The Philosophers' Magazine - 4th quarter 2006

Page 58

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forum 58

Who’s responsible?

poverty & the duty of assistance

TP M

4th quarter 2006

David Miller on the need to distinguish two types of responsibility

Who is responsible for global poverty? My question is deliberately ambiguous: if we ask “who is responsible for global poverty?”, we might be asking who is responsible for creating global poverty. I call this form of backward-looking responsibility “outcome responsibility”. However our question might also be interpreted to mean “who is responsible for getting rid of global poverty, now and in the future?” Here then we are looking forward and aiming to pin responsibility on the agent or agents who we think should carry the obligation to tackle poverty by pursuing policies with that aim from now on. I call this form of responsibility “remedial responsibility”. Of course the two forms of responsibility may well be linked, but sometimes this linkage can’t or

David Miller is professor of political theory at Oxford University and author of The Principles of Social Justice (Harvard University Press)

shouldn’t be made, and then we need to keep the distinction between the two forms of responsibility clear in our minds. In thinking about global poverty, one big issue is how far our judgements about remedial responsibility should track our judgements about outcome responsibility. Judgements of both kinds are at least partly value judgements. But the sense in which attributions of outcome responsibility imply moral judgement needs a little more clarifi cation. Obviously they presuppose empirical judgements about causation: you can’t be outcome responsible for a state of affairs unless you played some causal role in bringing that state of affairs about. But they also involve selection from among the causal antecedents. Consider a car crash involving two cars on a roundabout. In a causal sense, both must be part-responsible: if either driver had acted differently, the crash would not have occurred. But when we ask which driver was outcome-responsible for the accident, we are asking who the accident was down to, so to speak: who was driving in