【课程】技术伦理：责任心

Responsibility

Definition

• Responsibility is an assigning of roles by some larger section of society.

Explanation

• We are talking about responsibility as the degree to which individuals or groups are accountable for actions, events, or other changes in the world.
  • This might mean attributing a certain amount of praise or blame to those agents for those actions.
  • But also it means attributing an imperative to them that they should be thinking about possible actions within some domain.

Example cases

• A person being reliable or rule following.
• A guard is responsible for times when they stop, or fail to stop, unwanted access to the place they are guarding. But they are also responsible, more generally, for the security of that place.
  • Their responsibility doesn’t just come into play only at the moments that they are stopping someone or finding out that they failed: they are meant to spend the rest of their time increasing the chances of one of those and decreasing the chances of the other.
  • A guard who has their eyes closed all the time is presumably failing their responsibility here (superhuman echolocation powers notwithstanding)

Traits of Responsibility

• It’s often not an explicit exchange.
  • The guard is presumably being paid, but someone taking on responsibility for looking after a sick relative is not necessarily doing it to get anything back. They are instead maybe benefitting from being part of a society where this is