Personal Responsibility

Individual responsibility is an issue at the heart of public debates surrounding justice today - this book explores the philosophical implications of this hugely topical contemporary debate.

Freedom of choice is at the core of the American story. But what if choice is fake?Americans are fixated on the idea of choice. Our political theory is based on the consent of the governed. Our legal system is built upon the argument that people freely make choices and bear responsibility for them. And what slogan could better express the heart of our consumer culture than "Have it your way"?In this provocative book, Kent Greenfield poses unsettling questions about the choices we make. What if they are more constrained and limited than we like to think? If we have less free will than we realize, what are the implications for us as individuals and for our society? To uncover the answers, Greenfield taps into scholarship on topics ranging from brain science to economics, political theory to sociology. His discoveries—told through an entertaining array of news events, personal anecdotes, crime stories, and legal decisions—confirm that many factors, conscious and unconscious, limit our free will. Worse, by failing to perceive them we leave ourselves open to manipulation. But Greenfield offers useful suggestions to help us become better decision makers as individuals, and to ensure that in our laws and public policy we acknowledge the complexity of choice.

Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility is about why and how identifying ourselves by means of narrative makes it possible for us to be responsible, morally and otherwise. The book begins as an investigation into how it is that we can hold people responsible for who they are, despite the fact that we have almost no control over our lives in our formative years. It explains the relation between representation, personal identity, and self-knowledge, demonstrating how awareness of the vulnerability of our identity as persons is the origin of our capacity for the cathartic revision of a self-identifying narrative which is the condition of moral awareness. Innovative in its interdisciplinary juxtaposition of ethics, moral psychology, literary theory and literature, Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility develops a sophisticated and comprehensive account of human nature. This book offers an intuitively satisfying and humane yet rigorous account of why and how we think of ourselves as simultaneously free and constrained by nature. Its fundamental thesis, the mediation of narrative representation between agent and the world, suggests new answers to old problems in moral psychology, such as the question of free will and responsibility. With a more literary style than many philosophy texts, it works through a series of interconnected problems of as much interest to a thoughtful layperson as to academic philosophers.

First Published in 1988. All counselling approaches are means to helping people stand on their own two feet and assume effective responsibility for their lives. Thus personal responsibility becomes an obvious integrating focus. Though the concept gets implicitly or explicitly emphasized in all existing theoretical positions, none has provided the deserved coverage. Focusing on personal responsibility is almost like focusing on one’s nose. Though right in front of the face, the concept is not always easy to observe. This book aims at integration in a number of ways. It rejects the narrow ‘my theory right or wrong’ approach to counselling. Theoretical concepts and practical interventions are derived from a number of different sources, including the research literature. The book does not take a one-dimensional approach to behaviour in emphasizing people’s actions alone. Instead it takes a three-dimensional approach emphasizing feelings, thoughts and actions.

Noting the pervasiveness of the adoption of "responsibility" as a core ideal of neoliberal governance, the contributors to Competing Responsibilities challenge contemporary understandings and critiques of that concept in political, social, and ethical life. They reveal that neoliberalism's reification of the responsible subject masks the myriad forms of individual and collective responsibility that people engage with in their everyday lives, from accountability, self-sufficiency, and prudence to care, obligation, and culpability. The essays—which combine social theory with ethnographic research from Europe, North America, Africa, and New Zealand—address a wide range of topics, including critiques of corporate social responsibility practices; the relationships between public and private responsibilities in the context of state violence; the tension between calls on individuals and imperatives to groups to prevent the transmission of HIV; audit culture; and how health is cast as a citizenship issue. Competing Responsibilities allows for the examination of modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or coexist with the neoliberal focus on the individual cultivation of the self. Contributors Barry D. Adam, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Filippa Lentzos, Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski, Nikolas Rose, Rosalind Shaw, Cris Shore, Jessica M. Smith, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle, Jarrett Zigon

The exploration of personal identity and theories of narrative in Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility is extraordinarily suggestive, resulting in implications for theories of action as well as ethics and psychology. Taking seriously the thought that we mediate our relations with the world by means of self-defining narratives grounded in the natural phenomenon of desire provides new answers to old puzzles of what it means to be human.

America is divided by two clashing views about individual responsibility. Liberals see many people as not completely responsible for the situation they are in, their opportunities limited by their class, race, and sex. Distribution of outcomes is therefore seen as unjust, and the government has to help offset the limits people face. In contrast, conservatives believe individuals can and must live their lives with a presumption of personal responsibility for what happens. Government assistance is not seen as valuable, but as creating dependency and ultimately crippling to those who receive it.