It has been a commonplace since the 2012 coup to hear how fragile the Malian democracy had become. Among the many causes is the political role that non-governmental organizations have played as a fourth branch of government. As deliberative democratic processes were replaced by a corrupt elite consensus during the past eight years, NGOs assumed an important place in this system. This included humanitarian NGOs. However, these same NGOs until recently were blind to the political impact they were (...) having. This essay suggests one explanation for this blindness and argues for the importance of a conception of humanitarian aid that balances moral responsibility with political responsibility. (shrink)

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals addresses the many problems in defining the relationship of intellectuals to the society in which they live. In what respects are they responsible for, and to, that society? Should they seek to act as independent arbiters of the values explicitly or implicity espoused by those around them? Should they seek to advise those in public life about the way in which they should act, or should they withdraw from any form of political (...) involvement? And how should their preoccupations with truth and language find practical expression? The contributors to this volume seek to provide tentative answers to these questions. They come from a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from economics to linguistics and sociology to philosophy, and are drawn from both America and Eastern and Western Europe. The volume is given a particular interest by recent political upheavals in Eastern Europe, where many intellectuals have been confronted with sharply practical, sometimes dramatic, choices about their role in the political arena. (shrink)

How can human beings acknowledge and experience the burdens of political responsibility? Why are we tempted to flee them, and how might we come to affirm them? Jade Larissa Schiff calls this experience of responsibility 'the cultivation of responsiveness'. In Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness, she identifies three dispositions that inhibit responsiveness - thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition - and turns to storytelling in its manifold forms as a practice that (...) might facilitate and frustrate it. Through critical engagements with an unusual cast of characters hailing from a variety of disciplines, she argues that how we represent our world and ourselves in the stories we share, and how we receive those stories, can facilitate and frustrate the cultivation of responsiveness. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young articulated a social connection model of responsibility to conceptualize political responsibility for structural injustice. Schiff argues that actually confronting our responsibility is problematic: the pervasiveness of structural injustice makes it difficult to acknowledge as a problem, while distances between sufferers and contributors complicate our acknowledgment of social connection. These problems are exacerbated by thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition. Narrative can facilitate the acknowledgment necessary for us to confront our political responsibility.

In “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy,” Kant holds the seemingly untenable position that lying is always prohibited, even if the lie is addressed to a murderer in an attempt to save the life of an innocent man. This article argues that Kant's position on lying should be placed back in its original context, namely a response to Benjamin Constant about the responsibility of individual agents toward political principles in post-revolutionary times. I show that Constant's theory (...) of political responsibility, which sanctions the lie, is not based on expediency, but on principled realism, whereas Kant endorses a position that I describe as ‘political juridicism.’ This analysis enables us to uncover two plausible Republican theories of political responsibility in post-revolutionary times behind an apparently strictly ethical debate. (shrink)

One of the most significant challenges that twenty-first-century philosophy has to face is to think about our moral and political responsibility in collective and global contexts. In our globalized...

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have turned to ethics to theorize politics in what seems to be an increasingly depoliticized age. Yet the move toward ethics has obscured the ongoing value of political responsibility and the vibrant life it represents as an effective response to power. Sounding the alarm for those who care about robust forms of civic engagement, this book fights for a new conception of political responsibility that meets the challenges of today's (...) democratic practice. Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo forcefully argues against the notion that modern predicaments of power can only be addressed ethically or philosophically through pristine concepts that operate outside of the political realm. By returning to the political, the individual is reintroduced to the binding principles of participatory democracy and the burdens of acting and thinking as a member of a collective. Vázquez-Arroyo historicizes the ethical turn to better understand its ascendence and reworks Adorno's dialectic of responsibility to reassert the political in contemporary thought and theory. (shrink)

The question on guilt that Jaspers poses to the Germans was not only valid after the Holocaust, it can be raised to other peoples who must answer for the crimes committed by the state which act on behalf of the people that gave support to them. In this paper, I elaborate a notion of citizens’ political responsibility in order to argue to what extent—and under what circumstances—the citizens of a political community must respond for the deeds of (...) the political institutions that govern them. For that purpose, I try to explain Spinoza’s notion of political authority in relation to Jaspers’ notion of political guilt. This Spinozistic approach has the advantage of freeing us from moral guilt—a misleading notion in political arena as I will argue—but it demands from us a genuine self-reflective and therapeutic procedure that if applied to politics would reveal a different path from Jaspers’ guilt. The aim of this therapeutic is to bring about a profound change in the personal and political identity of both citizen and political community. (shrink)

Since overweight and obesity have been framed as one of the main contemporary health challenges in industrialized countries, it has become a matter of public health efforts. While the belief that obese individuals are personally responsible for their body weight prevails in public opinion, evidence-based health science widely acknowledges that obesity is significantly influenced by socio-economic factors and thus that prevention requires structural changes. This constellation bears the chance of politicizing an issue formerly conceived of as private which really is (...) dependent on societal contingencies, such as the particular availability of food. Reflecting on the prevention of obesity from an ethical point of view, therefore, requires an elaborate concept of political responsibility. The core thesis of this paper is that existing approaches within the field of obesity ethics fall short in reasonably grasping the political dimensions at play, due to the prevailing individualistic understanding of responsibility. Drawing upon Iris Marion Young’s concept of political responsibility, I propose an alternative approach that emphasizes the structural determinants of obesity. By arguing this way, obesity prevention comes into view as a public endeavor that involves public discourse as well as shared action. Political responsibility then cannot be discharged merely by intrusive governmental action nor by individuals on their own, but should be considered as a task all of us share. As I will sketch in the last part of the paper, this includes contesting discourses on interpretations of need. Thereby, the paper contributes to recognizing obesity as a social instead of an individual problem. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we explore the debate on corporate citizenship and the role of business in global governance. In the debate on political corporate social responsibility it is assumed that under globalization business is taking up a greater political role. Apart from economic responsibilities firms assume political responsibilities taking up traditional governmental tasks such as regulation of business and provision of public goods. We contrast this with a subsidiarity-based approach to governance, in which firms are seen (...) as intermediate actors who have political co-responsibilities in society endowed upon them by national governmental institutions. We argue that both approaches face conceptual and empirical problems, and do not make clear the content and scope of political corporate responsibility. Based on Iris Marion Young’s account of political responsibility we argue that corporate actors and governmental actors have a shared responsibility to tackle societal problems. Taking political corporate responsibility not only entails engaging in private action or engaging in public–private partnerships, but it also includes aiding governmental actors to remedy injustice or even create public institutions where they do not yet exist. By adding this perspective we contribute to the debate on responsibility in corporate citizenship and clarify the political role business can play in global governance. (shrink)

"A discussion of how everyday bystanders can learn to recognize and meet their shared and institutional political responsibilities for hunger, poverty, famine, civil war, wars of conquest and invasion, epidemics and pandemics, and genocide" ...

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals addresses the many problems in defining the relationship of intellectuals to the society in which they live. In what respects are they responsible for, and to, that society? Should they seek to act as independent arbiters of the values explicitly or implicity espoused by those around them? Should they seek to advise those in public life about the way in which they should act, or should they withdraw from any form of political (...) involvement? And how should their preoccupations with truth and language find practical expression? The contributors to this volume seek to provide tentative answers to these questions. They come from a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from economics to linguistics and sociology to philosophy, and are drawn from both America and Eastern and Western Europe. The volume is given a particular interest by recent political upheavals in Eastern Europe, where many intellectuals have been confronted with sharply practical, sometimes dramatic, choices about their role in the political arena. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2003, given by Iris Marion Young, an American philosopher.

The aim of this book is to reflect on the complex practice of responsibility within the context of a globalised world and contemporary means of action. Levinas' exploration of the ethical serves as point of entry and is shown to be seeking inter-cultural political relevance through engagement with the issues of postcoloniality and humanism. Yet, Levinas fails to realise the ethical implications of the inevitable instrumental mediation between ethical meaning and political practice. With recourse to Weber, Apel (...) and Ricoeur, Ernst Wolff proposes a theory of strategic co-responsibility for the uncertain global context of practice. (shrink)

In this article I propose to do five things. First, I describe the present confusion disturbing the tranquility of the American polity. Next, I hypothesize that an important source of civil confusion is that American civildiscourse is generally conducted in two different moral languages. Neither of these is adequate to the reality of the human good, and their speakers are, perhaps increasingly, given to misunderstanding one another. Third, I propose some reasons why not only misunderstanding but even outright hostility seems (...) to be growing. Fourth, I suggest that if we Christians are to be of genuine service to our fellow citizens, we have to begin by emancipating ourselves from inadequate moral languages and renew our capacity to function in a more properly Christian language. Finally, I suggest a possible contribution Christians might make to the renewal of civil discourse. (shrink)

Global structural injustices are harms caused by structural processes, involving multiple individuals, acting across more than one state. Young (2011) developed the concept of ‘political responsibility,’ to allocate responsibility for structural injustice. In this paper, I am going to argue that when considering the climate crisis Young’s model needs to be adapted— to have agency as a basis for allocating political responsibility instead of contribution. This is a more intuitive way to allocate responsibility for (...) the climate crisis given its nature as a threshold problem, and the subtle structural positions occupied by the individuals involved. (shrink)

Al-Farabi saw himself as inheriting from Aristotle the problem of limits to political responsibility for virtue. If the state possesses the authority to habituate citizens to virtue, what are the limits to that responsibility? Aristotle establishes two main limits: the family and the size of the state. Al-Farabi rejects both. Thomas Aquinas’s view of marriage as a sacrament, on the other hand, reinforces the Aristotelian position that the family is the most basic limit to public responsibility (...) for virtue. In fact, Aquinas expands the notion of subsidiarity beyond the family. Moreover, Aquinas and Aristotle agree that political life is not only limited from “below” by the family but also from “above.” Thus, in spite of Aquinas’ views on punishing heretics and apostates, it is not the case, as Leo Strauss’ claims, that Aquinas’ Christian faith led him to increase and exaggerate political responsibility for virtue. (shrink)

In this brief comment I will explain the usefulness of Iris Young’s conception of political responsibility and then point out how it exemplifies the contributions of Young’s exceptional body of work.

This article provides a historical contextualization of Corporate Social Responsibility and its political role. CSR, we propose, is one form of business–society interactions reflecting a unique ideological framing. To make that argument, we compare contemporary CSR with two historical ideal-types. We explore in turn paternalism in nineteenth century Europe and managerial trusteeship in early twentieth century US. We outline how the political responsibilities of business were constructed, negotiated, and practiced in both cases. This historical contextualization shows that (...) the frontier between economy and polity has always been blurry and shifting and that firms have played a political role for a very long time. It also allows us to show how the nature, extent, and impact of that political role changed through history and co-evolved in particular with shifts in dominant ideologies. Globalization, in that context, is not the driver of the political role of the firm but a moderating phenomenon contributing significantly to the dynamics of this shift. The comparison between paternalism, trusteeship, and contemporary CSR points to what can be seen as functional equivalents—alternative patterns of business–society interactions that each correspond, historically, to unique and distinct ideological frames. We conclude by drawing implications for future theorizing on CSR and stakeholder democracy. (shrink)

This study investigates the pivotal policy question of whether a firm’s corporate governance influences its political spending disclosures. Using a sample of S&P 500 firms from 2011 to 2019, we find empirical evidence that a board of directors’ monitoring and resource provision roles affect a firm’s political spending disclosure. Extending agency theory-driven expectations, we provide evidence that measures of a board’s monitoring role such as female monitoring directors, shorter board tenure, audit committee size, audit committee meetings, and audit (...) committee education enhance a firm’s political spending disclosures. Second, drawing from resource dependence theory and examining a board’s resource provisions, we find evidence that female advisory directors, CEO duality, additional directorships, and audit committee characteristics (i.e., size, number of meetings, age, and education) promote political spending disclosures. The study contributes to corporate governance and corporate political activity literatures by outlining different types of governance that may drive a firm’s political spending disclosures, a key component of a firm’s political responsibility. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young presents a social connection model on which those, and only those, who participate in structural processes that produce injustice have a forward-looking responsibility to redress the resulting injustice by challenging the structures that produce it. In Young's view, this is an all-things-considered, albeit discretionary, responsibility. I argue that participation in a structural process that produces injustice is neither necessary nor sufficient for having political responsibilities, and that therefore the social connection model must be rejected. (...) A subtler model is needed, one that depicts participation in a structural process that produces injustice as sufficient for having pro tanto forward-looking responsibilities to redress the process, unless the participating agent satisfies certain excusing conditions. I suggest the intuitive force of the thought that mere participation gives us political responsibilities can be explained by more fundamental considerations. Hastily, we might conclude that all participants have political responsibilities simply because most of them satisfy at least one of the following conditions: they cause injustice to continue, they are morally responsible for injustice, they benefit from injustice, they have communal ties with the victims of injustice, or they have the capacity to redress injustice. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Ahead of Print. How should responsibility be theorized in the context of the global climate crisis? This question is often framed through the language of distributive justice. Because of the inequitable distribution of historical emissions, climate vulnerability, and adaptation capacity, such considerations are necessary, but do not exhaust the question of responsibility. This article argues that climate change is a structural injustice demanding a theory of political responsibility. Agents bear (...) class='Hi'>responsibility not in virtue of their individual causal contribution or capacity, but because they participate in and benefit from the carbon-intensive structures, practices, and institutions that constitute the global political and economic system. Agents take responsibility by engaging in collective political action to transform these structures that generate both climate hazards and unjust relationships of power. By incorporating distributive principles within a capacious conception of political responsibility, this framework advances the theory and practice of climate justice in two ways. First, adopting a relational rather than individualistic criterion of responsibility better makes sense of how and why individuals bear responsibility for a global and intergenerational injustice like climate change. Second, framing climate justice in terms of political responsibility for unjust structural processes better orients and motivates the political action necessary for structural transformation. (shrink)

How can dogmatic teachings inform the political witness of the Chinese Protestant church and its calling among the moral crises of the past four decades? This essay responds to this urgent need by examining the political legacies of Karl Barth and Mou Zongsan, two dogmatic thinkers of Protestant Christianity and New Confucianism. A contextual and constructive comparison of the two figures allows us to reconfigure the notion of political responsibility as a praxis theory of neighbor love (...) with several critical elements: it grounds the political responsibility of the church in the imperative of safeguarding fellow humanity and the forming of responsible humanity, and this imperative must be self-critical and forward-looking in practice. It thus contributes to Christian ethics by articulating the legacy of Barth’s dogmatic theology for democratic ethics through interfaith dialogue and a praxis theory of neighbor love for the Chinese Protestant church under the neoliberal regime. (shrink)

Critics take issue with Arendt’s writings on the question of race in the United States, especially in On Violence [1970] and her controversial essays on school desegregation and education “Reflections on Little Rock” [1959] and “The Crisis in Education” [1958]. Recent works, such as that of Kathryn Sophia Belle, Patricia Owens, and Chad Kautzer, call to reevaluate Arendt’s canonical status through the lens of her anti-Black racism and warns that her thought sanctions state violence against racial groups. Anne Norton and (...) Robert Bernasconi argued before against Arendt’s failure to acknowledge Black agency and thought and how anti-Black racism structures the political realm in American society. While I agree with these critiques about Arendt’s shortsighted and questionable judgments, I find in her writings on guilt and political responsibility a resource to think resistance to anti-Black racism. This is not an obvious claim as the literature on Arendt’s notion of political responsibility focuses mainly on her writings about post-war Germany and the controversy following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem [1963] rather than her controversial writings on race and racism in the US. Yet we can find this connection in Arendt’s writing when she questions “white guilt” as an instance of collective guilt in On Violence (64-65) or when she criticizes in “Reflections” the abandonment of responsibility in its two senses: the responsibility to protect the children and the responsibility for the world (50). In the following I explain the relevance of political responsibility to confronting structural and historical racial injustices. I address critiques about the asymmetrical burden of responsibility and white ignorance and show support for the constructive, actional, backward- and forward-looking dimensions of political responsibility in the visions and platforms of the Movement for Black Lives. (shrink)