Normative Responsibilities: Structure and Sources

Attributions of what we shall call normative responsibilities play a central role in everyday moral thinking. It is commonly thought, for example, that parents are responsible for the wellbeing of their children, and that this has important normative consequences. Depending on context, it might mean that parents are morally required to bring their children to the doctor, feed them well, attend to their emotional needs, or to see to it that someone else does. Similarly, it is sometimes argued that countries that emit most greenhouse gases are responsible for preventing catastrophic climate change. This responsibility might imply that these countries are morally required to take necessary steps individually and jointly to come to an agreement on and implement a workable plan, and to avoid steps that worsen the situation. More trivially, the grading of your student’s essays might be your responsibility, as might making sure there is wine at tomorrow’s picnic, and you might thus be required to see to it that essays are competently graded and suitable wine brought to the picnic. -/- Though attributions of normative responsibilities are legion, such responsibilities have received surprisingly little philosophical attention compared to its normative relatives, obligations and reasons, and compared to retrospective responsibility. This chapter hopes to improve on this situation by taking on two main tasks. The first, attempted in section 1, is to spell out the general structure of normative responsibility, in particular the relation between normative responsibilities and corresponding obligations and demands. We suggest that normative responsibilities are constituted by normative requirements that the responsible agents care appropriately about how well things go in certain regards, and that obligations generally can be seen as straightforward upshots of requirements to care. -/- The second task, taken on in section 2, is to provide an overview of prominent sources of normative responsibility and its distribution among agents. Why would the children’s wellbeing be the parents’ responsibility? Why not the neighbor’s, or the state’s, or everyone’s? Here we discuss a range of possible sources, including agents’ abilities, costs involved in taking on the responsibility in question, retrospective responsibility for the situation, promises or contracts, and certain social relationships

On the preconditions for large-scale collective action

The phenomenon of collective action and the origin of collective action problems have been extensively and systematically studied in the social sciences. Yet, while we have substantial knowledge about the factors promoting collective action at the local level, we know far less about how these insights travel to large-scale collective action problems. Such problems, however, are at the heart of humanity’s most pressing challenges, including climate change, large-scale natural resource depletion, biodiversity loss, nuclear proliferation, antibiotic resistance due to overconsumption of antibiotics, and pollution. In this paper, we suggest an analytical framework that captures the theoretical understanding of preconditions for large-scale collective action. This analytical framework aims at supporting future empirical analyses of how to cope with and overcome larger-scale collective action problems. More specifically, we (i) define and describe the main characteristics of a large-scale collective action problem and (ii) explain why voluntary and, in particular, spontaneous large-scale collective action among individual actors becomes more improbable as the collective action problem becomes larger, thus demanding interventions by an external authority (a third party) for such action to be generated. Based on this, we (iii) outline an analytical framework that illustrates the connection between third-party interventions and large-scale collective action. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research.</p

Har vi det bättre på jobbet eller på fritiden?

I det här kapitlet undersöker vi hur det är ställt med välbefinnandet och meningsfullheten på arbetet och på fritiden, i dagens Sverige. Våra data pekar på att den del av svenska folket som förvärvsarbetar mår bättre på fritiden än på arbetet, medan upplevelsen av meningsfullhet snarare är starkare på jobbet än på fritiden. Någon fullständig förklaring till människors välbefinnande och meningsfullhet – på jobbet och på fritiden – kan vi inte ge, men våra begränsade analyser visar bland annat att företagare har högre välbefinnande och meningsfullhet på jobbet, medan höga inkomster framför allt är förknippade med högre välbefinnande och meningsfullhet på fritiden. Vi kan också se att individer som motionerar mycket på sin fritid upplever både högre välbefinnande och meningsfullhet på fritiden, men inte på arbetet. Avslutningsvis finner vi att fritiden tycks vara viktigare än jobbet för de som förvärvsarbetar: graden av välbefinnande och meningsfullhet på fritiden spelar en betydligt större roll för hur nöjda svenskarna är med sina liv som helhet, jämfört med hur mycket välbefinnande och meningsfullhet de upplever på arbetet