Original scientific paper

Ethical Aspects of Man's Responsibility

Ivan Koprek ; Faculty of Philosophy of the Society of Jesus in Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract

Contemporary society suffers from various illnesses which include excessive consumerism, uncontrolled hedonism, agression, corruption, poverty, addiction …. The lack of responsibility takes a prominent place among these ailments
Today it is difficult to personalize responsibility as the conceptualization and content thereof become increasingly unclear. Most often the concept of responsibilty is utilized in three ways 1. descriptively, that is responsibility expresses the causative relationship between the doer and the action, or rather the consequence, without any mention whatsoever of an ethical qualification of the action itself. 2. proscriptively, that is the concept of responsibility expresses a moral or legal obligation to either undertake action or to evade it, and is often called objective responsiblity. 3. ascriptively, that is the concept of responsiblity expresses a judgement on the part of the agent who acts in accordance with the law or moral norm, or rather against these. Finally, responsibility can be: a) subjective – I am responsible to myself, to my own conscience; b) relational – I am responsible to an instance, primarily to another person. In this sense we can say that responsibility is not only within ourselves, but something which is between us. We attribute to it the quality of social relatedness and responsiveness.
In considering the various usages of the concept of responsibility or of «being responsible» we are confronted with the different meanings attached to the concept. We first note the group of meanings in which the concept of responsibility reflects the concept of mental soundness, reasonableness. We are dealing here with prospective and retrospective responsibility.
In taking into account the basic components of the complex phenomenon of responsibility, we can say that reponsibility, in the moral sense, is man's obligation (duty) - from the standpoint of fulfilling one's purpose - to justify all essential elements of his behaviour, that is, internal disposition, concrete behaviour and the consequences of these in solving elementary problems in life, the lives of others and the world in general within the limitations of one's influence upon events. With this in mind, and in view of the challenges we are faced with today, the author questions the relationship between freedom and responsibility.

Keywords

ethics; duty; freedom; responsibility; retrospective and prospective responsibility; personal responsibility; the ethics of intention; the ethics of responsibility; values

Hrčak ID:

37267

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/37267

Publication date:

9.6.2009.

Article data in other languages: croatian

Visits: 7.275 *