Taking responsibility in an unjust world

Abstract

Our is an age of irresponsibility and injustice. The associations that make responsibility and justice possible have broken down due to negligence, deliberate subversion, and changed social conditions. To be responsible is to be bound by legitimate social rules and to be able to demand recognition of the social rules from others. Responsibility is the activity of calling and responding appropriately in our social transactions, while justice, most simply, is our reflective judgment of the quality of the rules and practices by which we live. Our responsibility, and our capacity to be responsible, is dependent upon the justice of the rules and practices with which we organise social life, upon the fairness of the way we bind ourselves together. Justice and responsibility, then, are associational concepts that characterise our relationships, as well as the norms and institutions through which those relationships are built. Therefore, to live in an irresponsible and unjust age means social rules and practices fail us, as our actual experience is not adequately reflected in the institutional and normative world we inherit. We no longer know how to respond to each other.Convention in political theory dictates we work out an ideal conception of justice, which provides a guide for the non-ideal world of lived experience. Yet, the irresponsible and unjust character of our age leads to alienation from the world of common experience, to feeling

Climate Change and the Politics of Responsibility

“…5On the emergent “grounded normative theory” movement see Ackerly et al (2021); Green and Brandstedt (2021); Hoover (2020). …”