Bernard Williams Shame and Necessity 1994

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some response from that agent, a demand made by himself, by others, or by both. Wherever all this is
possible, there must be some interest in the agent's intentions, if only to understand what has
happened; manifestly, a Telemachus who had intended to leave
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the door open would at least have had a very different plan and perhaps would have had very
different relations to Odysseus from those of the Telemachus who left it open because he did not think
what he was doing. Again, it must be a possible question how the intentions and actions of an agent at
a given time fit in with, or fail to fit in with, his intentions and actions at other times. Under any social
circumstances at all, that is a question for other people who have to live with him.
These really are universal materials. What we must not suppose is that they are always related to
one another in the same way or, indeed, that there is one ideal way in which they should be related to
one another. There are many ways of relating them, in particular of relating intention and state to
response. There are many ways of interpreting the elements, of deciding what counts as being the
cause, for instance, or enough of a cause, of a given state of affairs; what is an adequate response in
a given kind of case, and who can demand it; what states of mind might be strange enough to
dissociate the act from the agent. Any or all of the four elements, moreover, are liable to attacks by
skepticism. Some of the ways that the Greeks had of interpreting and arranging these materials, as we
shall see, are different from any that we now have or would want to have. Other ways they had are
the same as some of ours, While yet others speak to concerns that we might do better to
acknowledge. Above all, what we must not suppose is that we have evolved a definitively just and
appropriate way of combining those materials a way, for instance, called the concept of moral
responsibility. We have not.
The first of these elements, cause, is primary: the other issues can arise only in relation to the fact
that some agent is the cause of what has come about.[12] Without this, there is no concept of
responsibility at all. For this reason, the scapegoat and its relatives, also known in ancient Greece,[13]
are on the other side of a conceptual line: the scapegoat is not responsible, in anyone's
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scheme of things, but is a substitute for someone who is responsible. Analogous distinctions apply
in the modern world. There are, admittedly, rules of strict liability in modern law under which people
can be held criminally liable not only for outcomes they did not intend we shall come back to
that but, in some cases, for outcomes they did not even cause. Thus people can be sanctioned for
breaches of rules that their employees have committed against their intentions. Where modern
ascriptions of strict liability involve neglecting not just intention, but even causality, the idea seems to
be that there is a prior and general assumption of responsibility; it is part of what is undertaken, for
instance, by one who conducts a certain kind of business that he or she will be liable for certain faults
of employees. This introduces, in a sense, responsibility without causality. But in most spheres of our
life regulated by ideas of responsibility, the governing rule relates response to cause: the aim is that
the response should be applied to a person whose action was the cause of the harm (correspondingly,
if the system is corrupted, the pretence has to be that this is how things are).
Of course this truth does not decide whether in some given sphere of our life we should be
regulating our affairs by using the structures of responsibility. That is another question. It is a question
that we could not possibly decide without knowing what the responses mean and what the point is of
making them, and that is something to be borne in mind when we think, in particular, about the
responses of the criminal law.
The link between cause and response was for the Greeks built into their language. The verb
aitiaomai means "to blame" or "censure". "He is a terrible man," Patroclus said about Achilles; "he may
blame someone who is anaitios ," someone who has done nothing wrong.[14] In the case of the blame
for quarrels or wars, the causal question is often naturally enough the question of who started it.
The suitors are killed because they were the first to do shameless things,[15] and in the Iliad
Menelaus, in
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a startling expression, refers to the many evils that have been suffered "because of my quarrel
and the beginning made by Paris."[16] The word aition is, from the Hippocratic writings on, a standard
word for "cause", and its relative aitia kept connections with both kinds of sense: it meant a complaint
or an accusation, but already by the time of Herodotus's book it can mean simply "cause" or
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"explanation".[17]
This primary link to the idea of a cause may help us to understand some Greek views of
responsibility that we find more problematical. Creon in the Oedipus Tyrannus was sent to the oracle
to ask why Thebes was afflicted with a pestilence, and when on his return he tells Oedipus that it is
because of the unpunished killing of Laius and that the murderers have to be found, the king, that
eager problem solver, instantly starts to search: "Where is it to be found," he asks, "this obscure trace
of an ancient crime?" pou tod'heurethesetai / ichnos palaias dustekmarton aitias? [18] But there is a
complex message in Sophocles' words. Aitias indeed refers to a crime, but in its role as a cause, not as
something complained of; there has been no complaint, and that is itself at the root of the city's
problems. Aitia means "cause", and the word here belongs to the language of diagnosis and of rational
inquiry, a language with which the play is filled. Oedipus plans to conquer this problem, as he
says,[19] by the same means that he used in overcoming the Sphinx, by gnome , rational
intelligence the gnome in terms of which Pericles is represented by Thucydides as speaking of the
defeat of the Persians and the conduct of the Peloponnesian war.[20] Dustekmarton is equally a term [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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