Taking Responsibility

Recently, the notion of ‘taking responsibility’ has been deployed in agency theory in a rich sense, so that by taking responsibility one becomes responsible. On the face of it, this is puzzling: how could someone retroactively change the facts about who is responsible for what? I examine various accounts of taking responsibility and defend the apparently outlandish possibility of changing the responsibility facts. Proposals along these lines vary. Both Susan Wolf (2001) and David Enoch (2011) argue that in some cases where agency is unclear, it would be a a duty or a virtue to take responsibility. A more radical approach is Joseph Raz’s (2011). Raz argues that in cases of inadvertent harms, we should take responsibility. because our self-respect requires it. Elinor Mason (2019) makes a similar argument, but Mason’s argument depends on our needs in personal relationships. In this chapter I argue that the nature of compatibilist theories of responsibility is flexible and responsive to the sorts of considerations that the taking responsibility theorists point out. Thus our responsibility practices have the resources to make sense of taking responsibility, and so becoming responsible, for inadvertent actions.