanding would apparently be recommended by a utilitarian interpretation of CCA. The result that subjective burden is what we care about is also initially straightforward from a contractualist position. On contractualism, we are concerned about what is justifiable to the point of view of each person. From this perspective, individuals would surely prefer a loss-measuring index that is sensitive to actual burden endured. On the other hand, insofar as contractualism is properly committed to public measures of value (e.g., primary goods), there will be pressure to make such measures somewhat insensitive to subjective peculiarities. Nonetheless, even if we admit this last point, I take it that at least some public measures of advantage (e.g., money) can be treated in terms of their marginal value for purposes of measuring the impact of a loss. Our intuitive response to the case in this paragraph suggests that we can (at least roughly) do so.
As when we compensate firefighters for concentrated responsibility, for instance.
For a discussion of this kind of point in the context of permissible risk-taking, see Morgan-Knapp (2015).
Which is perhaps part of why he ends up defending a legal version of CCA while readily admitting the priority of justice.
2015 UNHCR Syria Regional Response Plan. Up to date data is available at: http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php
ibid.; 2016 UNHCR Syria Regional Refugee & Resilience Plan November 20 Funding Snapshot
Gregor Aisch and Sarah Almukhtar, “Seeking a Fair Distribution of Migrants in Europe,” New York Times, September 22, 2015.
References
Beitz CR (1979) Political theory and international relations. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 27–66
Besson S (2016) Subsidiarity in international human rights law - what is subsidiary about human rights? Am J Jurisprud 61(1):69–107
Brock G (2014) Some future directions for global justice. J Glob Ethics 10(3):254–260
Calabresi G (1970) The costs of accidents: a legal and economic analysis. Yale University Press, New Haven
Feinberg J (1970) Doing and deserving: essays in the theory of responsibility. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 222–251
Kamm FM (2000) Does distance matter morally to the duty to rescue? Law Philos 19(6):655–681
Karnein A (2014) Putting fairness in its place: why there is a duty to take up the slack. J Philos 111(11):593–607
Miller D (2001) Distributing responsibilities. J Polit Philos 9(4):453–471
Morgan-Knapp C (2015) Nonconsequentialist precaution. Ethical Theory Moral Pract 18(4):785–797
Rawls J (1999) A theory of justice, Revised edn. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, pp 19–24
Reeves AR (2015) Standard threats: how to violate basic human rights. Soc Theory Pract 41(3):403–434
Scanlon T (1998) What we owe to each other. Belknap Press, Cambridge, pp 229–241
Shue H (1980) Basic rights: subsistence, affluence, and U.S. foreign policy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 51–64
Singer P (1970) Famine, affluence, and morality. Philos Public Aff 1(3):229–243
Sreedhar S (2010) Hobbes on resistance: defying the leviathan. Cambridge University Press, New York
Young IM (2011) Responsibility for justice. Oxford University Press, New York
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Binghamton University for supporting this project with the facilities and time for research, and to other faculty fellows for their feedback and insight. The paper also benefited from the careful comments of Erik Encarnacion, Patti Lenard, Nicole Hassoun, Bat-Ami Bar On, and two anonymous referees for this journal.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Reeves, A. Responsibility Allocation and Human Rights. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 20, 627–642 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9808-z
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9808-z