Virtue, Law and Mercy

The attribution of responsibility in world society is increasingly a field of contestation. On the one hand, the perception of causal and moral links reaching far in space and time are ever more explicitly pronounced; on the other hand, the very complexity of these links often engenders a fragmentation of responsibility both in law (Veitch 2007) as well as in moral commitment. Moreover, those institutions of legal responsibility attempting to reflect some of these interrelations are often criticised as insufficient by those who follow alternative narratives of causation and moral community. Current institutions of responsibility in law appear to abstract from what could be called enabling contexts; they perform their cuts in the chains of enabling interactions at very brief intervals (Strathern 2001). The result is often “organised irresponsibility” (Veitch 2007; Beck 1996), producing appeals to a global community of concern in time and space without corresponding obligatory commitments. This talk explores alternative conceptualisations of responsibility, and enquires into their notion of the person, their temporal and socio-spatial dimensions, and their notion of liability.

Tugend, Recht und Moral: Tendenzen der Verantwortungszuschreibung

The attribution of responsibility in world society is increasingly a field of contestation. On the one hand, the perceptions of far-reaching causal and moral links between spatially and temporally distant events are ever more explicitly pronounced; on the other hand, the very complexity of these links often engenders a fragmentation of responsibility in law as well as in moral commitment. Identifying three competing conceptualisations of responsibility, namely a turn to virtue ethics, processes of juridification, and processes of moralisation, this article explores their different temporal and social dimensions, and the effects they each have on the relation between those held responsible and those affected by the situation that is to be accounted for.