9 Causal Responsibility Models

In previous chapters, we have discussed the ways in which we can model how responsibility can be assigned to agents and how responsibility models can facilitate discussions about the nature of responsibilities in organisations. These models document responsibilities in an organisation, provide insights into possible vulnerabilities due to responsibility misassignment and facilitate discussion about the nature of specific responsibilities. However, we have not, so far, tried to model the responsibilities themselves. Such a model might include information about the attributes of the responsibility, the relationships between these attributes and how one responsibility is dependent on other responsibilities. The difficulties of developing such a model of responsibilities as abstractions in their own right should not be under-estimated. We have already discussed how the word ‘responsibility’ is used in a very broad way and it is not possible, in our view, to have a single model that encompasses all different types of responsibility. A further difficulty arises because responsibilities are always interpreted by the holder of the responsibility and their culture, education, competence and experience influences that interpretation. This is one reason why it is often difficult to decide who should be blamed when some accident or incident occurs and a tribunal of some kind examines the ways in which individuals have discharged their assigned responsibilities. Because of these difficulties, I focus here on the more limited, but still challenging, problem of modelling causal responsibilities. Recall that causal responsibility is the responsibility of making some state of affairs come about or of acting to ensure that some undesirable situation does not occur. Each causal responsibility has an associated consequential responsibility where the consequential responsibility defines who takes the blame in the event of failure or, sometimes, the credit in the event of success. The agent that is assigned a causal responsibility may, but need not, be the holder of the corresponding consequential responsibility. For example, an automated agent assigned a causal responsibility cannot be assigned the related consequential responsibility – computer systems cannot take the blame for failure. Modelling causal responsibilities, without regard for the agent assigned these responsibilities, is helpful for a number of reasons: