Making judgments about whether a person is responsible for their behavior and beliefs, and holding others and ourselves responsible for actions and their consequences are fundamental to our relationships and moral practices. The judgment that a person is morally responsible rests in part on taking that person to have certain qualifying capacities, capacities that give rise (or fail to give rise to) their behaviors or beliefs. Relatedly, the attention given to guilt and blameworthiness in the philosophical and Christian ethical literature on moral responsibility seems to exceed the attention given to praiseworthiness, which may be due in part to the urgency of sanctioning persons who are blameworthy.
In exploring the relationship between freedom and responsibility, this paper first briefly diagnoses the outsize attention given to blameworthiness and guilt. Then, this paper locates the sympathetic response (as a kind of practical wisdom) as a capacity central to the concept of responsibility. The sympathetic response, or acknowledgement of another’s suffering, is an achievement fundamental to being responsive to and responsible for others. Drawing from Stanley Cavell’s distinction between “knowing” and “acknowledging,” this paper dramatizes the claim (that acknowledgment of human suffering is essential to knowledge of it) through insights from the lives and legacies of Mamie Till-Mobley and Frederick Douglass. Rather than centering concepts of obligation, Till-Mobley and Douglass stage the occasion for the kind of passional activity that is importantly instructive in Black freedom struggles.
In exploring the relationship between freedom and responsibility, this paper first briefly diagnoses the outsized attention given to blameworthiness and guilt in the philosophical and Christian ethical literature on moral responsibility. Then, this paper locates the sympathetic response (as a kind of practical wisdom) as a capacity central to the concept of responsibility. The sympathetic response, or acknowledgement of another’s suffering, is an achievement fundamental to being responsive to and responsible for others. Drawing from Stanley Cavell’s distinction between “knowing” and “acknowledging,” this paper dramatizes the claim (that acknowledgment of human suffering is essential to knowledge of it) through insights from the lives and legacies of Mamie Till-Mobley and Frederick Douglass.