THE NOTION OF VICARIOUS MORAL RESPONSIBILITY: SOCIAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS
In this article, I focus on the complicated variant of Collective moral responsibility, which is presented as the idea of vicarious responsibility. Using the idea of Collective Responsibility today has a lot of controversial statements. The main point, which is fixed in philosophical objections, is the principle of personality and autonomy. The idea of Collective responsibility eliminates personal responsibility, so we have the situation when nobody takes responsibility. However, today social changes, when to define real person action is impossible due to many reasons, researches have to investigate other types of responsibility, for instance collective. Collective agents such as nation, corporations, social institutes, human being need moral state, just because their actions have extensive impact and moreover the consequences of their actions have long term effects. The theoretical and practical gap is the source of the paradoxical situation. On the one hand, the paradigm of individual responsibility cannot be used for collectives, and on the other hand, the group’s activity avoids moral estimations. In this article, it seems that the idea of vicarious responsibility has a chance to connect individual and collective measurement of responsibility because it can be characterized as the space where individual and collective exist simultaneously. Vicarious responsibility deals with moral senses such as blame, shame, repentance which a personality has when other members of group have done. It is thought that the reason for this kind of experience becomes a moment of identification of the individual with the group on the basis of national, religious, professional or other interests. First fundamental question of collective responsibility and collective guilt was presented in the works of Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt. Philosophers have formulated the question of responsibility and guilt for the crimes of the nation's human scale, actually identifying the subject of the blame to the people. The German people were presented as a subject of collective moral responsibility. Later on, the idea of vicarious moral feelings was working out through the question: “When and under what conditions vicarious responsibility is?”
Keywords: blame, collective moral responsibility, group’s liability, deed, political responsibility
References:
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Issue: 5, 2015
Series of issue: Issue 5
Rubric: PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL DYNAMICS
Pages: 158 — 163
Downloads: 816