Abraham Joshua Heschel famously wrote, “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” But what happens when one is not in a free society, or when freedom for some comes at the expense of others? How do we trace the limits of our obligations without letting people off the hook? How can we balance the need to hold individuals accountable with the need to challenge structures, regimes, and ideologies? This panel reexamines the relationship between guilt and responsibility under the conditions of constrained agency, systemic evil, human finitude, and religiously-sanctioned sexism.
This paper explores the relationship between freedom, responsibility, and agency within the context of structural injustices, drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young and Sally Haslanger. Young's theory of structural injustice highlights the complex, long-term nature of harms that cannot be attributed to individual actors or specific policies but instead result from systemic forces. She critiques backward-looking liability models and advocates for a forward-looking political responsibility, emphasizing collective action to address these injustices. Haslanger’s analysis of social practices as sites for social intervention offers a valuable supplement to Young's theory by expanding our understanding of political responsibility. Social practices, which shape and are shaped by social systems, enable coordination and can be sites for addressing structural injustices. By integrating Haslanger’s perspective, this paper proposes a more robust vision of political responsibility, emphasizing collective intervention to confront structural injustices like economic inequality, climate change, gender-based violence, and segregation.
This paper argues that the most productive conceptions of freedom result in both humility—that is, an awareness of our lack of certainty and lack of universal knowledge—and a call to responsibility. This can be seen especially in the work of Dorothy Roberts and M. Shawn Copeland, both of whom understand freedom as necessitating resources and conditions that make choice possible and illuminate freedom as something lived and carried out in bodies, not just a concept touted in the abstract. Whereas some understandings of freedom, especially negative freedoms that consist mainly of non-interference, yield virtually no sense of responsibility, Roberts and Copeland’s understandings of freedom imply a responsibility akin to that described by Iris Marion Young, that is, the social connection model of responsibility that calls on persons of privilege to recognize the ways they have contributed to the perpetuation of injustice and continue to do so.
I been an addiction recovery coach since 2017, with a specific focus on women in addiction and recovery since 2022. As such, I have facilitated four different recovery support groups for women, and have conducted over 100 interviews with over 60 women. This work/research provides the material for the present paper.
Of the 63 women thus far interviewed, 61 have experienced significant physical or sexual abuse (most often both) antecedent to the onset of severe active addiction. In most cases, the experience of abuse has occurred over an extended period of time, with, for instance, criminal confinement and strangulation being common. These facts have direct implications for assessing freedom and responsibility in women’s addiction and recovery.
This paper argues that such patterns of violence constitute a “regime of gendered torture,” with a particular set of ideologies underpinning it. It then shows how Catholic teaching on gender reinforces these ideologies.
This paper argues that there is a limit to the responsibility an individual has towards acts of evil--a limit that comes not out of indifference or lack of compassion, but out of human finitude. Moral agents often occupy a position of wanting to thoroughly invest and respond to the ever-growing lists of evils they encounter, while being limited in their time, resources, and capacities. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’ idea of complete and incomplete acts of will (velleity) and a concept of ethical division of labor (vocation), this paper contends that moral agents can fail to respond to an evil in external action while not being guilty of indifference. The hope in making this argument is not to give individuals a carte blanche when it pertains to issues of injustice, but to provide relief for the individual who suffers guilt from their inability to respond to every act of evil.