Garrath Williams

Hannah Arendt’s (1906-1975) conception of power is entirely distinctive. It is rooted in a political philosophy that celebrates the public realm of freedom that emerges when people act with others as citizens or political equals. For Arendt, power is actualized where people act together to sustain or to change the world they share with one another. Her fundamental claim is this: ‘Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together’. This entry offers some background to Arendt’s account, highlights two important contrasts that she makes between power and violence, and then points to her related notion of authority.

Like most bioethical discussion, examination of human biobanks has been largely framed in terms of research subjects’ rights, principally informed consent, with some gestures toward public benefits. However, informed consent is for the competent, rights-bearing individual: focussing on the individual, it thus neglects social, economic and even political matters; focussing on the competent rights-bearer, it does not serve situations where consent is plainly inappropriate (eg, the young child) or where coercion can obviously be justified (the criminal). Using the British experience of large-scale biobanking, I argue that the focus on consenting individuals distorts our ways of thinking about biobanks and has serious practical ramifications. This becomes clear if we contrast the case of adult biobanks intended for medical research with two other forms of biobanking. Thus child cohort studies – vital for sound scientific investigation of the interplay of genetics and environment in health – have been very badly funded next to adult studies. On the other hand, forensic databases have attracted massive investment, but little debate – partly owing to a sense that here, at least, is a case where consent is not relevant. Contrasting these central types of biobanking, I will suggest that there are powerful factors at work in limiting ‘ethics’ to individual rights. Projects of this size should direct our attention to more overtly political questions concerning priority setting and organisation of medical research.

This encyclopedia entry contrasts three influential philosophical accounts of our everyday practices of praise and blame, in terms of how they might be justified. On the one hand, a broadly Kantian approach sees responsibility for actions as relying on forms of self-control that point back to the idea of free will. On this account praise and blame are justified because a person freely chooses her actions. Praise and blame respond to the person as the chooser of her deed; they recognise her dignity as a rational agent, as Kantians tend to put it. This approach sharply contrasts with two further ways of thinking about the issues. One is utilitarian, where praise and blame are justified in terms of their social benefits. Another, more complex approach is roughly Aristotelian. This approach situates practices of praise and blame in terms of our on-going relationships with one another. This approach stresses the importance of mutual accountability, moral education, and assessments of character in terms of the many vices and virtues.

Philosophers usually discuss responsibility in terms of responsibility for past actions or as a question about the nature of moral agency. Yet the word responsibility is fairly modern, whereas these topics arguably represent timeless concerns about human agency. This paper investigates another use of responsibility, that is particularly important to modern liberal societies: responsibility as a virtue that can be demonstrated by individuals and organisations. The paper notes its initial importance in political contexts, and seeks to explain why we now demand responsibility in all spheres of life. In reply, I highlight the distinctively institutional character of modern liberal societies: institutions specify many of the particular responsibilities each of us must fulfil, but also require responsibility to sustain them and address their failings. My overall argument is that the virtue of responsibility occupies a distinctive place in the moral needs, and moral achievements, of liberal societies; and this, in turn, explains why it now occupies such a prominent place in our moral discourse

This encyclopedia entry surveys the moral and political thought of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Hobbes's vision of the world is strikingly original and still relevant to contemporary politics. His main concern is the problem of social and political order: how human beings can live together in peace and avoid the danger and fear of civil conflict. He poses stark alternatives: we should give our obedience to an unaccountable sovereign (a person or group empowered to decide every social and political issue). Otherwise what awaits us is a “state of nature” that closely resembles civil war – a situation of universal insecurity, where all have reason to fear violent death and where rewarding human cooperation is all but impossible.

Although commentators sometimes mention a link between Kant and Nietzsche, this paper claims that the continuities in their moral thought have been insufficiently explored. I argue that Nietzsche may offer us a profound rethinking of Kant’s morality – one indebted to Kant’s ideal of critique. The paper first considers the wide apparent gulf between the thinkers. The second section seeks to explain this gulf in terms which relate to Kant’s overall project, while the final section deals with Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s reliance on rules of various sorts. I conclude with two suggestions for contemporary Kantian ethics that we might take from Nietzsche’s engagement.

The claim that happiness and virtue ought to be proportionate to one another has often been expressed in the idea of a future world of divine justice, despite many moral difficulties with this idea. This paper argues that human efforts to enact such a proportionment are, ironically, justified by the same reasons that make the idea of divine justice seem so problematic. Moralists have often regarded our frailty and fallibility as reasons for abstaining from the judgment of others; and doubts about our deserving some proportionment of happiness or unhappiness often arise insofar as virtue and vice may be explained on a causal basis. This paper argues that our fallibility and our susceptibility to social influence render judgment and response indispensable, because – given these characteristics – our actions and responses decide the morality that we actually share with one another. In this situation, to ‘judge not’ is to abandon the field to those with no such scruples.

Two of the most prominent questions in Kant's critical philosophy concern reason. The first, central to his theoretical philosophy, is the unprovable pretensions of reason in earlier “rationalist” philosophers, especially Leibniz and Descartes. The second, central to his practical philosophy, is the subservient role accorded to reason by the British empiricists—above all Hume, who declared, “Reason is wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals.” Treatise, 3.1.1.11; see also the entry on Rationalism vs. Empiricism .) Thus the titles of two key works: the monumental Critique of Pure Reason, and the Critique of Practical Reason that is middle point of his great trio of moral writings (between the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Metaphysics of Morals).

[Bibliographic article focussing on compatibilist approaches to responsibility.] Moral responsibility relates to many significant topics in ethics and metaphysics, such as the content and scope of moral obligations, the nature of human agency, and the structure of human interaction. This entry focuses on compatibilist approaches to moral responsibility—that is, approaches that see moral responsibility as compatible with the causal order of the world. This is partly because they have more to say about the nature of moral responsibility and the practices associated with it, and also because there is a seperate entry on free will. The entry also focuses mainly on the debates considered most significant by contemporary analytic philosophers. However, it also points to some earlier contributions and to some significant contributions from outside those debates. In particular, it is interesting that contemporary debates often focus on the agency of the responsible person, without attending to the forms of interaction that person may participate in. However, as Peter Strawson points out in a seminal essay (see Responsibility and the Reactive Sentiments), moral responsibility is intimately related to our reactions to one another. Should those reactions be understood by reference to features of the person held responsible, or by reference to the relationship between persons where some action or outcome is at issue, or even by reference to wider social and political structures? Moral responsibility also borders on a number of topics of great practical importance. These include responsibility under the law, the responsibilities of groups and organizations, accountability within organizations, and how distributive justice and individual responsibility are related. Again, this entry focuses largely on individual moral responsibility and only mentions a few social and legal discussions of responsibility with especial implications for how we think about individual responsibility.

This paper explores some ways in which Immanuel Kant’s ethical theory can be brought to bear on professional and health care ethics. Health care professionals are not mere individuals acting upon their own ends. Rather, their principles of action must be defined in terms of participation in a cooperative endeavor. This generates complex questions as to how well their roles mesh with one another and whether they comprise a well-formed collective agent. We argue that Kant’s ethics therefore, and perhaps surprisingly, requires us to consider the institutions, procedures, and politics that decide who should play what part in a complex collective enterprise. Likewise, professional responsibility involves – alongside a readiness to play one’s individual part – a concern for these collective aspects of healthcare

This article considers how we should frame the ethical issues raised by current proposals for large-scale genebanks with on-going links to medical and lifestyle data, such as the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council's 'UK Biobank'. As recent scandals such as Alder Hey have emphasised, there are complex issues concerning the informed consent of donors that need to be carefully considered. However, we believe that a preoccupation with informed consent obscures important questions about the purposes to which such collections are put, not least that they may be only haphazardly used for research —an end that would not fairly reflect the original altruistic motivation of donors, and the trust they must invest. We therefore argue that custodians of such databases take on a weighty pro-active duty, to encourage public debate about the ends of such collections and to sponsor research that reflects publicly agreed priorities and provides public benefits.

This paper looks at judgments of guilt in the face of alleged wrong-doing, be it in public or in private discourse. Its concern is not the truth of such judgments, although the complexity and contestability of such claims will be stressed. The topic, instead, is what sort of activities we are engaged in, when we make our judgments on others' conduct. To examine judging as an activity it focuses on a series of problems that can occur when we blame others. On analysis, we see that these problems take the form of performative contradictions, so that the ostensible purposes of assigning guilt to others are undermined.There is clear evidence from social psychology that blame is especially frequently and inappropriately attributed to individuals in modern Western societies. On the other hand, it has often been observed how suspicious we are about the activity of judging – thus a widespread perception that a refusal to judge is somehow virtuous. My suggestion is that the sheer difficulty of attributions of responsibility, in the face of a complex and often arbitrary moral reality, frequently defeats us. This leads to a characteristic set of distortions when we blame, so that it is no surprise that we have become suspicious of all blaming activities.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is likely to be the first woman to join the canon of the great philosophers. Arendt's work has attracted a huge volume of scholarship. This collection reprints papers from the USA, Germany, France and the UK, where further scholarly work is emerging at an increasing pace. Given that there was vigorous debate of her work in her lifetime, that there have since been several waves of evaluation and re-evaluation, and because a new generation of scholars is now coming to her work, a systematic collection of the critical assessments of her thought is extremely timely.

This paper considers the often-expressed fear that medical research may use children merely as means, and not respect them as ends in themselves – especially insofar as they are deemed less able to consent than adults. The main focus is on large-scale genetic, socio-medical and epidemiological research. The theoretical starting point of the paper is that to be treated as an end in oneself is to be regarded as – and to act as – a participant in cooperative endeavours. This participatory status is certainly connected with individual authority to consent and dissent; and there is no doubt that consent plays an important role when adults participate in many research projects. However, insofar as consent is located within structures of human cooperation, the authority to consent is not a straightforward privilege. Rather, consent is bound up with responsibility for one's choices and commitment to shared terms of cooperation. Given this understanding, it is argued that consent should not be our principal concern when we involve children in research. This is not because of children's (possible) incompetence to consent as such, but rather because children are still learning how to respect and assess the cooperative terms involved in our institutional lives. Instead, our leading concern should be with the terms regulating their involvement in research. Given suitable safeguards, research is one way in which children may learn what it is to bear responsibilities and to act as an end in oneself – that is, to cooperate with others on reasonable terms and for worthy ends

The members of any functioning modern society live their lives amid complex networks of overlapping institutions. Apart from the major political institutions of law and government, however, much normative political theory seems to regard this institutional fabric as largely a pragmatic convenience. This paper contests this assumption by reflecting on how institutions both constrain and enable spheres of effective action and responsibility. In this way a society’s institutional fabric constitutes, in Samuel Scheffler’s phrase, an infrastructure of responsibility. The paper discusses three key normative aspects of this infrastructure. First, institutions define roles and rules, alongside forms of sanction and encouragement, so as to realise limited forms of practical, normative agreement. Second, institutions allocate and adjudicate distinct responsibilities. This creates separate spheres of initiative, ensuring responsibilities are fulfilled and providing for structured disagreement and change. Third, because we move through a plurality of institutions and associations, we experience varying responsibilities and forms of recognition. Individual identities thus depend on several different forms of recognition, and are well placed to resist totalising or fundamentalist temptations. In sum, the paper argues that a liberal institutional fabric provides essential moral stability, though not an undesirable fixity. By containing the fragility and dangers of individual moral judgment, our institutional fabric allows such judgment to play a valuable role in human affairs.

Who, in particular, may hold us responsible for our moral failings? Most discussions of moral responsibility bracket this question, despite its obvious practical importance. In this article, I investigate the moral authority involved and how it arises in the context of personal relationships, such as friendship or family relations. My account is based on the idea that parties to a personal relationship not only share responsibility for their relationship, but also — to some degree that is negotiated between them — for one another's lives. In sharing these responsibilities, we grant people a particular authority to respond to us. By highlighting the responsibility that we assume when we hold someone responsible, I also suggest that this analysis contains important lessons for thinking about responsibility in other contexts

This paper explores an internal relation between wrong-doing and the ability to think in moral terms, through Hobbes ’ thought. I use his neglected retelling of our ‘original sin’ as a springboard, seeing how we then discover a need to vindicate our own projects in terms shared by others. We become normatively demanding creatures: greedy for normative vindication, eager to judge others amid the difficulties of our world. However there is, of course, no choice for us but to choose our own principles of judgment, or at least some authority to provide these. Unconvinced by Hobbes ’ remedies, I conclude with one implication for moral philosophy@ a need to look rather differently at agency and responsibility

Ethical reflections help us decide what are the best actions to pursue in difficult and controversial situations. Reflections on public policy consider how to alter patterns of individual activity and institutional policies or frameworks for the better. The rising prevalence of childhood and adolescent obesity may pose serious health issues. As such, it is related to ethical and public policy questions including responsibility for health, food production and consumption, patterns of physical activity, the role of the state, and the rights and duties of parenthood.

Hannah Arendt is one of the few philosophers to examine the dynamics of political action at length. Intriguingly, she emphasises the disclosure of who the actor is as a specific distinction of political action. This emphasis is connected with some long-standing worries about Arendt’s account that centre on its apparent unconcern for political responsibility. In this paper, I argue that Arendt’s emphasis on disclosure actually harbours a profound concern with responsibility. I do so by examining three questions. The main part of the paper focuses on how disclosure is bound up with political actors’ attempts to act with one another. It asks: what would it be for an actor to evade disclosure? And: what is involved in an actor acknowledging the fact of disclosure? – Looking at the matter negatively, attempts to evade disclosure and its implications lead to irresponsibility. Positively, for the actor to accept disclosure is to see herself as bound to her fellow actors and audience by relations of joint action and mutual accountability. The conclusion asks a third question: what would it mean for on-lookers to deny the relevance of actors’ disclosure? I argue that Arendt’s historiography – which revolves around stories in which political actors reveal who they are – reflects her conviction that people can and must take responsibility for their world

This article offers a Kantian account of dignity violations in the context of contemporary migration to western states. It considers three major issues: “modern slavery,” statutory detention, and lack of rights to engage in economic activity. While most Kantian accounts emphasize the dignity violations of treating people as “mere means,” we point out that this does not capture the central issue: the “hostile environment” that so many migrants face. The first part of the article briefly sets out a Kantian account of dignity violations. The second part highlights two key differences between modern slavery and its historical forebears. It emphasizes the interpersonal rather than institutional character of modern slavery, and distinguishes trafficking from smuggling. The third part argues that migrants who lack formal rights to remain and work face institutional exclusions that violate human dignity. Policies that aim to discourage and restrict immigration demean people’s status as ends in themselves. Moreover, they do so by actively denying opportunities to act as means for others. As such, the article draws a link between Kant’s well-known cosmopolitan right not to be treated with hostility and his less well-known ethical duty, “to be a useful member of the world.” Dignity can be found in acting as a means for others; hostility and exclusion can violate dignity just as much as instrumentalization.

This article considers the charge that citizens of developed societies are complicit in large-scale harms, using climate destabilisation as its central example. It contends that we have yet to create a lived morality – a fabric of practices and institutions – that is adequate to our situation. As a result, we participate in systematic injustice, despite all good efforts and intentions. To make this case, the article draws on recent discussions of Kant’s ethics and politics. Section 1 considers Tamar Schapiro’s account of how otherwise decent actions can be corrupted by others’ betrayals, and hence fall into complicity. Section 2 turns to discussions by Christine Korsgaard and Lucy Allais, which highlight how people can be left without innocent choices if shared frameworks of interaction do not instantiate core ideals. Section 3 brings these ideas together in order to make sense of the charge of complicity in grave collective harms, and addresses some worries that the idea of unavoidable complicity may raise.

This paper discusses Kant’s problematic attempts to come to grips with the question of meaning. The first section sets out the problem as Kant discovers it, under the idea of a ‘Categorical Imperative.’ The second looks directly at his thoughts on the question of meaning, in connection with individual dignity, personal fulfilment and hope for our common future. Third, I examine inadequacies in Kant’s account, while the fourth part suggests that these arise through a lack of faith in the practical fruits of reason. In conclusion I raise a lasting concern belonging to post-Kantian philosophy, whether Kant’s equation of autonomy with ‘the moral law’ may not threaten both freedom and meaning in human affairs.

Biobanks correspond to different situations: research and technological development, medical diagnosis or therapeutic activities. Their status is not clearly defined. We aimed to investigate human biobanking in Europe, particularly in relation to organisational, economic and ethical issues in various national contexts. Data from a survey in six EU countries were collected as part of a European Research Project examining human and non-human biobanking. A total of 147 institutions concerned with biobanking of human samples and data were investigated by questionnaires and interviews. Most institutions surveyed belong to the public or private non-profit-making sectors, which have a key role in biobanking. This activity is increasing in all countries because few samples are discarded and genetic research is proliferating. Collections vary in size, many being small and only a few very large. Their purpose is often research, or research and healthcare, mostly in the context of disease studies. A specific budget is very rarely allocated to biobanking and costs are not often evaluated. Samples are usually provided free of charge and gifts and exchanges are the common rule. Good practice guidelines are generally followed and quality controls are performed but quality procedures are not always clearly explained. Associated data are usually computerised. Biobankers generally favour centralisation of data rather than of samples. Legal and ethical harmonisation within Europe is considered likely to facilitate international collaboration. We propose a series of recommendations and suggestions arising from the EUROGENBANK project.

In this first part of the article, I want to sketch two things. First, I will say something about the idea of free will. The paradoxes involved in this idea often occur to people even before they come to philosophy, and these difficulties will be central to Kant’s account. But second, before turning to Kant, I would like to tackle Aristotle’s broad approach, and show that, before free will was invented by Christian philosophers, there was a quite different way of thinking about moral responsibility – one that has much to teach us. In the second part of the article, to appear in the next issue, I ask why Kant’s account continues to attract many people who would not dream of calling themselves Kantians – indeed, many who have never even heard Kant’s name. Kant’s theory involves a powerful idea of moral worth based on choice. This idea, though problematic because of the idea of freedom it seems to depend on, does account for many of our intuitions about moral responsibility. But it is not the only explanation of these intuitions, nor – I will argue – is it the most plausible.

Negligence reminds us that we often do and cause things unawares, occasionally with grave results. Given the lack of foresight and intention, some authors argue that people should not be judged culpable for negligence. This paper offers a contrasting view. It argues that gaining control is itself a fundamental responsibility, with both collective and individual elements. The paper underlines both sides, focussing on how they relate as we ascribe responsibility or culpability. Following the introduction, Section 2 argues that conscious awareness is neither necessary nor sufficient for control. Control is not a property of deliberate choice, so much as a practical achievement. Section 3 stresses the collective aspects of non-negligence: creating knowledge about risks, structuring environments to guard against them, and developing standards of care. Failings in the collective task, rather than lack of individual control, mean it can often be unfair to pin culpability on a single individual. Section 4 suggests that a basic duty of a responsible person is to acknowledge the ways in which we may do more or less than we mean to, often in ways that create risks. It then sketches an approach to culpability as part of a collective exercise: as we take responsibility for standards of care, and for our own and others’ agency.

Arthur Ripstein's book Force and Freedom insists that, ‘Freedom, understood as independence of another person's choice, is [all] that matters’. In this paper I suggest that this premise leads Ripstein to an instrumentalization of democracy that neglects a properly public and collective notion of freedom. The paper first criticizes Ripstein's key argument against any extension of public purposes beyond the upholding of persons’ ‘independence of others’ choice’. More constructively, the paper then suggests that a space of public freedom is opened up when people deliberate in order to form and pursue democratic purposes. Citizens may act together to promote ends that they think are worthwhile, without dominating one another or restricting individual freedom