Job Candidates: Jessica Payson

Dissertation: "Responsibility and Justice"

Abstract:

My dissertation addresses the concept of responsibility insofar as it is relevant for theorizing political agents’ relationship to justice. While the term “responsibility” is often employed by ethical and political theorists, what the concept of responsibility entails that is particularly valuable for expressing the attachment of demands of justice to political actors is rarely theorized. I aim to unpack the concept of responsibility in order to examine some of the currently under-theorized assumptions included in the concept of responsibility, and in doing so establish a prominent place for the idea of responsibility with respect to the theorization of justice.

I divide the dissertation into four chapters. The first, “Distinguishing Responsibility,” lays out the necessary groundwork for the conceptual terminology of the dissertation, differentiating responsibilities from other traditional ethico-political demands, viz. obligations and duties. While these are valuable for some purposes, I aim to show that the various concepts – obligations, duties, responsibilities – pick up on different sorts of issues and illuminate them in different ways. In the next chapter, “Taking Responsibility,” I disrupt the assumption that responsibility requires linearity. I will clarify a “forward-looking” version of responsibility that does not rely on a strict causal connection between agent and object, and even builds on the recognition that such direct connection may be absent. Having decentralized the linearity implied in backward-looking responsibility – i.e., the line that sufficiently connects an isolated agent to a bounded, completed event – in chapters three and four I add to this idea by working on, respectively, taking the agent out of isolation and situating “events” in socio-political processes. More specifically, in the third chapter, “Agents of Responsibility,” I examine concerns regarding the bearers of responsibilities for justice; because responsibility attaches primarily to individuals, responsibility for justice seems to conflict with some dominant liberal approaches to theorizing justice that aim to unburden individuals. I argue that seeing individuals as gaining responsibilities through their roles in groups evades the problem of overburdening and allows for a more expansive set of individual responsibilities. In chapter four, “Choosing Responsible Actions,” I address the content of responsibilities. I argue that as individuals work towards fulfilling their ethico-political responsibilities, their actions must contribute to building democratic communities. I argue for particular constraints that fall on individuals as they make choices in how they fulfill their responsibilities, in order that they both take action and take the right sort of action.