Dominik Boll
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
What is it for an agent to take responsibility? Call this the constituent question. My aim in this essay is to provide a novel answer to this question. While taking responsibility is not a new topic, it has attracted a flurry of recent interest. Why do we take responsibility for inadvertence or accidents if we are faultless (Wolf 2001; Raz 2011; Mason 2019)? Is it intelligible to take responsibility for someone else’s actions (Enoch 2012), results of AI mechanisms (Goetze 2021; Kiener 2022), or historical injustices (Miller 2007)? More surprisingly, taking responsibility involves complications even for clear agential wrongdoing (Sliwa 2024; Hieronymi 2024).
This paper advances the debate with three contributions. First, I provide a systematic overview over the different questions relevant to taking responsibility and specify desiderata any account should meet. Second, I outline the two prominent types of views—the Attitudinal View and the Actional View—and advance objections against both. Third, I propose and defend the Pluralist View, according to which taking responsibility consists of Ownership, Acknowledgement, and Normalisation. More specifically, taking responsibility requires
(a) Ownership: having an appropriate attitudinal response (affectively, cognitively, and motivationally),
(b) Acknowledgement: an acknowledgement of significance (both of one’s role in and its impact on all relevantly affected parties),
(c) Normalisation: steps towards normalisation, in the case of wrongdoing typically repair (materially, symbolically, and interpersonally).
These three components are necessary constituent parts of taking responsibility, but importantly, the Pluralist View allows for different manifestations of the components. I discuss them in turn, show that the view both successfully meets the desiderata and evades prior objections, and outline independent advantages. The Pluralist View is thus preferable over its rivals but retains the main attractions of both.
Chair: Kendra Gordillo
Time: September 13th, 10:00 – 10:30
Location: SR 1.007
SOPhiA 2026 