“No Making Responsible, We Might Say, Without Holding Responsible”.

John Gardner on the Concepts of Responsibility

Abstract

This article analyses some theses developed by John Gardner that deal with the relations between different concepts of responsibility and how these are useful for understanding the relationships between agency, reasons and responsibility practises. In the first two sections, the text introduces the Aristotelian view developed by John Gardner, focussing on how he understood the relationships between the concepts of basic responsibility, consequential responsibility and prospective responsibility. Sections III. and IV. then review two challenges that arise from the author's treatment of the concept of basic responsibility. The first is the difficulty of understanding some types of responsibility and the second is how we can make sense of the role of excuses in our responsibility practises. Finally, some philosophical tools that Gardner developed in his last works are presented in order to deal with those challenges.