Normative responsibilities: structure and sources

Attributions of what we shall call normative responsibilities play a central role in everyday moral thinking. It is commonly thought, for example, that parents are responsible for the wellbeing of their children, and that this has important normative consequences. Depending on context, it might mean that parents are morally required to bring their children to the doctor, feed them well, attend to their emotional needs, or to see to it that someone else does. Similarly, it is sometimes argued that countries that emit most greenhouse gases have most responsibility for preventing catastrophic climate change. This responsibility might imply that these countries are morally required to take necessary steps individually and jointly to implement a workable prevention plan, and to avoid steps that worsen the situation. More trivially, the grading of your student’s essays might be your responsibility, as might making sure there is wine at tomorrow’s picnic, and you might thus be required to see to it that essays are competently graded and suitable wine brought to the picnic. Normative responsibility is distinct from two other relations called “responsibility”: retrospective moral responsibility, i.e. the sort of relation an agent must stand in to decisions, actions, and outcomes in order to deserve blame or credit for them, and causal responsibility, which we have in mind when asking whether something caused something else (“is the infection responsible for these symptoms?”).1 Retrospective and causal responsibility might give rise to normative responsibilities—parents might be responsible for the wellbeing of their children because they are causally and retrospectively morally responsible for their existence. Still, normative responsibilities are themselves primarily prospective, and are often grounded in what can be done rather than in what has been done: it might be your responsibility to help the drowning child, not because you are