Kutz (2000) Complicity (2) The Deep Structure of Individual Accountability

Kutz, Christopher (2000). Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

2.1 Introduction

our practices of accountability are both positional and relation.

 

I focus upon what I have called the retributive or desert-based model of individual accountability, which is relationally and causally solipsistic. I will analyze the shortcom ings of this model by comparing it with our actual practices and will then suggest a nonretributive alternative conception of responsibility that better fits those practices.

accountability is somewhat narrower in meaning than responsibility.

 

Although sometimes used synonymously with accountability, responsibility bears two distinct senses, an internal and an external sense. Given a certain relation of an agent to a harm, the first sense of responsibility refers to a set of internal psychological competencies a person must have in order to be answerable for the harm. The second sense of responsibility refers instead to a set of normative, external affiliations, the duties of the agent to other surrounding agents. In the first, internal sense, responsibility is nonrelational. The second sense of responsibility, by con trast, is fundamentally relational, and it is this sense I want to segregate for specialized use, and to call by the name accountability. Agents are accountable to others for a harm as a function of their relations to others, as well as of everyone's relation to the harm or wrong. Accountability and responsibility in this sense are deeply related but not synonymous: Responsible agents are candidates for accountability, but may not necessarily be accountable for what they have done. (The bank teller who, at gunpoint, empties the cash drawer is paradigmatically responsible but not accountable.)

According to a retributivist, or desert-based, model...Facts about agents' wills - what they have intended, what motivated them, the reasons for which they acted - determine the responses they deserve. So by describing retributivist con ceptions of accountability as solipsistic, I mean they fail to take into account the relation between the respondent and the agent...To restate this with different emphasis, the solipsism I attribute to retributivist conceptions means they are nonpositional. They fail to take into account the multiplicity and particularity of the positions from which respondents respond.

The conception of accountability I propose is, in contrast with the retributivist conception, relational and positional. In arguing for a relational conception of accountability, I separate the fact of wrong doing from the responses warranted by it, and base the decision about what responses are warranted upon the relationship of the respondent to the agent. In arguing for a positional conception of accountability, I emphasize the importance of recognizing that for any given harm there is no single, uniquely determined response warranted.

2.2 SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE FUNDAMENTALLY RELATIONAL NATURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY

As a normative concept, accountability consists in a warrant for certain kinds of typically interpersonal responses - attitudes, sanctions, and claims - that serve this social function.